Graphic Analysis: Transitional Phenomena in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?

Abstract

In this essay, methods are discussed for enacting “potential spaces,” as demonstrated in D. W. Winnicott’s theoretical and therapeutic practices and as drawn in Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Are You My Mother? , a text in which Winnicott and his work in particular, and therapeutic scenes in general, figure prominently. It juxtaposes Winnicott’s theories and practices next to Bechdel’s in order to create a transitional space between the two that illuminates the graphic elements of Winnicott’s psychoanalytic theories and the psychoanalytic elements of Bechdel’s art practice. What Bechdel practices in Are You My Mother? is not so much graphic medicine as what the essay calls “graphic analysis”—a long and difficult therapeutic and creative process of doing and undoing the self in words and images.