Maternal ambivalence in the novel and film We Need to Talk About Kevin

Erica D. Galioto is an Associate Professor of English at Shippensburg University, where she teaches courses in American literature, psychoanalysis, and English education. Her research focuses on a concept she calls “real-world therapy”: everyday experiences in literature and life that occasion therapeutic effects outside a clinical setting. Published in Skin, Culture, and Psychoanalysis, her article, “Split Skin: Adolescent Cutters and the Other,” adds a psychoanalytic dimension to the growing body of work that recognizes cutting as a form of self-therapy. Other recent publications include articles on Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, Sapphire’s Push and The Kid, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, and A.M. Homes’ The End of Alice. Her most recent publication is “Teaching Fun Home as a Narrative of Trauma in the English Classroom: Psychoanalysis in Fun Home and Are You My Mother?” in Approaches to Teaching Bechdel’s Fun Home (MLA, 2018).