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Indices to works about the life of Sigmund Freud often reference a slim volume edited by Margaret Gray Blanton. She oversaw the posthumous publication of her husband's Diary Of My Analysis With Sigmund Freud (1971) consisting “of about 120 typewritten pages” which “were transcripts made from the original entries jotted down in hard-covered notebooks from day to day as the analysis progressed” (p. 5). It included Margaret's “Preface” (pp. 5-10), “Biographical Notes and Comments” (pp. 119-135) and an “Introduction” by Iago Galdston (pp. 13-16).
According to Smiley Blanton's account of his August 15, 1935 analytic session, contemporaneously recapitulated—in part—as follows: “I then spoke of my mother's strong will and the resolution with which she became a teacher in a society where women were not supposed to work…” (p. 77). The rest of the text of his published chronicle is otherwise mute about the mother-son dyad.
Margaret's “Biographical Notes and Comments” inform us that when Smiley was an infant, his mother (Sarah Araminta Brunson, affectionately known as “Sally”) died. His father “married the widow Pennington who was Sally Brunson's sister” (p. 120). While (Smiley) “was young, he had tuberculosis, of which his mother had died, and he survived malaria, which was endemic in that section of the South” (p. 121).1 The reader is then left to speculate about the monumental loss Smiley must have suffered as a toddler.
Two decades later—at a time when Smiley at 24 and a half years of age before meeting his wife—he memorialized the uneasy throes of his mother's death. Evidence of the rediscovered memory fragment was not archived until 2001 and has eluded any other references to date.2 An abbreviated excerpt, for interested readers, follows:
…My babyhood did not differ from that of most babies except that I was
At that time, Smiley's maternal extended family made their home at Pennington's Gap near the southwestern corner of Virginia (M. G. Blanton, 1971, p. 120).
See relevant En
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At that time, Smiley's maternal extended family made their home at Pennington's Gap near the southwestern corner of Virginia (M. G. Blanton, 1971, p. 120).
See relevant En