SOURCE: “Ann Beattie: Emotional Loss and Strategies of Reparation,” in The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 53, No. 4, 1993, pp. 317-33.

Much of the psychoanalytic literature dealing with emotional loss has focused on the early origins of narcissistic injury. Masterson, for example, speaks of “the mother's libidinal availability for the child's separation-individuation needs” （1981, p. 132）. The child is viewed as introjecting a “withdrawing maternal part-object,” with consequent abandonment depression. Whether one relates the resulting intrapsychic structure to borderline or narcissistic personality disorders, the depressive component cannot be ignored. My present purpose is to analyze Ann Beattie's fiction with special reference to emotional loss in the context of adult love relationships. I will also explore links between the sense of abandonment, depression, and a variety of coping mechanisms as described by Beattie. I have chosen Beattie because her work is highly representative of contemporary trends in fiction, in which love relationships are often depicted not only as problematic but as impoverished and filled with loneliness and a sense of loss. To the extent that these trends reflect patterns of behavior in real life—always difficult to determine—it is possible that love relationships, family life, and nurturance in contemporary America are undergoing important historic changes of an entropic nature.

Beattie's “A Vintage Thunderbird” is one of many stories that illustrate the theme of irreparable loss, in this case not only the ill-advised sale of a vintage auto but more importantly the damage done to assorted love relationships by misunderstandings, indecisiveness, and self-centeredness. As if gratuitously, Beattie causes her bachelor protagonist to catch a glimpse of a little boy playing with a hula hoop, a reminder, perhaps, of lost opportunities for a normal family life. The symbolic meaning of the child is underscored by the circumstance that one of the female characters, a married friend and short-term mistress of the protagonist, has had an abortion earlier on the same day.

All of Beattie's characters in this representative story suffer from abandonment depression, being left behind repeatedly by their lovers. Unlike the arrested narcissistic personality described by Masterson （1981） or Kernberg's regressive narcissistic personality （1975）, with their characteristic grandiose defenses, Beattie's characters are at the mercy of their depression. They accept their rejection or abandonment by their lovers as a fact of life, hoping that their phone will ring—as it does unexpectedly from time to time—but not really believing that they deserve to be loved or that they can successfully pursue their love objects: “He had seen for a long time that it didn't matter to her how much she meant to him” （Beattie, 1978, p. 15）.

Beattie's protagonists cannot separate from their unavailable love objects, even though they fail to receive positive mirroring. The frustrated protagonist of “A Vintage Thunderbird” experiences a brief flare-up of anger when his elusive girlfriend sells her Thunderbird, which he had idealized as much as his girlfriend. But it is not typical of Beattie's protagonists to mobilize rage in response to their endless disappointments. In fact, the hapless protagonist of “A Vintage Thunderbird” is the victim of other people's rage, being mugged and severely injured on two occasions immediately following rejection by a girlfriend. If it was Beattie's intention to “punish” her protagonist for failing to meet the emotional needs of his lovers, she has succeeded, although most of the emotional pain experienced by her characters is self-administered.

The fear of loss and abandonment may be one of the reasons Beattie's characters remain locked into unsatisfactory love relationships, breaking up and reconciling only to part in anger and bafflement over and over again. Once they are separated, they are overcome by anxiety and feel bereft of emotional resources. It is not so much that they are lonely as they are puzzled by their failure to connect. Their loneliness begins, in fact, when they come together. One cannot speak of separation anxiety because Beattie's characters do not anticipate their abandonment, even though they have experienced it many times. The reason for their lack of prescience is that they do not learn from experience but live existentially from crisis to crisis. Though oft-wounded and conscious of their pain, these rejected men and women do not wonder why they have been made to suffer and are surprised to be told that they have made others suffer. It is this incapacity for veridical reflection that is their doom and their saving grace, as well, protecting them from unbearable insight. Beattie remarked in an interview （McCaffery and Gregory, 1984, pp. 165–177） that though some of her characters have insight, their self-understanding is usually limited, distorted, or incapable of guiding their actions in a constructive direction. She adds that her characters are unhappy because there is “something missing” in their lives, which neither she nor her protagonists can identify.

One explanation for the plight of Beattie's characters is that she has placed them in relationships in which, in Mahler's theory, they are not emotionally responsive to each other （1979）. Part of their difficulty is that, even though they are adults, they have not undergone the kind of separation-individuation that Mahler associates with early childhood. At least one critic, Joseph Epstein （1983, pp. 54–58）, has remarked on the interchangeability of Beattie's characters, who are often distinguished by their names only, names that are nondescript to begin with. One can understand why they are trapped in relationships in which they are unable to give each other emotional support or even communicate their own feelings: these characters are undifferentiated from each other except with regard to gender. Their symbiosis resembles the relationship between a mother who cannot let go and a child who is afraid to break away. Beattie's unhappy spouses may plan to obtain a divorce, like the father in the novel Falling in Place （1980）, who is unable to act until forced to make a decision by an external event, in this case the shooting of his daughter by his son. In the short story “Distant Music,” sudden success as a songwriter permits the male protagonist to leave his mistress in New York in order to start a new life in California. The mistress, for her part, remains tied to the memory of her erstwhile lover by holding onto the dog they had raised together, even though it has become vicious and all but unmanageable.

Symbiotic relationships in Beattie's fiction are characterized not only by inertia but by tremendous tension fueled by unconscious resentment of the partner whose claims, often unstated, bar the way to freedom. Sometimes the impulse to break out of passivity results in psychotic acting out, as in the story “A Reasonable Man.” This story is told from the point of view of a young mother who has not yet recovered from a recent psychotic break, in which she accidentally endangered the safety of her small son at the beach by leaving him in the surf while she impulsively ran off to the end of the beach and returned in a confused state. The mother has no insight into her condition and cannot understand why her husband （whose name she apparently no longer remembers, thinking of him only as “the man”） urges her to get out of the house more often, or why she is obsessed with the thought that her telephone never rings anymore. Her husband's “reasonableness” is tinged with half-concealed anger and is devoid of empathy. The wife, who has long been neglected by her “busy” husband, and who feels totally isolated, wonders if she can “lure him into bed. Perhaps if that works, the phone will also ring” （1978, p. 47）. To add to the woman's frustration, her critical and insensitive mother-in-law, who has taken custody of her son, has also enrolled her in an arts-and-crafts class as a form of therapy. Her instructor, who seems to understand her situation, gives her a book of poetry by Sylvia Plath and wants her to realize that “many women felt enraged—sad and enraged” （1978, p. 50）. The woman is unable to share her pain with him because “That would cast a pall over things, though. The instructor would feel uncomfortable. … Talk about something neutral. Talk about the weather” （1978, p. 50）. Significantly, the only topic her husband talks about with her is the weather. “A Reasonable Man” is a powerful statement about the impossibility of communication, the substitution of banality for candor, and the sense of entrapment in a failed relationship. This time, the protagonist has lost more than her love-objects because she has lost contact with reality and her sense of efficacy as a person, as a wife, and as a mother.

A possible interpretation of “A Reasonable Man” is that the reaction to symbiosis sometimes takes the form of abortive flight, which in the present case resembles a fugue of short duration. The young mother's wild dash along the edge of the beach may be seen as a momentary acting out, not very different, in essence, from the vicarious acting out symbolized by the brother's shooting of his sister in Falling in Place. Is there a systematic relationship between abandonment depression as depicted in “A Reasonable Man” and acting-out behavior? If so, we may have a partial key to the etiology of acting-out behavior in some individuals where there is evidence of maternal neglect. In such instances, the desperate effort on the part of the poorly differentiated child to break out of a symbiotic, nonempathic relationship may lead to acting out as an expression of frustration and rage. Beattie's characters are not antisocial necessarily, much less psychopathic. On the contrary, they are highly socialized, even when their speech is flavored with the obscenities that have become commonplace among middle-class youth. These fictional protagonists are much closer to narcissistic and borderline personality disorders precisely because they are not antisocial, but depressed and self-destructive. In this context, acting out can take many forms, conditioned by middle-class as well as lower-class cultural norms. For example, Masterson （1981, p. 46） speaks of psychopathic acting out as a defense against the fear of engulfment, in some cases, and in other instances, the fear of abandonment. Defensive rage, flight, or aggression are not peculiar, however, to the psychopathic personality, but may be seen as reactions to maternal deprivation in general.

The story of “La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans” illustrates some of the difficulties involved in parent-child relationships that are not manifestly symbiotic, but produce defensive rage in the child. The tale describes a charismatic father figure who comes to be perceived by his daughter as standing in the way of her growth toward autonomy. The two protagonists are the college-age son of a famous painter and his girlfriend, who is the daughter of a celebrated poet, some of whose poems are based on memories of his daughter's childhood. When the poet dies by his own hand after being told he is terminally ill, his daughter finds herself becoming enraged when anyone refers to her father and what a great man he was. Her anger is so intense that she terminates her relationship with the painter's son when the latter recalls how he once thought her father was “larger than life.” Is she angry because of the explicit charge by her lover that her father has dominated her life, or is her rage symptomatic of her ambivalence and melancholia? In the context of Beattie's other fictional works, in which people sometimes become attached to objects and pets, rather than other people—“A Vintage Thunderbird” and “Distant Music” are examples—and where relationships are precarious, the present story appears to deal with the fear of engulfment. The daughter had never imagined that her gentle father played a destructive role in her life until her lover reproached her for being under the older man's domination. In fact, there is more than a suspicion that the lover has projected his own conflict over individuation onto the hitherto repressive girl, bringing to the surface defensive rage she did not know she possessed.

The theme of a young woman being under the domination of an older father figure is developed more fully in “Weekend,” in which the woman cannot break out of a deeply frustrating six-year relationship with her lover, an alcoholic, failed English professor twice her age. The male, who is portrayed as a narcissistic, aging roué, shows far more interest in his former female students than in his mistress, who tries to lose herself in domesticity. The former professor, dismissed from his post and with plenty of time on his hands, entertains his erstwhile students every weekend, taking long walks in the country with selected young women and engaging in animated conversation with them in the presence of his house-bound mistress, whom he hardly ever addresses. Despite the fact that the mistress has had two children by the professor, she feels excluded from his life and sees daily evidence of the man's self-absorption and indifference to her needs. To add to her pain and humiliation, she overhears him saying to one of his students that she, the mistress, is “simple” for staying with him. Her brother has urged her for years to leave the older man, but in vain, partly because the woman feels pity for her lover, having seen a number of agonized facial photos that he took of himself and then concealed. Finally, the professor, quite drunk, embraces one of his students in front of his mistress and gleefully announces that he is in love with the young girl, who rejects him at once, bursting into tears and fleeing from the house. After the student leaves, the professor curses her, but is consoled by his long-suffering wife, who says to him: “I'm the only one you can go too far with” （Beattie, 1978, p. 127）.

The self-abasement of the mistress in “Weekend” corresponds closely to Masterson's description of borderline pathology （1981, pp. 99–102）. His view of the salient features of the borderline condition includes failure of individuation, inhibited self-assertion, and low self-esteem associated with self-image disturbance. Sometimes, compulsive defenses are part of the picture, as exemplified by the counting compulsions shown by several of Beattie's inadequate protagonists, including the professor's mistress in “Weekend.” Beattie's uncanny ability to dramatize the borderline personality is matched by her gift for describing a variety of what Masterson calls “caretaking” relationships by which the borderline “clings” to the object selflessly, blocking individuation. Anger and depression go hand-in-hand with compliant behavior as the borderline struggles to ward off the threat of abandonment by stifling self-assertion at all costs.

The plight of Beattie's inadequate, passive protagonists is understandable not only in terms of borderline pathology but also in the light of the drug-oriented counterculture of the sixties and seventies in which they find themselves. But one must not make too much of the cultural or cohort context. Beattie's fictional failures of attachment, the underlying rage experienced by her characters, their poor sense of self, their acting out via alcoholism or drug abuse, and their lack of self-direction are all symptomatic of a trend in which anomic features of popular culture intersect with the breakdown of the traditional family for a variety of historical reasons.

Thus, Beattie's protagonists, despite their privileged middle-class background and college education, are as much the result of defective childhood nurturance as Joyce Carol Oates' or Harry Crews' violent characters. The difference is that Beattie's characters are self-destructive, wasting their lives in aimless, promiscuous relationships and living from hand to mouth, whereas Oates' or Crews' protagonists, no less disoriented and filled with a sense of emptiness, act out their frustrations in an extrapunitive way. Lovelessness and an incapacity for healthy object relations are the common factor along with the erosion of the ego ideal, although the more aggressive coping mechanisms of Oates' or Crews' characters suggest a narcissistic character structure, with characteristic features of grandiosity and omnipotence. The fantasy themes explored by these contemporary writers parallel developments on the plane of everyday reality. These developments are described daily by the mass media with their terrifying accounts of crime, homelessness, drug addiction, spouse and child abuse, and many other indices of social pathology. Here, too, it is necessary to distinguish between the pathetic helplessness of borderline personalities, such as many homeless people, addicts, and the like, and the predatory behavior of narcissistic characters whose rage is channeled along sociopathic lines.

The generation that Beattie writes about—at least its middle-class members—is indeed different from earlier generations in its relative affluence and its lack of a sense of urgency about career choice, marriage, and “settling down.” The evidence of borderline personality traits in her characters is consistent with the lack of structure in their lives. This is to say that the parental generation and authority figures generally have disappeared from the scene. They exist only to send monthly checks and worried letters to their wayward children, as in “Colorado,” in which an aimless graduate-school dropout allows himself to be persuaded by his unstable girlfriend to drive out from Cambridge to a remote part of Colorado merely for a change of scene.

In the absence of pressures to strive for acceptance into adult society, or to hold onto a job, or pursue an education, or even to be self-supporting, Beattie's tarnished, pot-smoking jeunesse doré are forced to create their own structure. Or, it would be more precise to say that hedonism replaces society's traditional structure of age- and role-related expectations. Accordingly, Beattie's protagonists do not “act their age,” but are dependent and self-absorbed. Nor do they act like parents to their neglected children, as in “Starley,” in which a man hardly ever bothers to see his son and wonders why his son does not like him. In effect, these characters allow their lives to be structured by accidental circumstances or by other people, as in “Deer Season,” in which a young woman, fearful of turning into a spinster, is persuaded by her former lover to go off with him into a problematic future: “She … thought that perhaps being powerless was nice, in a way” （Beattie, 1978, p. 188）. Symbolic of the young woman's fate is a newly slain deer tied to the top of a van whose driver stops to help the stranded couple who are on the way to no place in particular.

The lives of Beattie's characters testify to the futility of hedonism and the destructive effects that result from the dismantling of long-term, committed relationships, familiar routines, seasonal rituals, and other activities that provide a framework of predictability for people's lives and a semblance of security. The much-vaunted informality of American life turns out to be a form of social “deconstructionism,” as interpreted by Beattie, not unlike its counterpart in literary criticism. The consequences for Beattie's characters are much more serious than those produced by the reinterpretation of iconic texts. What is absent in the lives of Beattie's protagonists is nothing less than the network of mutual expectations that bind people together into a cohesive society. Her fictional borderlines, for this reason, are more than examples of the walking wounded. Their isolation from each other is emblematic of centrifugal forces at work in society. I do not wish to push the analogy too far, but the lack of integration seen in borderlines seems to parallel the weakening of the nexus between individuals on the macrolevel of the social system as a whole.

In her analysis of the borderline adolescent, Paulina Kernberg （1979） speaks of unpredictability, poor impulse control and weak integration resulting from low frustration tolerance, low anxiety tolerance, and low depression tolerance. To understand why Beattie's characters are unable to bond with each other it is necessary to see their impulsivity, and low frustration tolerance, in particular, as contributing to their instability. For example, in “The Lawn Party” a young married man impulsively kisses the bare toes of his brother's attractive wife. Earlier in the story, he was described as spending all his spare moments with his wife's sister, making no attempt to conceal the affair, until the latter, on a sudden impulse, drove her car off the road, losing her life in the “accident,” and causing the protagonist to lose his right arm.

The embittered protagonist deliberately insults everyone present at a family reunion, including his 10-year-old daughter. The story ends with the protagonist watching his brother's wife dancing drunkenly on the lawn as he undresses her mentally. Here, in a single story, the motifs of failure as a husband, father, and brother are developed against a background of quasi-incestuous relationships. The protagonist, whose mutilated body is the outward emblem of his poorly integrated self, responds to the loss of his mistress and his arm in a pseudoeuphoric manner that is indicative of his incapacity for tolerating not only frustration but depression as well. The euphoria is manifested by his sudden infatuation with his brother's wife, which has less to do with mature sexuality than with regression to the rapprochement crisis. Otherwise, why does the angry, isolated man kiss each of his sister-in-law's toes, saying, “Give back that piggy,” an obvious reference to the babyish game, “This little piggy went to market?”

The connection between impulsivity, hedonism, and depression that is suggested by “The Lawn Party” is best understood in the context of attempted reparation for emotional loss and deprivation. As Thomas Edwards observed in his review of Beattie's 1986 collection of short stories, Where You'll Find Me in the New York Times Book Review （Oct. 12, 1986, p. 10）, Beattie's characters fail to find replacement for what they have lost earlier in life—not only love objects but the capacity for intense feeling that once was invested in these objects. The search for reparation sometimes centers on symbolic representations of these lost objects, as is illustrated by the story, “Janus,” in which a glazed bowl becomes the symbol of a woman's erstwhile lover, who had given her the bowl as a gift.

Other expressions of attempted reparation take the form of groups living in rural, commune-like settings in which young married and unmarried men and women—former lovers and would-be lovers—try to create the illusion of togetherness. The long story, “Friends,” is one of many examples of this tendency in Beattie's fiction and illustrates the tenuousness of the ties that exist among such people, despite their physical intimacy and tolerance for each other's idiosyncrasies. In “Friends,” too, a physical object—in this case a borrowed oak table—links two women to each other in a long-term relationship by phone, even though they have no real interest in each other. The group life of these characters is regressive, with much drinking, pot smoking, carelessness, and petty annoyances caused by their egocentricity. They even arrange their physical space as if to recall their childhood: “Seeing the clothes on hooks reminded him of the way coats were hung in his schoolroom in the winter when he was young” （Beattie, 1978, p. 226）.

The reader is given to understand that there is more to the lives of these unsettled people than is suggested by their bohemian lifestyle, with its alternations between communal life and reclusiveness in remote corners of New England. They are, after all, half-serious artists, poets, and musical band members. Their reclusiveness is nominal because they spend hours talking to each other on the phone and lose no opportunity to congregate in each other's rustic dwellings, even though they live far apart from each other. Beattie has these lonely people circling each other, in quest of elusive lovers or in flight from present spouses, or trying to escape from the isolation of their self-centered lives. Like Perry, the protagonist of “Friends,” a would-be poet with a cast on his broken leg, they drag themselves around from one crowded New England farmhouse to another, uncertain whether their destiny is to be a poet or a carpenter, a platonic friend or a lover.

Another character resolves her conflict between being a responsible, nurturant mother to her young child or becoming somebody's mistress by deserting her husband and eloping with her former lover. The woman whom the protagonist loves epitomizes her own conflict as follows: “I don't know what I want. … When Anita had her baby I wanted to be a mother. I want to be left alone, but I need to have people around” （Beattie, 1978, p. 247）. She is certain, however, that she wants to become a “famous” painter, but rarely gets beyond painting nude portraits of herself. The story ends abruptly with the woman on the threshold of success, waiting calmly to be interviewed by a reporter from the Village Voice. The protagonist, whose mistress she has become, less out of passion than expediency, knows that she will never marry him and resigns himself to obscurity and the realization that “his importance in life was to take care of other people—that he would be remembered as the person who housed them and looked after them” （Beattie, 1978, p. 261）.

Beattie's fictional peer groups cannot provide love and security because they are pseudo-families prone to fragmentation, each member eventually veering off in a different direction. Like the borderline adolescents described by Kernberg （1979） in her analysis of rapprochement difficulties, Beattie's characters alternate between using other people as a support for their fragile sense of self and a tendency to turn against others, or away from them when their behavior does not correspond to unrealistic self- or object representations. In “A Clever-Kids Story,” for example, Beattie describes a young woman who is by no means a borderline, but whose grief over the loss of her older brother in Vietnam is intensified by the knowledge that their relationship during childhood had been almost incestuous. The woman had successfully differentiated herself from her brother, but she continues to experience her relationship with her lover as if it retained important elements of the physical intimacy that had existed with her brother during childhood. The protagonist's brother had been the dominant one in their relationship, compelling her to listen to his wild bedtime stories while he shared her bed. The young woman, for her part, had turned out to be a realist, having urged him to flee to Canada rather than risk death in Vietnam. Nevertheless, she continues to experience her brother's attraction to the uncanny, associating it with a portion of her childhood identity that is forever lost because it was tied to her brother's psychic structure.

The theme of imperfect differentiation of the self is explored in “Tuesday Night,” in which a divorced woman doesn't know what to do with herself on Tuesday nights, when her lover has to attend business meetings. She is chronically bored and depressed but is less than enthusiastic when her lover offers to change the night on which the meetings are held. It is as if she needs to have time to herself, as she maintains, and wishes to differentiate herself from her lover, but cannot structure her life as a separate person. Ominously, her lover “has been saying for a long time that our relationship is turning sour for him” （Beattie, 1978, p. 292）. In the reader's last glimpse of the protagonist, she fearfully awaits her lover's declaration that their relationship is at an end because the night before he had said: “If there has to be so much time alone, I can't see the point of living together” （Beattie, 1978, p. 292）. In “Secrets and Surprises,” the title story of the 1978 collection, a 33-year-old woman whose husband has left her takes a 21-year-old lover who was her music student. She cannot abandon the hope that her husband will return to her, a hope that is kept alive by his letters, which keep her abreast of his travels, presumably with another woman. At the same time, she regrets that her young lover is about to leave her to travel around Europe.

The Secrets and Surprises collection, taken as a whole, then, elaborates the theme of symbiosis and the difficulty of breaking off outworn relationships by people who are poorly integrated and lack a sense of purpose. The underlying affect is that of depression and loss, without insight, and with compulsive hedonism as one of several desperate remedies. Are these stories, published originally in periodicals in the seventies, symbolic expressions of Beattie's inner conflicts and preoccupations, or are they an objective summing-up of the lives of representative middle-class, white Americans of the post-Vietnam years—or both? My present purpose is not to attempt to explore the personal sources of Beattie's fiction but to call attention to the larger implications of her portraits of people who resemble borderlines along certain dimensions. These fictional bohemians and jaded housewives are more than creatures of the sixties and seventies counterculture. Beattie's fiction is an attempt to deal with the complexities of love relationships against the background of important changes in the structure of family life and the viability of long-term emotional commitments. These relationships are explored in different contexts.

In the story “In Amalfi,” in the 1991 collection, What Was Mine （the title itself suggests irretrievable loss）, published 13 years after the appearance of Secrets and Surprises, Beattie continues to probe love relationships that cannot be sustained, yet cannot be terminated. This time the protagonist is a divorced woman who had married her English professor, then had divorced him after a short period; but had kept in touch with him for 15 years, even after he remarried and had children by his second wife. Now the professor is once again divorced and spends his vacations with the protagonist. The point of the story is that the renewed relationship between the aging professor and the much younger protagonist is impoverished, with the professor spending much of his time writing a book and ignoring the protagonist: “It no longer irritated her that for seconds or minutes or even for half an hour, she could be no more real to him than a ghost” （1991, p. 15）.

In this collection, however, Beattie depicts people who wonder about each other's motives, as well as their own reasons for entering into or ending relationships. Her characters are no longer shown from the outside, but are given an inner life, though not a very detailed one. The result is that they appear to be closer to each other, or at least within reach of each other, if not on the level of empathy, then on the level of tolerance. These dissatisfied men and women are still restless and feel constrained by family ties, as is revealed by “Imagine a Day at the End of Your Life,” which is about a retired householder who is relieved to get away momentarily from his large family, whose members have gathered to celebrate his fortieth wedding anniversary. He finds solace in driving out to the countryside alone, without his hyperactive wife, and walking in the woods while he tries to rediscover his links with nature and contemplates his eventual death. As if he has had enough of people, he has filled a photo album （a gift from one of his daughters） with pressed autumn leaves instead of photos of his family.

In contrast to the escapist motivation implied in the above story, Beattie explores a moment of coming together and genuine empathy and mutual concern in “Honey.” Here a middle-aged housewife, already a grandmother, is in love with a 23-year-old man. Their relationship, largely unspoken, has not gone beyond sharing a tub of popcorn at the movies and licking butter off each other's fingers. At a backyard barbecue attended by the housewife, her husband, and her would-be lover, as well as others, the protagonist and the young man instinctively clasp each other's hands across the table when everyone is thrown into a panic by a swarm of bees drawn to a honey pot opened by the young man. The woman seems to have been thinking about the meaning of her attraction to the young man when she wonders why her married daughter decided to have a baby: “Please let it not be because she thinks that if someone needs her, he loves her” （1991, p. 34）. If Beattie means for this line to epitomize the housewife's feelings toward the young man, it would suggest that her fictional world has ceased to be a universe in which people cling to each other out of blind need and has become a place in which they reflect on the meaning of their relationships. Is this shift an indication of greater inwardness on Beattie's part or has she decided to abandon her erstwhile method of distancing the reader from her characters? Another possibility is that Beattie no longer sees her fictional people as products of a particular period, i.e., hippies and posthippies of the sixties and seventies, but as individuals with the same wishes and fears as everyone else, and as capable of much greater self-determination than her earlier creations.

The last-named possibility gains credibility from some of the stories in the What Was Mine collection, in addition to “Honey.” Although not all the stories are an advance over her earlier work, the general tone is different. For example, “The Longest Day of the Year,” a story about a couple who are about to end their marriage, reveals no evidence of soul searching. It shows an impatience on the part of the wife, once her mind is made up, to get on with the process of dismantling her old life and moving away, even though the local Welcome-Wagon woman insists on taking up her time on the eve of her departure. In this story, Beattie depicts a woman who is no longer ambivalent about terminating a failed relationship, but her decision is not based on any special insight, as far as the reader can tell.

Another example of decisiveness, but without evidence of reflection, is provided by the lives of the protagonists in “The Working Girl,” in What Was Mine. This is an account of a female office worker's marriage to a middle-management executive and of his eventual death following surgery. The account is remarkable for its sustained externality and its “deadpan” treatment of crucial events in people's lives, all in the guise of the author pretending that she is trying to make up a story about an imaginary working girl. Beattie distances herself completely from her colorless protagonists at the same time that she enables her male protagonist, the executive, to divorce his beautiful wife without hesitation once he has become enamored of his rather ordinary office worker.

A similar example of single-mindedness is displayed in “Home to Marie,” in which a housewife arranges for an elaborate catered party at her home and then deliberately walks out on her unsuspecting husband as he awaits the guests who will never show up because they have never been invited. The stunned husband is last seen being consoled by the caterer and remembering how he was once mugged and badly injured after leaving a bar one night. The suddenness of his assailant's attack, the reader surmises, has its counterpart in the abruptness of the wife's departure, suitcase in hand.

Decisiveness is seen also in “Television,” in which a man suddenly falls in love with the female narrator of the tale while they are treating their lawyer to a surprise birthday lunch at a restaurant. The man's unexpected declaration of love is matched by the woman's shocked rejection of him: “This surprised me so much that as well as moving away from him I also went back in my mind to the safety and security of childhood” （1991, p. 97）.

The decisiveness, indeed, the recklessness shown by Beattie's characters in What Was Mine, can be seen as something apart from thematic or stylistic experimentation. Whatever the sources in Beattie's personal development or in the events of her private life, the shift from listless, irresolute characters to people who act with seeming confidence on the spur of the moment suggests, in psychodynamic terms, that impulsivity is sometimes the reciprocal of obsessive blocking and indecision. In such cases, the fear of impulsivity may have given rise to obsessive defenses in the first place. Accordingly, what appears as decisiveness may represent a weakening of obsessive defenses against acting out. In such instances, acting out can take the “positive” form of falling in love, perhaps serving as an attempted antidote to doubt and depression. Similarly, acting out can take the form of falling out of love, as an expression of repressed anger and resentment that has finally surfaced.

In “Horatio's Trick,” impulsivity takes still another form, namely, harsh candor, as a college-age son confronts his divorced alcoholic mother with her heavy drinking, her phobic attitudes, and her blocked, repressive style of life: “I'm going to say this, because I think you aren't aware of what you do. You don't ask anything, because you're afraid of what every answer might be. It makes people reluctant to talk to you. Nobody wants to tell you things” （1991, pp. 112–113）. The son also accuses his mother of showing no interest in his father's new family, as if she “doesn't want to know things.” It is as if the young man has saved up his reproaches and finally has to unburden himself, despite the obvious pain to his mother. Although candor is quite different from what is usually meant by acting out, and can be a deliberate act, it can also be seen as an effort to overcome passivity in others by means of reproach.

When one views the collection What Was Mine as a whole it is clear that Beattie understands the power of repression and has set out to create characters who can act on their feelings, albeit not always with full understanding of what impels them. These new characters are very different from the characters in Beattie's first collection of stories, Distortions （1976b）, in which people seem to have no will of their own and are prepared to accept a destiny that is shaped entirely by fortuitous circumstances. Nevertheless, there are echoes of Beattie's earlier themes in What Was Mine, as if Beattie cannot avoid certain fictional situations. As mentioned earlier, for example, “Home to Marie” ends with the deserted husband alone with the caterer, a young woman who tells him about her love life and seems to sympathize with his predicament. One finds almost the same ending to a story in the earlier collection, The Burning House （1982）, in “Greenwich Time,” in which a man who is visiting his former wife and her new husband in what was once his own house is comforted by his former maid while he awaits the arrival of his ex-wife and her husband. The theme of loss and attempted reparation is obviously a thread that runs through Beattie's fiction from her earliest work to her latest writings.

The breakdown of repressive defenses in the behavior of Beattie's more recent protagonists may indicate that she is at the threshold of exploring the sources of depression, apathy, and irresolution, rather than concentrating on symptoms and defensive strategies. I say “symptoms” because Beattie's fiction deals with the long-term after-effects of faulty parenting and early traumas without making direct causal connections. In the novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter （1976a）, for example, the reader listens in at great length to the conversations of two dysphoric young men who bemoan the vacuousness of their lives, their sense of hopelessness, and the decline and moral decay, as they see it, of America as a whole. We learn that their families were dysfunctional, alcoholic, and unsupportive, but Beattie's focus is on her protagonists' bad feelings and general cynicism. When one of the male protagonists, for example, receives an urgent call from his mother, in which she states that she is in such great pain that she thought of killing herself, he remarks angrily to his sister: “She's not in pain. He's out with some barfly and she's acting up. … She's either drunk or in a bad mood because he's out with some woman. She's done this a hundred times” （1976a, p. 4）.

The son's analysis of his mother's motives is correct and she is indeed a troubled woman, who is lying stark naked in bed when her son and daughter arrive to summon an unneeded ambulance. The son had earlier expressed his rage at his mother to his friend: “Even your dog had the good sense to lie down and die.” Beattie does not examine the inner life of the mother or her early relationship to her children. The son sums up his mother's predicament as follows: “I think that one day she just decided to go nuts because that was easier. This way she can say whatever she wants to say and she can drink and lie around naked and just not do anything” （1976a, p. 14）. He brushes aside suggestions that the deaths of family members may have contributed to his mother's behavior. Although it is not a fiction writer's obligation to provide a clinical analysis of why parent-child relationships turn destructive, Beattie's detached treatment of her characters leaves the reader without insight into their emotional problems, and therefore, without an understanding of them as people.

In a later novel, Falling in Place （1980）, the disasters of family life are given their due as the author traces the breakup of a marriage, but the exact relationship between parental unhappiness and the rage and confusion felt by the children is left to the reader's imagination, perhaps in keeping with Hemingway's theory of leaving the most important things unsaid. Beattie seems to grasp this relationship in a general way, but her focus alternates between the children and the adults and she seems unable or unwilling to interweave their lives in an illuminating way. As was noted earlier, Falling in Place involves, among other things, a 10-year-old boy shooting and wounding his 15-year-old sister, but the sources of the boy's disturbed personality are not dealt with, either artistically or by the way of psychological analysis. The lack of connection between causal factors and adult behavior is even more conspicuous in those works by Beattie that deal only with adults. Her habit of writing stories spontaneously and without a definite plan or predetermined ending is well known to critics and has led Beattie into a style of writing that highlights surface behavior and neglects etiology. To deal with the sources of aimlessness, boredom, affectlessness, depression, and emotional dependency and the other traits described by Beattie requires a very different strategy of composition and a different style.

Unless, of course, Beattie is writing about people who suffer from what Kohut （1977） has termed “empty” depression, or nonpsychotic states that are not motivated by the usual feelings of self-reproach associated with depression. Kohut sees such pathology as reflecting a fragmented self-structure in which there are no goals in life to provide direction or coherence, so that the individual gives the appearance of being depleted. Kohut traces “empty” depression to the absence of empathic response on the part of the sufferer's parents or caretakers. In a similar vein, Basch （1975） posits impairment of the symbolic concept of the self, with the implication that the depressed person cannot objectify the self and is therefore responding to a sense of loss of his identity as an autonomous person. In this connection, Beattie seems to be writing about depressed people who are driven neither by self-blame nor remorse, so that it is not necessary for her to construct scenarios involving symbolic “crime” and self-punishment. Beattie's scenarios of separation and loss have special relevance for understanding depression in women, even though Beattie makes use of male protagonists as often as female.

Blatt （1974） compares anaclitic with introjective depression and argues that anaclitic depression is more characteristic of women than men. Presumably, the preoedipal period is significantly longer and more problematic for girls than for boys, so that girls experience the rapprochement crisis more acutely than boys. When a girl's separation from her mother during her first years is either premature or prolonged, it is suggested that regressive behavior is more likely to occur than if a boy is similarly traumatized. Based on these premises, Blatt reasons that girls require a longer period of attachment to the mother because, unlike boys, they do not have the option of later shifting their identification to the father.

A study by Herman （1979） on sex differences concludes that the female response to a real or symbolic loss in interpersonal relationships is to seek out people for emotional support and to counteract depression, whereas males tend to withdraw. Although this study is based on adult behavior, it can be hypothesized that Beattie's depressed, but oddly social, party-going, hard-drinking, pot-smoking protagonists who run from the arms of one lover to another are engaged in object seeking by way of reparation, and that this behavior is the analogue of behavior in young children. If this line of thinking is valid, Beattie's fictional people resemble depressed women more than men and the nature of their depression is anaclitic. Beattie also has described hedonistic strategies of reparation that are highly representative of our times and involve an almost manic flight into a pseudo-reality. But why are so many fictional people depicted as searching for a lost parent, or more precisely, a substitute object, in Beattie's work? Is it possible that their real-life prototypes are psychological orphans whose parents left them not with memories of warm embraces but with a couple of faded photographs of people they hardly knew?

References

Basch, M. F. （1975）. Toward a theory that encompasses depression: A revision of causal hypotheses in psychoanalysis. In E. J. Anthony and T. Benedek （eds.）, Depression and Human Existence. Boston: Little, Brown, pp. 485–534.

Beattie, A. （1976a）. Chilly Scenes of Winter. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Beattie, A. （1976b）. Distortions. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Beattie, A. （1978）. Secrets and Surprises. New York: Random House.

Beattie, A. （1980）. Falling in Place. New York: Random House.

Beattie, A. （1982）. The Burning House. New York: Random House.

Beattie, A. （1991）. What Was Mine. New York: Random House.

Blatt, S. J. （1974）. Levels of object representation in anaclitic and introjective depression. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 29: 107–157.

Edwards, T. （1986）. Review of Where You'll Find Me. In New York Times Book Review, Oct. 12, p. 10.

Epstein, J. （1983）. Ann Beattie and the Hippoisie. Commentary 75（3）: 54–58.

Harris, H. （1979）. Psychoanalytic theory and depression. In R. Formanek and A. Gurian （eds.）, Women and Depression. New York: Springer.

Herman, M. F. （1979）. Sex differences in depression. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Kernberg, O. （1975）. Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. New York: Brunner

Kernberg, P. （1979）. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy with borderline adolescents. In Developmental and Clinical Studies, Vol. 7, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kohut, H. （1977）. The Restoration of the Self. New York: International Universities Press.

Mahler, M. S. （1979）. The Selected Papers of Margaret Mahler. New York: Jason Aronson.

Masterson, J. F. （1981）. The Narcissistic and Borderline Disorders. New York: Brunner/Mazel.

McCaffery, L., and Gregory, S. （1984）. A conversation with Ann Beattie. The Literary Review 27（2）: 165–177.