Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama

In this pause, I suddenly saw something very clearly. Whatever it was I wanted from my mother was simply not there to be had. It was not her fault. And it was therefore not my fault that I was unable to elicit it.

In a narcissistic cathexis, you invest more energy into your ideas about another person than in the actual, objective, external person. So the man who falls in love with beauty is quite different from the man who loves a girl and feels she is beautiful and can see what is beautiful about her.

It's our very capacity for self-consciousness that makes us self-destructive!

If it weren't for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body.

The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story. Not, you may note, to serve her family, or to serve the truth, but to serve the story.

I am not ultimately interested in writing fiction. I can't make things up. Or rather, I can only make things up about things that have already happened.

Your unconscious wants to express the pain you feel about your own lost innocence. But your ego wants to keep it repressed. To the compromise is anxiety.

In one way, what I saw in those mirrors was the self trapped inside the self, forever. But in another way, the self in the mirror was opening out, in an infinite unfurling. I am the one whose drive is being thwarted. And I am the one who is thwarting it.

On our second date, she kissed me in a bar. I invited her home. We just caught the F train, which seemed like a good omen.

There was a certain thing I did not get from my mother. There is a lack, a gap, a void. "How's that?" But in it's place, she has given me something else. Something, I would argue, that is far more valuable. "I think I can get up now." She has given me the way out.

Alice Miller writes that the child who suppresses his own feelings in order to accomodate a parent has been, in a sense, abandoned. 'Later, when these feelings of being deserted begin to emerge in the analysis of the adult, they are accompanied by such intensity of pain and despair that it is quite clear that these people could not have survived so much pain. That would only have been possible in an empathic, attentive environment, and this they lacked. [as quoted by Alice Miller]' She also says that the mother who requires accommodation from her child is just trying to get what her own mother refused her.

I have never read Sylvia Plath. My mother has never read Virginia Woolf. In general, we have stayed out of one another's way like this.

Psychoanalytic insight, Miller seems to suggest, is itself a pathological symptom.

Language gets very confusing as it approaches this place where outside and inside touch.

Every one' of the psychoanalytic trainees she [Alice Miller] has supervised has the same history: An insecure parent who did not appear to be insecure, but who depended on the child behaving in a particular way. And an 'amazing ability' on the part of the child to perceive this and take on the assigned role. "This role secured 'love' for the child-that is, his parents' narcissistic cathexis. He could sense he was needed and this, he felt, guaranteed him a measure of existential...[as quoted by Alice Miller]

I guess I felt like I'd failed her [by throwing up]. She had so many demands on her...The one thing she needed from me was that I not need anything from her [Bechdel's mother].

Maybe the mother manages to be a mirror only part of the time. In such 'tantalizing' cases, some babies learn to withdraw their own needs when the mother's are evident.

I put the odds on a psychic deathmatch between Attila the Hun and Virginia Woolf at fifty-fifty.

I don't think your family was a very safe place to be a little girl.

Here's the vital core of Winnicott's theory: The subject must destroy the object. And the object must survive this destruction. If the object doesn't survive, it will remain internal, a projection of the subject's self. If the object survives destruction, the subject can see it as separate.

Your anxiety attach in the church sounds like a compromise formation. A what? Your unconscious wants to express the pain you feel about your own lost innocense. But your ego wants to keep it repressed. So the compromise is anxiety.

I remember feeling very angry at Betty Friedan." AB: What? Why? "Well... she hated housework and wanted women to be independent, but then she's hire other women to do her housework.

You can't live and write at the same time.

In his 1964 talk on feminism, Winnicott says something he's been saying all along. "...We find that the trouble is not so much that everyone was inside and then born, but that at the very beginning everyone was dependent on a woman." Winnicott sees this dependence as the root of misogyny--though he never uses that word. Perhaps, like Woolf with "feminism," he felt plain language was more persuasive. "The awkward fact remains, for men and women, that each was once dependent on a woman, and somehow a hatred of this has to be turned into a kind of gratitude if full maturity of the personality is to be reached.

The idea that our unconscious possesses such sure aim excited me. I became more attuned to my own erroneously carried out actions.

At thirteen, I was so paralyzed with self-consciousness that sometimes I'd get home from school and realize I hadn't spoken out loud all day. Later, I would blame my social awkwardness on my homosexuality. But now I speculate that being a lesbian actually saved me... If it weren't for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body.

I'm sure these things are true. But the way she says them feels like an implied criticism. As if she's comparing her own selflessness to my self-absorption. But of course that's just evidence of my self-absorption. My mother is probably not thinking anything like this. In fact, my desire to think that she's thinking of me at all is a bit pathetic.

This is one of my difficulties now... my fear that Mom will find this memoir about her "angry." Another difficulty is the fact that the story of my mother and me is unfolding even as I write it.

But, Jocelyn, if I really were all those things [good, kind, talented, hard working, open to change, and adorable]... ...I would die.' I wasn't sure what I meant by this, but it suddenly struck me as the truth. 'Because you'd rather die than feel anger at your mother for not giving you what you needed?

Whatever was going on between my parents, I suppose that my fantasy of self-sufficiency, my heavy investment in my own mind, is also a kind of narcissistic cathexis.