Unsurprisingly, in several recent graphic memoirs, the memoirist includes episodes of going to a psychotherapist—e.g., David Small’s Stitches, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother. In all cases, the interactions are positive, and enable the memoirist to gain insight and motivation. For Small and Spiegelman the interactions are part of a large set of interactions. Bechdel’s work goes beyond giving us a group of frames showing her working with her therapist. She becomes intensely connected to the work of D. W. Winnicott, who is not her therapist but an influential English psychoanalyst (and psychiatrist); he specialized in working with children, and wrote about a wide range of psychoanalytic topics, including play, the good enough mother, and the true and false selves. Bechdel cites him in her second memoir, Are You My Mother? (a title repurposed from an original child’s story). She cites him much more frequently than Small or Spiegelman cite their own therapists. For Bechdel, psychoanalysis is very much part of the story rather than an incident in it.
The course will study this case of Bechdel and Winnicott. We will read both of Bechdel’s memoirs--Fun Home is her first—and, of course, P.D. Eastman’s original Are you My Mother? We will also read the works of Winnicott that Bechdel cites to better understand her understanding of Winnicott. The course invites a general question about why an artist might cite someone else’s work—it is common phenomenon—but a more particular one about the nature of the relationship Bechdel chooses to have with Winnicott. We will be interested in why Bechdel has such a strong feeling for Winnicott. He becomes nearly a character whose thinking and observations she values—at times he seems like a deus ex machina, Winnicott appears with an insight.
About Martin Gliserman
Professor Gliserman is the author of Psychoanalysis, Language, and the Body of the Text (University Press of Florida,1996) and has the following collateral appointments: Editor Emeritus of American Imago: Studies in Psychoanalysis and Culture; Faculty and Training Analyst for the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies in Manhattan; Faculty, Graduate School of Education (Literary Education "Educational Psychology"). His current project, TeXtRays, focuses on the representation of the body in fiction from Defoe to Arundhati Roy. The project, among other things, is a relational database along with corresponding charts, maps and graphs that articulate the body of the text in a visual manner.