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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. | 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. | 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. | |||
Later on the same day, however, the second snapshot offers a glimpse of Susan with her biological mother, Bea. She has just arrived to take Susan to live with her in Mexico, where she lives since her divorce from Norman Mailer. At the time, she lives with her Mexican companion and later husband Salvador Sanchez (AKA Chavo). With the passage of time, as mentioned earlier, this snapshot becomes psychosomatically problematic for the | |||
author and causes her the “butterfly effect” in her belly, which she describes so effectively in the seminal first paragraph of her memoir. | |||
To the reader’s inquisitive eye, what emanates from the photographic image is noticeably a split-second of bewilderment for the infant Susan. The snapshot records for years to come a moment of awkwardness between mother and her infant daughter after three months of separation. Their gettogether is unwieldy at best and veritably confusing. Both mother and child give the impression of being ill at ease with one another. It is nearly imperceptible, which makes it at once troubling and signifying. | |||
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. | |||
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: | |||
::</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. | |||
What makes it possible for her to carry out this demanding regenerative potential is setting up internal working prototypes. She practices modalities of lived experiences and imaginative inner dialogues. These practices permit her not to repress totally her negative emotional responses. She learns how best to deal with what she finds problematic by minimizing their harmful effects by confronting them rather than suppressing them. | |||
This confrontational attitude saves her from the possibility of the “return of the repressed” as derivatives of her past problems. In the process, she discovers the transcendent agency of human consciousness as the ground of freedom of choice and its ensuing acts and responsibilities. It amounts to engagement in the psychosocial logic of ''negation of negation''—mostly through the magic of innermost dialogue with oneself as an intimate category of effecting a “talking cure,” as Bertha Oppenheim (pseudonym of Anna O, one of Joseph Breuer’s patients has reputedly characterized it. | |||
I attribute Susan’s enlightened and enlightening achievements in returning to psychosomatic stability to an atavistic belief in the efficacy of language as an antidote to repressive and depressive tendencies of the human psyche. One might consider it a primordial evolutionary process. She sets up a safe haven for her unsettled mind and, perhaps more significantly, to a launching pad for future adventurous journeys and activities. | |||
This psychological place makes it possible for her to train for practice psychoanalysis and ultimately to writing her memoir. Therefore, she is able to transmute the lead of her the inner void to gold of intellectual and affective operative models. Her efforts such as of acquiring a native’s ability in speaking Spanish, as spoken in Mexico, and using it in Chile in her psychoanalytic practice bear witness to the efficacy of her extraordinary mental agility to affect transformations in her life. | |||
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. | |||
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