This Close to Happy: An Exploration of Maternal Trauma, Emotional Neglect and Depression

Emotions, an essential human trait is pessimistically deployed for centuries either to mock or denigrate women in particular. In other words, being emotional is constructed as a sign of femininity and weakness. However in recent times, with the advent of neuroscience interventions, which highlights the interconnection between the significance of healthy emotional regulation and longitudinal well-being, the perception of comprehending emotions changed drastically. Emotion is no longer a gendered phenomenon and turns out to be the focal of different disciplines like affect studies and psychology. Within this broad context, the growing trend of cosmopolitanism and the impacts of war and immigration elicit critical attention. There are ample of studies reflecting on the difficulty of the brain in getting adapted to the host country culture from the first generation perspective. Whereas the second generation nuanced complexities and struggle in terms of sustenance and adaptation often goes unnoticed. Set in this context, this paper is an endeavor to study and analyze the American writer Daphne Merkin’s memoir This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression where the narrator becomes victim of her mother unprocessed war trauma and gets afflicted with depression since childhood phase. The study by drawing from the theoretical framework of neuroscience and attachment studies interpret the memoir to underscore how unprocessed maternal trauma could distort the development of sensitive bonding thereby architecting neurobiological changes in their children and make them vulnerable to severe psychological disorders in the adulthood.