"This is one of my difficulties now... my fear that Mom will find this memoir about her "angry." Another difficulty is the fact that the story of my … - Alison Bechdel

"In his 1964 talk on feminism, Winnicott says something he's been saying all along. "...We find that the trouble is not so much that everyone was inside and then born, but that at the very beginning everyone was dependent on a woman." Winnicott sees this dependence as the root of misogyny — though he never uses that word. Perhaps, like Woolf with "feminism," he felt plain language was more persuasive. "The awkward fact remains, for men and women, that each was once dependent on a woman, and somehow a hatred of this has to be turned into a kind of gratitude if full maturity of the personality is to be reached.

"Every one' of the psychoanalytic trainees she [Alice Miller] has supervised has the same history:

An insecure parent who did not appear to be insecure, but who depended on the child behaving in a particular way.

And an 'amazing ability' on the part of the child to perceive this and take on the assigned role.

"This role secured 'love' for the child-that is, his parents' narcissistic cathexis. He could sense he was needed and this, he felt, guaranteed him a measure of existential...[as quoted by Alice Miller]

I guess I felt like I'd failed her [by throwing up]. She had so many demands on her...The one thing she needed from me was that I not need anything from her [Bechdel's mother].