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::</blockquote>''The first requisite for the use of a theory is proper conditions for ''observation.''The most important of these is psycho-analysis ofthe observer to ensure that he [or she] has reduced to a minimum his [or her] own inner tensions and resistances which otherwise obstruct his [or her] view of facts by making | ::</blockquote>''The first requisite for the use of a theory is proper conditions for ''observation.''The most important of these is psycho-analysis ofthe observer to ensure that he [or she] has reduced to a minimum his [or her] own inner tensions and resistances which otherwise obstruct his [or her] view of facts by making correlation by conscious and unconscious impossible.''</blockquote> | ||
:::::::::—W. R. Bion, Learning from Experience | :::::::::—W. R. Bion, Learning from Experience | ||
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My Father, Norman Mailer reads, “MY EARLIEST MEMORY IS IN MY | My Father, Norman Mailer reads, “MY EARLIEST MEMORY IS IN MY | ||
BELLY” (). This concise, aptly capitalized, one-line paragraph brings together memory and belly. This association casts a psychosomatic light on | BELLY” (). This concise, aptly capitalized, one-line paragraph brings together memory and belly. This association casts a psychosomatic light on | ||
the author’s entire memoir, in which the enigma of the psychosomatic phenomena prevails. The exceptional coherence and intelligibility of the line owes much to author’s eleven years of being in psychanalysis, psychoanalytic training at Psychanalytic Institute in Santiago,Chile, and finally her experiences as a practicing psychoanalyst. | the author’s entire memoir, in which the enigma of the psychosomatic phenomena prevails. The exceptional coherence and intelligibility of the line owes much to author’s eleven years of being in psychanalysis, psychoanalytic training at Psychanalytic Institute in Santiago, Chile, and finally her experiences as a practicing psychoanalyst. | ||
Accordingly, I would state this single one-line sentence gives birth to a | Accordingly, I would state this single one-line sentence gives birth to a | ||
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an event in its precise immediate fleeting spacetime dimensions. For the author, however, it would prove to be an intricate traumatic moment in her ultrasensitive infantile stage of life. This moment holds its own prominent | an event in its precise immediate fleeting spacetime dimensions. For the author, however, it would prove to be an intricate traumatic moment in her ultrasensitive infantile stage of life. This moment holds its own prominent | ||
psycho-ontological implications in and by extension her memoir. Only partially repressed and tangentially brushing against her unconscious, the harsh experience of abandonment registers itself in her psyche as an ineradicable separation as early sorrow. | psycho-ontological implications in and by extension her memoir. Only partially repressed and tangentially brushing against her unconscious, the harsh experience of abandonment registers itself in her psyche as an ineradicable separation as early sorrow. | ||
By capturing a fleeting troublesome moment in her life as an infant, the snapshot marks the original site of the author’s generalized lifelong apprehension of human reality—in the triple significations of the substantive as anxiety, grasping, and latent realization. Her affective response to the snapshot experience leaves her with an irreducible quotient of unease in her early relationship with her mother, Bea (Beatrice Silverman) and inevitably with her father. She writes, “What had my mother been thinking when she left me for three months with my [paternal] Grandma Fanny? Why hadn’t my father prevented her departure, or at least mine?” (In Another Place). Consequently, all such questions initiate intuitive generative narratives of their own, which the author deftly develops them into her exceedingly readable memoir of learning experiences. The German language uses the term ''Bildungsroman'' for such a narrative of a person’s overall educational lived | |||
experiences. | |||
Another consequential snapshot juxtaposes itself on the troublesome one that I have already discussed. This one proceeds the other on the same page and shows the author as an infant with her Grandma Fanny (In Another Place). It appears on the same page and precedes the one associated with the author’s distressing memory, both in the memoir and in its spacetime actuality. In contrast to the other snapshot, this discloses a moment of veritable happiness in the eighteen-month-old Susan’s life. | |||
The two radically divergent snapshots sketch out the author’s primal discovery of happiness as wellbeing in attachment, proximity and its antithesis as the problematics of abandonment and separation. Subsequently, her memoir unfolds as a dialectical series of syntheses between disappointments and fulfilments, separations and attachments. From this dialectical perspective, I would propose to take a closer analytical look still at these two originary opposing snapshots. Juxtaposed, I find that these antithetical snapshots put in motion the author’s intriguing voyage of self-discovery as a constellation of intentional, subjective-objective lived experiences. Her analysis later makes this journey amply conscious. This internal-external voyage contributes veritable insights to the author’s memoir. It provides her and the reader with sensitivities required for appreciation of radical changes and challenges, which a gutsy life of adventures necessitate. | |||
As I have already indicated, the first snapshot discloses a glimpse of the author’s surrogate mother and primary care-giver, her Grandma Fanny, Norman Mailer’s mother. She impresses the reader as a caring substitute mother holding her granddaughter with a captivated smile. She affectionately holds Susan aloft in her arms without restricting her in anyway. Susan also seems to be equally in a kind of infantile bliss. She appears to be nearly a natural part of her grandmother’s body. Fanny has that primordial luminous maternal smile on her face, naturally exuding love, care, and concern. Thus, the snapshot impresses the reader that Fanny’s body as a substitute mother personifies the body of the mother of infancy in total attunement. Her body is replete with the primeval role Freudian psychoanalysis assigns to it as the enraptured and enrapturing center of the infant’s extraordinary universe. | |||
One can say that Fanny’s body mediates between Susan and the surrounding world they both inhabit, whole and entire. She does so through recreation of unconscious intimations of transcendent consciousness as subjectivity whose object will cover all modes of future human relationships. It is so since the body of the mother of infancy is not merely another body among others. From the moment of conception on, there is an ineradicable oneness between the infant and the biological mother of infancy, whose traces outlast life’s vicissitudes. Yet under certain disruptive circumstances, the infant also possesses a natural flexibility to transfer this original corporeal and affective emotion to a surrogate mother or father. | |||
A bright ambient familial light permeates this snapshot of infant Susan Mailer and her “Grandma,” where all appears idyllic and ideal, a transitory moment in the “Land of Milk and Honey,” the Abrahamic," Promised Land.” Their image hints at an early narrative of veritable prenatal and infantile union, demarcating a safe and stress free psychosocial zone of human oneness—a good place to be even for an evanescent moment of a clicking of the camera’s shutter. Accordingly, everything in this image conspires to communicate to the reader-viewer a profound experience of childhood euphoria. The snapshot fully depicts an early but profound affective learning experience of attachment, bonding, and union. I would also suggest that is what the author also intends the snapshot will communicate to do reader. It does so, properly and well. | |||
Thus, for infant Susan her Grandma Fanny’s body as substitute mother of infancy characterizes the embodiment of primal lifelong desire for unifying and fulfilling affective negotiations with others and the environing world. I would suggest that Fanny is the first educator in her granddaughter’s lifetime patterns of affective, spiritual, and even political and professional education. I will go even as far as saying that her relationship with her Granma Fanny offers her a vibrant model of love of learning from lived experience. Love of experiential knowledge or epistemophilia emerges from intimate infantile discovery of the mother’s body. In my opinion, such love of knowledge precedes sexual awareness and later joins with it as other corporeal discoveries. As such, I would say that it gains an authentic place in the author’s ''Weltanschauung'', a worldview with all of its unending epistemological and heuristic intimations. In due course, the mnemonic associations of her grandmother literally holding Susan on her bosom on a bright sunny summer day serves as a psychological working model for the author. | |||
who unconditionally loves each of her two daughters and son. Her embodied childhood memories preserved by a snapshot serve as the avatar of all | |||
that is meaningful, unifying, and cheering in her memoir. | |||