nccotus

I was always worried about those two books, my mother said she got the Little Princess by mistake because they didn’t have the Secret Garden (by the same author). And I was worried about “Pride and Prejudice” because I was being so rude to my mother by picturing her as the silly Mrs. Bennet in that book.

I just saw it so easily what was happening there! It was a classic Electra complex! Just as in an Oedipal complex a young boy goes through a phase where he wants to kills has father and marry his mother, in an Electra complex, similarly, a little girl has feelings that she wants to kill her mother and marry her father. OBVIOUSLY I never got this worked out in my psychoanalysis properly and my mother played me for the animosity. She never let me get anywhere near my father. Who knows what her complexes were.

similarly Freud found disturbing evidence that many of the neurotic young women he was asked to treat had been raped by their fathers, and the images were so similar, for instances, so often a doll went missing. After a while he deemed that it was a fantasy.

I lost my doll Susan when we went to England when I was 10. I assume my mother used that moment to take her off of me as no longer appropriate.

in college I read “Tender is the Night,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a novel based on a true story about a widower who had sex with his 12 year old daughter after his wife died. He left her a clinic and fled.

My father swears that that never happened to me. He said, It does happen, but I never did that to you.”

The night that I cracked up after I got out of the state hospital, they were undressing me in their bed I can’t remember why, probably trying to control me; and I said, “is this what you used to do when I was a little girl?” And mother said, “It happened when you were 13.”

???

My father practices his lies.