And here was my first television and my first cartoon and my first superhero — a hero who like my father, was in America—and somehow it all came together for me in a lightning bolt of longing and imagination. My fathers’ absence made perfect sense. He couldnt come back right away because he was busy fighting crime in NYC...as Spider–Man. The diasporic imagination really is its own superpower...I believed I had seen my father on that TV, and if I paid close enough attention it would show him to me again...For the record: my father did eventually return and take us to the States...My father was the worst shock of all. He had no problem laying hands on us kids for the slightest infraction. Beatings like he was making up for lost time. Like he was mad that he had a family...Are you surprised, then, that I was drawn back to the television? Because I was lost, because I wanted help with my English, because my father was a nightmare. And because I was convinced, foolish little fantasist that I was, that somehow my family and I had ended up in the wrong America and that the country and the father I’d first glimpsed on TV in Santo Domingo, the country and father I’d been promised, was still out there somewhere. I just had to find them. Never did.
If they had access to these memories of themselves, they would inform their conscious ego that they were in a dire, life-threatening situation, information that is too catastrophic to accept. Over time, these memories of themselves in relationship to their rejecting parent coalesce and form internal representations. The process of dissociation of memories of the self and of the parent is called "splitting of the ego" or simply "splitting", because part of the childs original conscious ego (or self) is "split off" from the rest of their normal view of themselves and hidden in their unconscious. Similarly, the memories of that part of the angry, enraged and irritated parent are split off from the "normal" aspects of the parent and held in the unconscious as well. The memories of the angry parent are appropriately called the "Rejecting Object" in Fairbairns model. "Object" is an awkward term used in psychoanalytic theory to designate a person outside the self. So both the terrified memory of themselves and the abusive aspect of the parent (the object) are split off from the conscious self and they become "part selves" and "part objects", The terrified part of the self (called the "Antilibidinal Ego" in Fairbairns model) and the terrorizing part of the object are cut off from consciousness and are no longer associated with the conscious representation of either the self or the object. This affords the child a (false) sense of security that prevents them from feeling anxious about their fate from moment to moment.