As children, all we know of the world outside ourselves is what we see and hear; all we know of ourselves is what we feel and want. As far as understanding either the world or ourselves, it is all a big mystery, especially trying to make sense of our parents and some of the other important adults in our lives. Much of what these grown-ups do is hidden from us--- in their pasts and while we are asleep or they are at work; sometimes deliberately so, signaled by a coded look between them or betrayed by a lowering of the voice so the child cannot hear what is being said; at other times it is simply and finally declared to be forbidden or off limits--- “not for children,” “none of your business,” “you’ll understand when you’re older.”
And, indeed, as the child grows older, some of these puzzles are solved, the pieces fitted together with what one learns over time about these adults and about oneself. Others issues remain troubling mysteries, aching to be solved, while still others appear to be forgotten, but more likely are repressed and festering.
When we are young adults and begin to have children of our own, we are likely to face in our own lives many of those very issues that were dark mysteries to us as children: expectations and disappointments in marriage, financial strains, sexual feelings, conflicts at work, careers, child-rearing, sharing (or not sharing) household chores, strained relationships with in-laws and with one’s own parents and siblings, alcohol and drug abuse, and so much more, including for many of us, the ways in which repressed childhood memories and experiences complicate how we act and react in these various challenging situations.
I was two and half years old when my father returned from the war in December 1945; my sister was 5 months old and was seeing him for the first time. This large bear of a man was a strikingly different creature than our soft and cuddly mother. And, unlike her, he came and went----often leaving just as I was waking up in the morning and returning as I was preparing for bed.
So, my early experience of my father consisted, for the most part, in a hearty bear hug in the morning and, if I was lucky, a story read to me as I dropped off to sleep and into the world of dreams. There were weekends, of course, but even those were truncated by my father seeing patients on Saturday mornings. Still, most of my fondest childhood memories of my father came during those weekends and, of course, in the month of August when literally all New York psychoanalysts in those years took their month long vacations.
Now, many years later and in possession of my father’s personal papers and professional records, I have been able to piece together some of the puzzle, although----and this is a large caveat----I am hardly an objective reporter in this matter. So, dear reader, please take this all with considerably more than “a grain of salt;” how much of this is fact and how much surmise or even fiction, even I cannot tell. However, aided by these papers, records, and photos, I will do my best, given the limitations of a 77-year old brain, to describe the world I recall from the first 6 or so years of my life, before school became the primary influence in my life.
Upon my father’s return from the war, he was immediately able to leverage his wartime experiences as a neuro-psychiatrist and his family connections to enter the heady world of New York City-based psychoanalysis, just then enjoying its heyday. This was a world that drew much of its intellectual fervor from a group of European exiles, which included: social psychologist Erich Fromm, philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich, philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin, novelist Erich Maria Remarque, critical philosopher Theodor Adorno and many others, including, Karen Horney, who would turn out to be one of the most important people in my father’s life, and so for us, his family, as well.
Through my father’s aunt, Dr. Sarah Kelman and his uncle Harry (Dr. Harold Kelman), my young, but war-toughened father was welcomed into the coterie of psychoanalytic protogées of Karen Horney, a charismatic and controversial psychoanalyst and teacher who dared to criticize Freud’s work and is viewed by many as being the founder of feminist psychoanalysis and one of the most important proto-feminists thinkers of the 20th century.
My father arrived at a crucial time in Horney’s career (1946) and ended up playing an important role in the final years of that career, cut short by her untimely death in 1952. (See: post on Karen Horney to come.)
Of course, I knew nothing of all of this until much later in my life.
Here’s what I did know: shortly after my father was discharged from the army (January 1946), my parents hired a live-in maid, a severe old German woman I was told to call Tante (Aunt) Clara, although she was no relation; shortly before my brother was born in January 1948, my father moved his office out of our apartment to an office suite he rented in the apartment building next door to us; that spring (1948) my parents bought a brand new Buick in which we drove to the Short Beach (Connecticut) beach house they’d also bought; in September 1949, I entered first grade at New Lincoln, a progressive New York City private school.
Did I realize that all of this was due to my father’s growing reputation as a child psychoanalyst and the concomitant growth of his practice? Or that these acquisitions were a sign of my family’s increasing wealth and status? Of course not. My real awareness of how privileged my upbringing was came much later in my life, really not until my involvement, as a college student, in the Civil Rights movement of the early 1960s.
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