There's a Mystery There by Jonathan Cott

Author:Jonathan Cott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-16T04:00:00+00:00

Credit 41

“When I first talked to Sendak about Outside Over There, he told me that he felt that Mama was ‘a bit melancholic,’ but he later—and I think more accurately—used the word ‘gaga’ to describe her.”

Preliminary sketch of Ida’s mother and her children for Outside Over There Credit 42

“And Mama,” said Gottlieb, “is gaga because where is Papa, and when, if ever, is he coming back? And it’s not clear to me in Outside Over There that he is ‘over there,’ and it’s not clear that he’s ever coming back. So he has some responsibility for the mother being all gaga and being the way she is, because she has to take care of two children by herself. She’s a sailor’s wife, she’s a single mom.”

“To me,” I said, “Sendak’s depiction of the mother appears to be a classic example of dissociation, a withdrawing from what one can’t bear. As the psychiatrist Mark Epstein described it, ‘The shocked self is sacrificed, sent to its room for an endless timeout.’ ”

“That’s a nice way of putting it,” Gottlieb agreed. “The mother is clearly depressed. In fact, I came across a preliminary sketch that Sendak made in which the mother is in a state of despair—her head is buried in her hands, and the two children are desperately holding on to her. And in Outside Over There, the mother is clearly in an altered state.”

“In your essay on the Sendak trilogy, you wrote about the emotionally unavailable mother who can’t or will not recognize her child’s concerns or state of mind, and you described this situation as ‘a malignant state of affairs with far-reaching consequences for personality development’ and used the term ‘soul-blindness’ with regard to this. What do you mean by soul-blindness?”

“That term was first used by the psychoanalyst Léon Wurmser to describe something that can be seen over time in certain mother-child relationships, and it has to do with the mother who, not necessarily out of motives of malice, just doesn’t get or understand her child, who doesn’t have a sense of empathy with regard to what the child’s inner life is, and who is blind to his or her soul. And that’s a terrible thing to grow up with, because even when the mother is trying to be nice and express affection, it’s off the mark, it betrays a total misunderstanding of what the child is about, and it can leave a child very confused about all subsequent relationships.”

“In this regard,” I said, “there’s an extraordinarily painful and revelatory statement that appears in one of Sendak’s journal entries. He wrote: ‘Charlie Lindbergh, the Mush baby. I was never born, I was dead in my mother’s womb, I was the ice baby—and my mother didn’t notice that I’d been replaced. She could have done the magic trick to get her real baby back, but she was too distracted and I stayed an ice baby.’ Sendak explained that Mush refers to Moishe, which was his Jewish name, so he seems to have

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