User:SWoodman/sandbox: Difference between revisions

::</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

BELLY” (). This concise, aptly capitalized, one-line paragraph brings together memory and belly. This association casts a psychosomatic light on

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 plurisinificant 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

::</blockquote>''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. Everytime 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. (In Another Place )''</blockquote>

which serves as aides-mémoires (recollection aids) in the narrative of remembrances that ensue. This ordinary snapshot in plain black and white is

a visually simple and plain photographic image.Just the same, it documents

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

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.

::</blockquote>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. (''In Another Place'')</blockquote>

All the same, she also mentions, “In a private crevice of my secret being, I believed I could get by on my own” (Another Place). Thus, I consider that “crevice” interiorized by her as “being in another place” prominently placed in the title of her memoir as the psychological site of the emergence of a salutary safe harbor. From her initial lived patterns of abandonment, attachment, and separation at a critically early age, the reader recognizes that the author consciously searches for a security zone within her own psyche.

As a result, she settles in another place in her psyche, separate from what the vagaries of her circumstances, as a good place to be. In another spatiotemporal psychic setting, she can now freely choose how to cope with relative security and comfort. She does so by accepting the responsibility for her choice and ''without repressing'' her all-pervading “burden of separation and longing”. To the contrary, she claims her problems as her own. Largely, she treats them as chosen intuitive and imaginative acts of restructuration and reconfigurations without constraints. She learns the calculous of self-transformation. It gives impetus to thorny undertakings. Simultaneously, it

imposes its own psycho-philosophical interpretations, and a whole set of new approaches to deal with the nature of how to think and act.

Being in another place inaugurates alchemical processes which offer her remedies for her lack of stable familial relationships and its unavoidable anxieties. Multiple forms of periodical separation from one or the other of her parents, from the country of her birth, and her “mother-tongue,” bring about troubling concerns in her daily life. Still and all, she moves to this remedial another place as, an alternative and yet parallel place, where she seeks and finds her independence as a young woman. As a free agent and independent, her personality takes roots in this other place, and she acts accordingly. By “getting-it-together,” as it were, on her own terms she compensates for the infantile sense of lack that she feels. She is fortunate not to let that lack achieve the status of a dominant state of depersonalization or loss of identity; briefly put, alienation with catastrophic problematics.

As a result, the author sensitively moves through various stages of her life, as daughter, sister, teenager, student, and later wife, mother, and psychoanalyst regardless of her distressing infancy. She is strong enough to face her sorrow by not by denying it but rather by refusing to give it the role a predetermined and inalterable force in her life. She astutely and successfully encounters various lived experiences such as drastic changes in her father’s marital life, dual national environments, cultures, and languages. She does so by judicious psychological malleability in adapting to racial, religious, and lingual differences in her life in her often radically different environments. She also manages living properly and well and in NewYork City, Mexico, and later in Chile.

:::</blockquote>Though eventually Dad came to regret it, at the time he was totally unaware of how this decision would directly shape our lives. Our relationship would always carry a burden of separation and longing. (''In Another Place'')</blockquote>

I would suspect that the author’s reference to “philosophy” in her father’s reaction to the sacrament of confession shows his awareness of his own more or less Gnostic tendencies. Norman Mailer’s reaction to his daughter practicing the Catholic sacrament of reconciliation strikes the reader as a no nonsense approach to truth as he understands it. Mere truthfulness in discussion of such serious matters is not what he pursues. Their conversation in style and substance will become emblematic of the father-daughter approach concerning their future relationship as the author remembers it in her memoir. Subsequently, she hits upon a series of similar archetypal, generative learning configurations. Educative and informative dialogues with others inform the narrative of her memoir as a Bildungsroman.

I would say that the author accepts the ubiquitous reality of various complications in the human condition in their different modes and degrees of severity. She comes across as attentively accepting existing situational realities and creatively remaking them. She refuses the false alternative peace of mind by futile attempts at repressing them. Her courage to do so saves her from the horror of the return of the repressed, which might produce a tragic form of arrested development. She accepts her father as paterfamilias. The reader gets a more illuminating glimpse of

Norman Mailer’s gentler family life as opposed to his stormy public life. His inner life remains a secret to us a perhaps it was to himself, as it is so with the rest of us. There is an unknowable part to our psyche, which English psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion calls “O.” As ultimate Truth, it surpasses even the unconscious language of our dreams and remains ineffable. Therefore, one might say the short, hard-hitting father-daughter dialogue remarkably affects and informs the subjective-objective or phenomenological quality of the different formulations and conceptual patterns of Susan’s memoir. Along with her revelations of infantile memories, their dialogue casts a long, if crepuscular, light on the familial encounters with her father and, by extension, her mother. Her desire to allow reciprocal truthfulness to surface in intimate dialogues about family matters makes them more intelligible to the reader than they might have been otherwise. They come close to a mode of psychoanalytic sessions of various length, where language reigns supreme. In such sessions, the author focuses solely on getting a grip on her past, not as over and done with, but rather for the opposite reason. She shrewdly uses them as a springboard toward future undertakings. For example, still trying to decipher the circumstances of her mother’s sudden appearance at Long Branch to take her to Mexico, the author engages in another truth-seeking conversation. Curious about the circumstances arrested in spacetime by that invariantly upsetting second snapshot, she writes, “Years later, I found out from Mom this picture had been taken the day I left Grandma to go to Mexico. And when I heard this, I felt the same uncomfortable sensation in my belly. Only I wanted to cry for that little girl, twice

ripped away from her surroundings (''In Another Place'').

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

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'').

* {{cite book |last= Mailer |first=Susan |date=2019 |title= In Another Place With and Without My Father, Norman Mailer.|publisher= Northampton House Press, |ref=harv }}