'‘Unlike the heart … a brain cannot be understood as a static organ. It changes with its history and with every present moment.’
'After the birth of her first child, Nicola Redhouse experiences an unrelenting anxiety that quickly overwhelms her. Her immense love for her child can’t protect her from the dread that prevents her leaving the house, opening the mail, eating. Nor, it seems, can the psychoanalytic thinking she has absorbed through her family and her many years of therapy.
'In an attempt to understand the source of her panic, Nicola starts to thread together what she knows about herself and her family with explorations of the human mind in philosophy, science and literature. What role do genetics play in postnatal anxiety? Do the biological changes of motherhood offer a complete explanation? Is the Freudian idea of the mind outdated? Can more recent combined theories from neuroscientists and psychoanalysts provide the answers? How might we be able to know ourselves through our genes, our biology, our family stories and our own ever-unfolding narratives?
'In this compelling and insightful memoir, Nicola blends her personal experiences with the historical progression of psychoanalysis. In the end, much like in analysis, it is the careful act of narrative construction that yields the answers.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Epigraph:
A woman I don't know
is having a drill drill into her
skull. To get rid of the thing
requires entering the brain.
How to imagine a story
that ends with that ending?
Excerpt from 'Still Life with Antidepressants', Aaron Smith.
So long gone had I been
that when I returned
I did not know me, the one
who called - warily, through the trees,
as I approached like a thief or a
ground mole - Who is it?
I saw her whiten in the doorway,
She could have been my cousin.
Linda, is that you?
That's what I answered.
From the lintel she took me in, the length
of me, with my one good eye.
Nearing her, I was a worm on the end, and indigent.
That was when I knew I had arrived.
The last step is the longest, impassably long, now I will always
be twinned, wanting
to not know returning. -'The Scar', Susan Wheeler
'Nicola Redhouse’s memoir traverses neuroscience and psychoanalysis in a quest to understand her own mind.'
'A woman has a baby and she can’t stop crying. She cries not just on the third day after giving birth with the “baby blues”, but as she feeds him, as she takes congratulatory cards from the letterbox, as she watches television and opens a tin of tomatoes and tries to explain her confusion to a GP. The percussion of new motherhood hits hard, though she finds, to her surprise, that she’s good at the practicalities, and she has no difficulty in loving her child. She panics whenever the baby cries, envisions catastrophe as she strolls with the pram. There are nightmares prowling in her snatches of sleep: her dog drowning, fires, a twilight with two moons and planetary apocalypse impending. The ordinary assault to normality of parenting a first child is bad enough but, she wonders, “was this all that this was? Me acclimatising to reality? I doubted it. I had a history of reality turning irretrievably bad.”' (Introduction)
'A woman has a baby and she can’t stop crying. She cries not just on the third day after giving birth with the “baby blues”, but as she feeds him, as she takes congratulatory cards from the letterbox, as she watches television and opens a tin of tomatoes and tries to explain her confusion to a GP. The percussion of new motherhood hits hard, though she finds, to her surprise, that she’s good at the practicalities, and she has no difficulty in loving her child. She panics whenever the baby cries, envisions catastrophe as she strolls with the pram. There are nightmares prowling in her snatches of sleep: her dog drowning, fires, a twilight with two moons and planetary apocalypse impending. The ordinary assault to normality of parenting a first child is bad enough but, she wonders, “was this all that this was? Me acclimatising to reality? I doubted it. I had a history of reality turning irretrievably bad.”' (Introduction)
'Nicola Redhouse’s memoir traverses neuroscience and psychoanalysis in a quest to understand her own mind.'
