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The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Attachment, Abandonment, and Reconciliation: A Psychoanalytic Review of Susan Mailer’s Memoir as Bildungsroman: Difference between revisions

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The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Attachment, Abandonment, and Reconciliation: A Psychoanalytic Review of Susan Mailer’s Memoir as Bildungsroman (view source)

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Susan Mailer rightly foresees that her initial one-line paragraph’s brevity and acuity compel the reader to respond to it by a sort of penetrating ''explication de text'' (textual clarification), as the French Formalist literary criticism refers to it. In this case, a textual clarification is even more germane because she has a psychoanalytic background. From her specialized viewpoint, the paragraph legitimately demands a psychoanalytic textual explication. Thus, in an understated, succinct, and yet plurisignificant line, the author produces her own concise textual clarification. She discloses the first essential element at the heart of her memoir and leaves the rest to interpretive reader response activities. All the same, after the reader absorbs the hidden import of the sparse first line, more pivotal, informative details burst forth. The author writes:
Susan Mailer rightly foresees that her initial one-line paragraph’s brevity and acuity compel the reader to respond to it by a sort of penetrating ''explication de text'' (textual clarification), as the French Formalist literary criticism refers to it. In this case, a textual clarification is even more germane because she has a psychoanalytic background. From her specialized viewpoint, the paragraph legitimately demands a psychoanalytic textual explication. Thus, in an understated, succinct, and yet plurisignificant line, the author produces her own concise textual clarification. She discloses the first essential element at the heart of her memoir and leaves the rest to interpretive reader response activities. All the same, after the reader absorbs the hidden import of the sparse first line, more pivotal, informative details burst forth. The author writes:


{{Cquote|While I was growing up, I loved to look at our family albums. Among the many photos was a small square, black and white image of me, at not quite two years old, with my mother. Every time I saw it, I got a fluttering, butterflies-in my-belly sensation which made me turn the page as fast as I could. Sometimes, I’d even skip that page, anxiously trying to avoid the butterfly effect.{{sfn|Mailer|2019|p=3}} }}
{{quote|While I was growing up, I loved to look at our family albums. Among the many photos was a small square, black and white image of me, at not quite two years old, with my mother. Every time I saw it, I got a fluttering, butterflies-in my-belly sensation which made me turn the page as fast as I could. Sometimes, I’d even skip that page, anxiously trying to avoid the butterfly effect.{{sfn|Mailer|2019|p=3}} }}


The above paragraph makes available to the reader a particular diagnosis of various psychological, emotional, and intellectual aspects of the narrative of entire life. Without any undue drama, she deftly makes statements of foundational import of a specific picture, or better, a snapshot taken when she was an infant. This snapshot uncannily snatches, records, and integrates infantile experiences of attachment and abandonment, union and separation, and eventually unavoidable and dreadful anxiety. Yet, mysteriously, for me it consists of what one might call a psychological situation report.
The above paragraph makes available to the reader a particular diagnosis of various psychological, emotional, and intellectual aspects of the narrative of entire life. Without any undue drama, she deftly makes statements of foundational import of a specific picture, or better, a snapshot taken when she was an infant. This snapshot uncannily snatches, records, and integrates infantile experiences of attachment and abandonment, union and separation, and eventually unavoidable and dreadful anxiety. Yet, mysteriously, for me it consists of what one might call a psychological situation report.
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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:


{{cquote|Then there were my parents’ multiple marriages and divorces. For more than two decades my father had left one wife, only to quickly to have another appear. Not to mention the nine siblings, all born in rapid succession after I was six years old. I barely had time to get used to one new stepmother and baby before another arrived on the scene.{{sfn|Mailer|2019|p=227}} }}
{{quote|Then there were my parents’ multiple marriages and divorces. For more than two decades my father had left one wife, only to quickly to have another appear. Not to mention the nine siblings, all born in rapid succession after I was six years old. I barely had time to get used to one new stepmother and baby before another arrived on the scene.{{sfn|Mailer|2019|p=227}} }}


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