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“Oh, Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me.”
Theoretical constructs occasionally spring to life in unexpected venues. Take Winnicott's notion of True and False Self…
The intense, much loved, and widely celebrated New York painter, , was once welcomed onstage at a conference. Upon arriving at the podium, Murray told her audience how alienated she felt on occasions when she was publicly introduced. She always experienced difficulty recognizing herself, she confessed, in the strange pictures that formed in her mind while she stitched together the patches of information furnished by strangers' recitals of her accomplishments.
As I sat in the dim hall listening to her words, I began to re-envision my mother—of years ago—and uncanny sensations returned.
She was a mother-artist. I do not mean to imply by this that she painted or played the piano (although she did both) but rather that she spent her days creating her children. My mother did so in part by focusing her attention on the details of our appearance. Not a speck escaped her gaze. She carefully dressed us—my younger sister Connie and me—in pastels, plaids, and pleats, in neatly ironed dresses and pinafores, with evenly turned-down socks and freshly polished shoes to go with