Psychological Diffusions: The Cognitive Turn in Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama

Alison Bechdel's new memoir, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama was released earlier this month to much critical excitement. Within the span of two weeks Bechdel was profiled in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and interviewed in Salon. Already an acclaimed commercial success, Bechdel's latest work focuses more on her adult life, and in particular her romantic relationships, as well as her complicated relationship with her mother. More heavily influenced by psychoanalysis and the work of pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, Bechdel's signature meta-awareness is perhaps even more present than in her breakout first memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.

Framed by dreams, the autobiographical writings of Virginia Woolf, and D.W. Winnicott's papers on child psychology, this project seems more focused, but also perhaps even more intellectualized than Fun Home. Centered at least in part around the therapist/patient dialectic--and unabashedly aware that this dynamic often stands in for the absences in the patient's non-therapeutic relationships--the memoir continues its predecessor's examination of the epistemological crisis inherent in the genre of memoir. At once aware that memoir is a "suspect genre" as she says on page 11, but also hopeful that, ". . . if you write minutely and rigorously enough about your own life . . . you can, you know, transcend your particular self. . ." Bechdel's new work makes explicit the contemporary memoirist's confrontation and negotiation with writing about the self (201). Beneath the almost seminar-like explications of Winnicott's work on mother-child emotional dynamics, and the Freudian dream analyses, is the center point that all writers undertaking memoir ultimately face: that is, how can we negotiate the telling of a life narrative when there are other lives present and often at stake?

Bechdel's tendency to intellectualize her relationship with her mother. Her desire to become her own psychoanalyst, as her vigorous pursuit of the subject suggests, gestures towards a phenomena in contemporary life narrative that the psychoanalytic tradition cannot obliterate (45). In fact, in spite of the reluctance that I have of aligning all things Freudian and psychoanalytic with my own work in the realm of cognitive neuroscience, the major commonality between these two particular areas is the study of how the mind works. The phenomena in life narrative that I am identifying is a relentless pursuit, on the part of the authors, to learn how their minds--and the minds of others--work. While Bechdel turns to Winnicott, a man whose career overlapped with Freud's seminal work on psychoanalysis, her memoir also engages a sophisticated examination of theory of mind. The work of  Dan Dennett and other cognitive scientists, can just as easily find a home in Bechdel's work. Her examination of her own needs and desires as they align with, bump up against and move past her mother's demonstrates a willingness to grapple with both the self and others as other. Her ability to relate to her mind ". . . like it's an object" (152) places Bechdel in the unique position of thinking subjectivity in a meta and what might come across as detached way.

However, as much as this is a memoir about memoir--a memoir that examines the productive and counter-productive effects of memoir on the individual and her family and the limitations of memoir in producing a stable and complete sense of self and others--it is also a memoir that objectifies, in many respects, the development of subjectivity. Bechdel uses the nearly-cliched therapist-patient couch scene as a site of self-interrogation, and often evisceration. She also has this way of removing herself from her self: of examining and recording sensations and emotions from a distance, as her therapist notes on page 152: "Being attached to your work, your mind, the way you would be to another person--that cuts you off from the world." Are You My Mother? is perhaps more solidly about Bechdel than her previous memoir, but still through the evocation of psychoanalysis, literature, and dream-scapes, she keeps us at a remove. Thus, she demonstrates the complicated dance that a memoirist performs as she susses out her life narrative, which, by extension, means sussing out cognition.

That Bechdel is "heavily invest[ed] in [her] own mind," perhaps explains her desire to configure where the boundaries between mind and body, internal and external, reside (218). Rejecting Descartes's cogito--I think therefore I am--in favor of Lacan's less solid notion of "I" as it's reflected during the mirror stage Bechdel longs, instead, for a more "real" or authentic and coherent conception of the self. Citing Winnicott's notion of true and false selves, she suggests that we see ourselves reflected in the other (232). In particular, seeing the self through the other happens, at the earliest stages of life, in the relationship between the baby and the mother called "maternal mirroring" (219). This dynamic continues from infancy into adulthood but the relationship of mirroring moves from the maternal body to the erotic one (219).

Freudian notions of libido and the deep focus on the mother aside, Winnicott's argument that we tend to be shaped by our relationship with our parents in infancy, and this dynamic continues to affect us even as adults is an argument that neuroscience has also begun to make. In a New York Times article titled "The Brain on Love" the author identifies the new field of interpersonal neuroscience, which argues that "All relationships change the brain — but most important are the intimate bonds that foster or fail us, altering the delicate circuits that shape memories, emotions and that ultimate souvenir, the self" (1). In short, the relationship that we have with our parents are often the earliest and most profound and they affect how are brains are wired. Thus if a child's relationship to her parents is one where the child takes on too much responsibility and emotional demands early on, they will be shaped to respond this way in relationships in their later life.

That Bechdel often struggles in this memoir with her romantic relationships is not surprising given Winnicott, and the most recent work being conducted in the field of interpersonal neuroscience. Her complicated and emotionally distant relationship with her parents as a child sets the stage for this later emotional complication. So too does her referential anxiety as a child predict her adulthood feelings of anxiety and professional inadequacy. Bechdel's life narrative is also a case study, in these respects. Her evocation of psychoanalysis is an obvious gesture towards the field's focus on telling life narrative as a means to heal past trauma. However, perhaps less accounted for are the new trends in psychology and brain studies that she engages with such as the aforementioned theory of mind and interpersonal neuroscience. Are You My Mother? complicatedly, but also richly--lavishly even--engages with the study of the mind, of which cognition--her's, her mother's, her therapists', her lovers'--is a vital component.