Channels • 2021 • Volume 5 • Number 2 Page 23 and present themselves in a repeated dream (Hunt 58-59). In the dream, Ash is stuck in the middle of a crowd of strangers. She is young and unable to find or push her way through them to get to her mother (58-59). Ash’s recurring dream points to a central conflict: being unable to reach her mother. When understood within the context of her mother’s suicide and the decided severance it incited, this dream becomes another depiction of Ash’s unconscious longing for her mother. Having been abandoned by her mother’s suicide, Ash faces consistently overwhelming waves of grief, desertion, and trauma that she relegates to the unconscious. She speaks of the tears of her mother “[finding] a way out of the dream and on [her] face”, and she mentions chewing tobacco, “thinking it might help wake [her] up from [her] reveries” (153, 203). In these instances, the breakdowns of Ash’s painful longings flood her sleep with agonizing dreams and “rich visions” that remind her of her mother’s suicide and their resulting separation (111). Ash attempts to avoid this pain and terror, yet the sting of abandonment and the knowledge of her mother’s intentional choice of suicide intensifies her repression. This convolution of Ash’s psyche prompts her ignored trauma to emerge into her dreams (111). Consequently, Ash details increasingly more dreams throughout the text, plagued by nightmares of abandonment, her mother, and death (42,76,110). She longs for her lost maternal intimacy so intensely that her psyche resorts to dreams to express the unconscious desire, and thus, exposes her ongoing battle to cope with her mother’s suicide. Hunt thus employs each of these dreams as a nod to the pervasive nature of such grief and unconscious desire for the maternally identifying daughter.] Faltering Sense of Reality Daughters who repress their unconscious desire for maternal intimacy amidst grief may find their perceptions of reality faltering. Fantasized communication with the dead mother, a psychological defense, can emerge as one manifestation of this detachedness. Often already troubled by unconscious struggle, the grieving and maternally identifying daughter may develop emotional and repressive tendencies to further avoid her unsatisfiable longing for closeness with the mother (Wright 104). Of these repressive tendencies, a skewed sense of reality blurs fantasy with the real world to mask the daughter’s conflict and pain by confusing existent and imagined struggles (Tyson 34). Essentially, the daughter’s psyche makes it so that she “may not be unable to tell the difference between what is happening and what she thinks is happening” as a means of eluding grief (Dobie 56). If unable to determine reality, then the daughter is never forced to validate or acknowledge her bereavement since it could potentially be illusory. Within this already weakened sense of reality, the daughter’s desire to remain connected to the mother may emerge in imagined conversations and efforts to restore psychological closeness with her (Flax, The Conflict 176). The mother is the maternally identifying daughter’s only “ongoing contact and relationship [to] help fulfill her psychological and social needs,” and becomes, even after death, the key figure to preserve union with (Chodorow 62). As such, these daughters will frequently strive to communicate and “check back with the mother for reassurance” as “emotional refueling” to maintain maternal approval and connectivity (Flax, The Conflict 176). Thus, as maternally identifying daughters bear the burden of grief, they may also negotiate this unconscious, repressive loss of reality. It masks pain through
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM4ODY=