A note on our daddy issues
In which I discuss projection, anxiety, and the future of serious nonfiction.
“Dad Books Are a Dying Breed”—an article published last week in the Wall Street Journal—fills me with complicated, maternal feelings: tenderness, exasperation.
Where did Daddy go; why isn’t Daddy paying attention; oh no, Daddy must not exist anymore; oh NO, that means I’ll die too: God, whatever happened to the stereotype that publishing people were all self-aware neurotics in active psychoanalysis? Does no one else hear what I do?
What I hear, perhaps unfairly, is the heavens echoing with Margaret Mahler’s screams. This feels less like journalism and more like the cry of an infant who hasn’t yet developed object constancy. It feels like something I shouldn’t see: personal, private, best worked out on the couch in a well-established transference relationship.
To be clear, I’m not trying to shame anyone.
It’s just people being people. D.W. Winnicott calls regression “part of a healing process” and “a normal phenomenon” that “can be properly studied in the healthy person.” It’s what we all do when some destabilizing situation in our present recalls an unresolved terror from our past. Something shifts in our environment; things no longer make sense; meaning becomes void; and into that void, we pour a solution to a problem from another time and place. With any luck, there’s a therapist present to give us words for what’s happening. That way, we can finally grow past it.
Growth is great. Even the oldest, wisest people on Earth must grow from time to time. And for what it’s worth, I share one underlying conviction with the WSJ: this is a moment of what one may call growth opportunity for nonfiction.
Yes, and: I want those of you reading about this moment in publishing history to understand what you’re reading.
