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==The Psychoanalytic Review== | ==The Psychoanalytic Review== | ||
===Part 1=== | |||
::</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> | ::</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> | ||
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Unlike the first image, in this second snapshot of the day Susan’s cheerful smile is gone. She seems to impart a twinge of infantile incomprehension and confusion, gently pushing her mother away. Bea also appears to be maladroit in managing to hold her daughter in her arms. She lacks the kind of attachment, affection, and intimacy Fanny exhibits so naturally and joyously in the preceding snapshot. The photo records a piercing moment of infantile separation and loss. The butterfly sensations Susan later experiences by looking at this picture are the psychosomatic results. | Unlike the first image, in this second snapshot of the day Susan’s cheerful smile is gone. She seems to impart a twinge of infantile incomprehension and confusion, gently pushing her mother away. Bea also appears to be maladroit in managing to hold her daughter in her arms. She lacks the kind of attachment, affection, and intimacy Fanny exhibits so naturally and joyously in the preceding snapshot. The photo records a piercing moment of infantile separation and loss. The butterfly sensations Susan later experiences by looking at this picture are the psychosomatic results. | ||
===Part 2=== | |||
Years later in analysis, despondent about not finding her place in life as the daughter of a well-known writer, Susan confesses, “At times, I’d despaired; thinking I would never find my niche, never excel in anything,” and she goes on to reflect: | Years later in analysis, despondent about not finding her place in life as the daughter of a well-known writer, Susan confesses, “At times, I’d despaired; thinking I would never find my niche, never excel in anything,” and she goes on to reflect: | ||
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teenager and in her adult life. | teenager and in her adult life. | ||
The author clearly learns the cause of her anxiety and the resultant feeling of nausea when she would look at her picture with her mother as an infant. Thus, that exiled little girl eventually is in a position to claim the authority to repatriate herself—psychologically and otherwise. Through tenacious learning processes, she becomes a citizen of the world, by freely choosing to do so. All these dialogical activities bode well for her. They enable her to get along excellently with her extensive family members and her future endeavors with others as a psychoanalyst. Yet, I would stress again, the author cannot and, fortunately, does not repress the effects of her infantile lived experiences. She often cries while listening to her mother plays | The author clearly learns the cause of her anxiety and the resultant feeling of nausea when she would look at her picture with her mother as an infant. Thus, that exiled little girl eventually is in a position to claim the authority to repatriate herself—psychologically and otherwise. Through tenacious learning processes, she becomes a citizen of the world, by freely choosing to do so. All these dialogical activities bode well for her. They enable her to get along excellently with her extensive family members and her future endeavors with others as a psychoanalyst. Yet, I would stress again, the author cannot and, fortunately, does not repress the effects of her infantile lived experiences. She often cries while listening to her mother plays an oneiric twilit Chopin nocturne, Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” or a Brahms’ lullaby. “I probably ached for that lost period of my childhood when Mommy or Grandma had held me in their arms,” she writes (). That voice of mother of infancy! Which constitutes the instinctive basis of our appreciation of vocal music, indeed all music! | ||
an oneiric twilit Chopin nocturne, Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” or a | |||
Similarly, the author also takes her mother’s marriage to Salvador Sanchez in stride. Indeed, she genuinely cares for her stepfather and her stepbrother. Salvador was a man of the left, as is the man Marco Color, whom the author marries. The author’s main challenges, nevertheless, come from the problematics of her father’s frequent marriages and divorces, of tumultuous unions and inescapably hurtful partings. They present undeniable realities as lived experiences for the author. | |||
Her father’s five marriages, divorces, and numerous affairs, extramarital or otherwise, end in unavoidable familial realities to deal with in the author’s teenage age years and to some extent later. Drawing on her shrewdly acquired psychosocial skills already present and active, she seems to get along as well as one reasonably can expect with all five stepmothers, her stepbrothers, and stepsisters. | |||
Undoubtedly, it matters much that all of the author’s stepmothers were talented women of accomplishment. With them, the author manages to hold her own quite amiably and properly. The most demanding issue for her appears to have been the relationship with her strikingly attractive stepmother Norris (Barbara Davis) who, as a twenty-five year-old, was her coeval. Once again, the author accepts facts as they are and surpasses them by creating a close bond with Norris, who later would become a gifted writer of fiction and a memoirist. | |||
===Part 4=== | |||
Finally, what the reader truly appreciates is that the author has not permitted these painful memories to exclude the possibility of a correlative salutary imagination. To the contrary, it prompts her creativity to stimulate the expansion of a clearing for possibilities and potentials. The impressive characteristics, and there are many, of the author’s memoir reside in her discovery of the possibility of negating the adverse effects of frequent parental absences. She does so by placing herself in another place that we call imagination. Salvation resides for her in this god-like attribute of our human psyche to create a place for the intellectual and imaginative capabilities to develop. Almost in its entirety, her memoir deals with periodic separations in | |||
its different modalities and the haunting symbolic legacy of ineffaceable distress. Yet she gradually learns how to transform her life by acts grounded in | |||
imaginative freedom and responsibility. | |||
As uncanny as it may sound, the author’s early sorrow carries in it its own antidote and intimates to her that salvation may well be attained or, at least, one might approximate it. Not surprisingly, she finds it again in language, not only in the alchemy of the “talking cure,” but a decision to become a writer. On the last page of her memoir, she tells us, “I wrote about us, my father and me, and while I wrote he came back to me again. His voice was reassuring, championing my step into new places” (''In Another Place''). | |||
Acute consciousness of the magical role dialogical language plays in our life effectively assembles and structures the author’s instructive memoir as a narrative of various stages of learning of how to cope with the omnipresent vagaries and intricacies of life. She shares with her father the extreme desire to think creatively through the magic of language, and ideate or envisage the narrative field of lived new experiences—embracing a mode of high caliber dialogic epistemophilia. Her memoir is an account of a triumph over adversities, truly. I commend and recommend it to all those who, like myself, declare their solidarity with language as the very essence of our salvation. | |||