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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: | ||
::</blockquote> | ::</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. | 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. | ||
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===3=== | === Part 3=== | ||
It would seem to me that the preceding scrutiny of the seminal first chapter of the author’s narrative of her life is central to our comprehension of the indispensable psychological matrix of it. The first chapter and its two most intriguing snapshots grip the reader and make evident her primary finding and learning from the two snapshots. They disclose foundational workings of the human psychosoma. A well-integrated primeval and evolutionary phenomenon, psychosomatic theory reveals to her and the reader a profound human reality that now has formed the basis of contemporary neuro psychoanalysis. Her lived experiences and their attendant regenerative powers lead her to profound comprehensive dialogic interactions with others and the world we all inhabit. She does so on the plane where language appears in its widest possible dialogical signification; that is to say, as it occurs between a speaker and a responder, who between them engage in dialogical worldmaking. | |||
It comes as no surprise that later in her adult life, as a psychoanalyst, she recognizes the interpretative activities of language linked in psychoanalytic | |||
sessions to revelations, which together make up the constitutive elements of psychoanalysis. In this sense, her language bursts out of the primordial silence and engages us in the possibilities of salutary dialogic interactions. As is now our common knowledge, an open dialogical discourse between two individuals, capable of flowing without prejudgment as prejudice, makes reconciliation and healing between two human beings a viable possibility. For the author, such a discourse permits her to achieve a true if not facile reconciliation and reconnection with her father. The authenticity of the following dialogical give-and- take between father and daughter is maximally | |||
revelatory. I consider it worthy of quoting at some length: | |||
:::</blockquote>When I was old enough to formulate the question, I asked Dad why he’d let me be taken off to Mexico.</blockquote> | |||
:::</blockquote>‘I couldn’t have done otherwise,’ he said, ‘because I had promised your mother that if she decided to move to Mexico you could go with her. I felt bound by my word. And to be honest, I wasn’t that committed to being a father. I wanted to have the freedom to live without a daughter or a wife.</blockquote> | |||
:::</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> | |||