Dalsimer, Katherine 1944–

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Dalsimer, Katherine 1944–

PERSONAL: Born 1944.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University, 275 Central Park W., New York, NY 10024. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Columbia University, New York, NY, member of faculty of Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, and consulting psychologist for mental health service; Weill Medical College, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, member of faculty.

WRITINGS:

Female Adolescence: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Literature, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1986.

Virginia Woolf: Becoming a Writer, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2001.

SIDELIGHTS: Psychologist Katherine Dalsimer's Female Adolescence: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Literature draws on five literary works that focus on the female coming-of-age: Carson McCullers' Member of the Wedding, Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Anne Frank's diary, William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and Jane Austen's Persuasion. Dalsimer studies each work in an order determined by the age of each heroine, beginning with the preadolescent Frankie in Member of the Wedding. In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, adolescent friendship and awakening sexuality are the theme. Georgia Review contributor Anne Bromley felt that the chapter focusing on Spark's book "is the strongest because it clearly fulfills Dalsimer's states intention: to show how female adolescence is distinct from that of the male."

In The Diary of Anne Frank the fourteen-year-old Jewish diarist, while hiding from the Nazis, writes about the beginning of menstruation. "Anne's diary becomes a confession in Dalsimer's skilled hands, revealing that female maturity continues on its course in even the most oppressive circumstances," commented Daniel W. Ross in Modern Fiction Studies. Frank's diary also touches on Oedipal conflict. While Marjorie Stone commented in the Dalhousie Review that Dalsimer's examination of this work is "one of the most absorbing and illuminating" portions of Female Adolescence, the critic added that, "in keeping with many recent studies … Dalsimer sees the girls' relationships with her mother rather than her father as being much more important than it is in the Freudian view. The 'passionate involvement' with other females in the intense friendships and mentor worship of early adolescence 'reflects the fact that the girl's psychic struggles continue to center on her powerful bond with her mother.'"

Shakespeare's Juliet is a slightly older heroine who, in addition to awakening sexually, is also engaged in parental conflict. Persuasion's heroine Anne Eliot, even at age twenty-seven, is still caught up with resolving her adolescence. Choice reviewer M. B. Arthur wrote that "Dalsimer's interpretations are remarkable for the intelligent and informed acuity of her psychoanalytic observations as well as for their preservation of the texture of lived experience."

In Virginia Woolf: Becoming a Writer Dalsimer explores the evolution of the writer who suffered from a mental illness which ultimately led to her suicide at age fifty-nine. Studies in the Novel contributor Panthea Reid wrote that "Dalsimer writes lucid, engaging prose, unhampered by the jargons of either psychology or literary criticism. She keeps her cast of characters small and summarizes plots and relevant biographical facts efficiently." Woolf lost her mother when she was thirteen years old, and her half-sister, father, and brother had also died by the time she was twenty-five. In her semi-autobiographical novel To the Lighthouse Woolf focuses on an adult relationship in which the conflict between the author and her own mother is played out between the fictional characters Mrs. Ramsay and artist Lily Briscoe.

In her examination of Woolf, Dalsimer concentrates on the writer's adolescence and young womanhood, and studies her subject through diaries, letters, novels, and other writings. She views writing as Woolf's means of combating her depression, while Woolf's life-long love of reading was a way to escape an unstable home life. "But, as is evident from Woolf's ultimate surrender to her illness, the catharsis she experiences in writing is not in the end an effective cure," noted Rebecca Stone in a review for the Harvard Crimson online. "In her analysis of Woolf's later writings, Dalsimer exposes the limitation of the writer's work to positively affect her emotional state. By depicting Woolf's art as an involuntary drive, Dalsimer shows that writing can distract Woolf from her pain without necessarily getting to the core of her illness." The question that remains unanswered is whether Woolf's manic depression limited her creativity or was central to it.

Bernadette Murphy noted in the Los Angeles Times Book Review that, "as a teacher and supervisor for psychologists and psychiatrists in training, Dalsimer has found that close reading of literary texts is excellent 'ear training' for the kind of listening required in clinical situations" as well as "an excellent training for apprentice writers and for readers who wish to delve deeply into texts. In what could be viewed as a fine introduction to the art of close reading, Dalsimer takes readers by the hand and shows us the treasures she finds."