Generations Connecting: Alzheimer's Disease and Changes of Cultural Values
by Roberta Maierhofer, University of Graz, Austria
1 The emphasis of American culture on the autonomous and independent individual, and on the search for identity in opposition to defined cultural and societal rules, can be seen as a value that is undergoing rapid change. In American Studies, the quest of the individual for a self-determined life in opposition to the norms of society has often been defined as the central cultural narrative, in which the desire of the individual to seek and define an identity within or without the community is the driving force of the plot. In feminist literature, more specifically, the search for a single, private self has often been linked to the daughter’s relationship to her mother within the family structure. However, this quest for identity takes on different forms when the daughter is confronted with a mother whose identity, due to Alzheimer’s disease, is no longer discernable, and whose memory of whom she is and was has vanished. This loss of memory concerning not only everyday incidents but also one’s very relation to others marks a starting point of a new definition of self in relation to others and reverses a mother-daughter to a daughter-mother relationship. In texts dealing with daughters whose mothers are Alzheimer’s disease patients, a re-evaluation of the concepts of independence and autonomy is taking place. The dichotomy of self and other is being supplemented by the concept of "self-in-relation."[1]I would like to thank Thomas R. Cole who pointed to the importance of this concept within a discussion of age, identity, and gender. If the strength of American Studies has been to speak with both the „authority of difference“ and the "authority of connection," (Bercovitch 2) both difference and connection can be seen as values of American society. Within a context of individual and social needs – often in conflict with each other – a new value in American Studies can be identified as represented in literature and film: the necessity of mutual and supportive relationships as a key to the development of personal identity.
2In this essay, I would like to focus on two texts portraying women with Alzheimer's disease and their relationship to their care-giving daughters. In Judith Dothard Simmons' journal article, "Connections. I Am My Mother's Keeper," the narrator asserts her responsibility for her aging mother and thus re-defines values of American society by establishing the importance of family bonding and the necessity of defining oneself in relation to others. In the film Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter, Deborah Hoffmann chronicles the various stages of her mother's Alzheimer's disease and the changes in the daughter's response to her mother and to herself. When the daughter finally accepts that her relationship to her mother can no longer rely on the given relationship between mother and daughter, she manages to establish a connection to her mother that liberates both from societal expectations. Because of her mother’s lack of memory, every meeting is a negotiation of their relationship, which has to be newly defined continuously in the present moment of their encounter.
3 With a rapidly growing older population, this shift in cultural values calls for a social policy that understands the interdependence of generations. This approach takes a life course perspective to help explain the seeming paradox of the autonomy and interdependence of individuals and age groups as they move through life. This suggests that in an interdependent and aging society, all generations have a common stake in family efforts and public policies or intergenerational transfers that respond to the needs of people of all ages.[2]Cf. Eric Kingson, John Cornman, Barbara Hirschorn. “Ties That Bind.” Aging. Concepts and Controversies. Ed. Harry R. Moody. London: Pine Forge, 1994, p. 216. When talking about family structure and cultural change, the question of life course, personal development and aging are of central concern. The aging individual and the conflicts, passions, and joys, exemplify more than any other stage in life the interplay between the private and the public, the individual and the communal, and stress the importance of relationships and connections. Sally Gadow – looking at aging from a gerontological perspective and emphasizing the cultural and humanistic aspects of aging – comments:
Historical, legal, and economic interpretations mark aging as an objective phenomenon, open to general, cultural understanding. But aging is only in part a public phenomenon. It is a heart subjective. It has, like all experience, an objective overlay of social meaning, including scientific theory, economic policy, and political/religious ideology. Beyond these, however – in keeping with them, in spite of them, or indifferent to them – the central meaning of aging is individual, subjective. (Gadow 131)
By identifying aging as “a heart subjective,” Gadow centers the individual around social objectives and defines the meaning of aging as the interplay between self and other. In a different context, Thomas R. Cole speaks of the fluidity of identity and positions the definition of this self within the political frame of race, class, and gender:
Identity, loosely defined as a sense of who one is, is not a unitary thing that one simply finds and wears – like overalls, a dashiki, or a pin-striped suit. Identity is rather an unstable, relational process, a story always in flux, negotiated in difference and relationship. Identities […] are historically conferred, subject to redefinition, resistance and change. They are ambiguous, produced through multiple identifications, some of which are salient in certain contexts and hidden in others. These insights are crucial to the future of a democratic culture and to the creation of new cognitive maps of identity which will allow individuals to form selves that are not mutilated by cultural domination of the powerful or by exclusive claims of any group. (Cole 200)
4This definition of identity is in accordance with the position of contemporary criticism and theory, which has questioned the traditional belief that human identity can be present to the conscious mind as an accessible piece of self-knowledge. The subject is seen as perpetually in flux, pursuing an illusion of wholeness and selfhood that is ultimately unattainable, however necessary it may be to human functioning.[3]Cf. Jacques Lacan. Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977. In these terms, Alzheimer’s disease patients can be seen as extreme paradigms of this postmodern condition, where memories and the past only exist in a unstructured, fluid condition. Like the decentered subject that is in Lacan’s term of the mirror stage defined as constituted in and by its language, Alzheimer’s disease patients use language without any referential meaning in order to establish relationships and connect to others. The acceptance of these linguistic acts as the only form to establish connection, demands an acceptance of identity that is not only in flux, but defines itself in the interaction with others as the self-in-relation. Alix Kates Shulman describes an incident she encountered when she came to visit her mother afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease in a retirement home:
I was surprised to find Mom perched on her bed listening attentively to an attractive silver-maned man seated in a wheelchair, volubly holding forth. […] The visitor, undeterred, continued his animated talk. After a few minutes, I realized that his words made no sense. The language was English, with its familiar grammar, vocabulary, and inflections, but the sentences lacked all discernible meaning. Still, Mom listened with seemingly rapt attention, nodding periodically and using all her social skills to make the stranger feel at home. (11)
5In her essay “A Relational Perspective for Understanding Women’s Development,” the psychologist Judith V. Jordan asserts the limited applicability of traditional Western psychological theories of development to the psychology of women. Instead of seeing the “self” as the primary reality separated out from its context as a bounded and contained entity that has both object and subject qualities, she suggests the alternative conceptualization of self as a “relational self” or as a “being in relation.” (Jordan 9) The societal paradigm of the sanctity and freedom of the individual overshadows – so Jordan – the compelling reality of the communal and deeply interdependent nature of human beings and ignores the realities and needs of women. Feminist psychologists have voiced their dissatisfaction with this model and offer new models of female development of self that take into account the power of the ethic of caretaking and relationship in women’s lives. Thus, Nancy Chodorow re-examines object relations theory to find traditional theory failing to acknowledge the importance of the early and longer lasting bond between the girl and her mother.[4]Cf. Nancy Chodorow. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978. Other theorists, such as Jean Baker Miller and Carol Gilligan, have also noted the failure of previous theories of “human development” to appreciate the relational nature of women’s sense of themselves, and offer explicitly or implicitly a more contextual, relational paradigm for the study of all self experience. As Carol Gilligan notes, women “define themselves in the context of human relationship.” (Gilligan 17)
In Jordan’s words:
New relational theory of self, perhaps like the “new physics” of quantum theory and uncertainty, emphasizes the contextual, approximate, responsive and process factors in experience. In short, it emphasizes relationship and connection. Rather than a primary perspective based on the formed and contained self, this model stresses the importance of the intersubjective, relationally emergent nature of human experience. (15)