Review of Kay Young’s “’Wounded by Mystery’: Dickens and Attachment Theory”

Abstract

In this stimulating article, Kay Young explores the identity, self-awareness and psychic life of Esther Summerson in Dickens's Bleak House (1853) via Attachment Theory. For Young, Esther's guilt, shame and crises of identity flow from the wound of having had no mother. Esther suffers a traumatising upbringing at the hands of her unloving godmother who provides her with only scanty, censoring descriptions of her origins. Young argues that Esther's character articulates and endures the painful "psychic experience of feeling unattached" (237), of having forgone the primary, ideally loving attachment that secures the growth of an assured selfhood. With no introjected mother to answer the primary question, 'Who am I?' Esther confronts a double mystery: the identity of her lost mother and the less resolvable enigma of her unknown and unknowable self. With its underpinnings in nineteenth-century neurophysiology, Freudian psychoanalysis foregrounds the biological and orientates psychological life around the physical drives. However, Freud also explored the psyche in terms of objects, incorporation and introjection, thus facilitating the development of overlapping theories of object relations, attachment and relationality. According to these approaches, which have largely supplanted Freud's drive model, our earliest attachments form the basis of mental life via a complex, ongoing intra-psychic mediation between the external and internal. Consequently, Attachment Theory's primary exponents-John Bowlby, Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott-shifted attention from father-son rivalry to (equally fraught) mother-infant attachment, while emphasising intersubjectivity, affect and lived experience. Young opens with Freud's foundational 1917 paper "Mourning and Melancholia". Here, Freud argues that loss can instigate "a fundamental cleavage" (237) within the self with the ego, which is identified with the lost loved one, becoming a "forsaken object." Young argues that Esther has undergone such a bifurcation and is "mourning for her self" (238). Bereaved infants, such as Esther, are haunted by an "absent memory" (239) and Young describes how Esther experiences a different, unthinking way of knowing her lost mother. If Esther famously, selfdeprecatingly and, perhaps, disingenuously opens her narrative with "I know I am not clever," Young posits that "what Esther knows is beyond clever-remarkably, she knows what she has not known" (246). Thus, although urged to forget, Esther intuitively recognises Lady Dedlock as her mother. Young analyses Esther's relationship with her godmother, deploying the psychotherapeutic notion of 'malattunement', by which the primary caregiver is unable, or unwilling, to provide the infant with a securing love. With her evangelicalism, which only envisages Esther's origins as shameful, Esther's godmother holds her "in a state of detachment, not just to herself as the 'mother' figure, but to Esther's self as a person" (241). Young cites the analyst Robert Stolorow, who argues that, without the "affect-integrati...