Are You My Mother? Alison Bechdel

<<Are You My Mother? is furiously literary, full of citations and quotations, and crafty symbolic parallels to the books its author is so often depicted reading with furrowed brow. The presiding genii of this particular work include Adrienne Rich, Sigmund Freud, Alice Miller and, above all, Virginia Woolf and the British psychoanalystDW Winnicott. ("I want him to be my mother," cartoon Alison says.) The concepts Winnicott contributed to object relations theory (the "good enough" mother, transitional objects, the true and false self, etc) provide themes for each of the book's seven chapters, but its swirling, circular structure derives from Woolf.>>


<<Winnicott held that infant and mother regard each other as mirror image – a replica of the self that is at the same time inaccessible. Bechdel feels that until she can get her mother "out of my head" the two women can never truly know each other, and that an exorcism of this kind is exactly what Woolf achieved by writing To the Lighthouse. Woolf got the idea for that novel while "walking round Tavistock Square". The young Winnicott's analyst had his office a block away. Bechdel imagines the two crossing paths on that very day in a beautiful series of pages that show just how masterfully she has developed her ability to fuse drawing and diagram in a visual poetics of thought.>>


http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/may/24/are-you-my-mother-alison-bechdel-review?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+theguardian%2Fbooks%2Frss+(Books)