Broken Fathers/Broken Sons: A Psychoanalyst Remembers
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Reprinted with permission: The Psychoanalytic Review. Vol. 96, #5 October 2009
(Book Review Essay) pp. 860-868.
Broken Fathers/Broken Sons: A Psychoanalyst Remembers,
By Gerald J. Gargiulo. New York: Rodopi, 2008, 150 pp.
The subtitle is “A Psychoanalyst Remembers.” After reading this
potent, poignant and moving, beautifully written memoir, we appreciate
what the meaning is of the psychoanalytic idea of placing emphasis on
remembering. This means trying to recapture the truth of the past
experiences in their actual context, rather than act out distorted portions to
preserve our own self-justifying pictures of the past in order to vindicate our
own sense of injury. What is it we must remember? The title is Broken
Fathers, Broken Sons, a picture of the familial trauma of conflict over
generations. What’s presented is the pain of a particular consciousness
struggling to come into being, so that we see an individualized version of the
common experience of the effort to achieve the dignity of autonomous
selfhood that we all can recognize.
Is there a particular virtue about the way a psychoanalyst remembers?
As an individual he suffers; as a practitioner he knows the way memory is a
“child of desire,” inevitably selective in any recall. The evocation and
identification of the subjective element in Gargiulo’s narrative of the past is
a marvelous feature of this memoir. The details of emotional abandonment
and rejection are not spared, but questions regarding this accuracy of recall
are constantly evoked, so that the exclusive view of one’s victimization
slowly gives way to the resurrection of a fuller context. One’s parents may
not have been available as one would have liked, but in other ways they
were supportive. The broken relations experienced with them expressed
their failings as well as one’s own turning away from them. So we need to
tell our stories to others, so that we too might hear them for the first time,
and be able to restore something of the objective reality—the reality that the
others lived that is not excused but more completely understood in its impact
on us.
One virtue of a psychoanalytic retelling of the situation is an open
and honest exploration of all the details, to see their forgotten links and
emerging coherence. We appreciate the psychoanalytic ethic of the
obligation we all have to be in a continuous struggle for self-knowledge. A
psychoanalyst recognizes what seemingly is a moral obligation to be
responsible to himself for resolving his own conflicts. The telling of a life
story is metaphorically similar to the progression of a psychoanalytic case
2
with the loosening of repression and the emergence of insight and selfknowledge.
We play a role in creating and fostering what happens to us, and
indeed one measure of wisdom is the ability to recognize the way we
construct our own reality.
Continuarea la http://internationalpsychoanalysis.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/GargiulosBookReview-Jenkins2.pdf
(Book Review Essay) pp. 860-868.
Broken Fathers/Broken Sons: A Psychoanalyst Remembers,
By Gerald J. Gargiulo. New York: Rodopi, 2008, 150 pp.
The subtitle is “A Psychoanalyst Remembers.” After reading this
potent, poignant and moving, beautifully written memoir, we appreciate
what the meaning is of the psychoanalytic idea of placing emphasis on
remembering. This means trying to recapture the truth of the past
experiences in their actual context, rather than act out distorted portions to
preserve our own self-justifying pictures of the past in order to vindicate our
own sense of injury. What is it we must remember? The title is Broken
Fathers, Broken Sons, a picture of the familial trauma of conflict over
generations. What’s presented is the pain of a particular consciousness
struggling to come into being, so that we see an individualized version of the
common experience of the effort to achieve the dignity of autonomous
selfhood that we all can recognize.
Is there a particular virtue about the way a psychoanalyst remembers?
As an individual he suffers; as a practitioner he knows the way memory is a
“child of desire,” inevitably selective in any recall. The evocation and
identification of the subjective element in Gargiulo’s narrative of the past is
a marvelous feature of this memoir. The details of emotional abandonment
and rejection are not spared, but questions regarding this accuracy of recall
are constantly evoked, so that the exclusive view of one’s victimization
slowly gives way to the resurrection of a fuller context. One’s parents may
not have been available as one would have liked, but in other ways they
were supportive. The broken relations experienced with them expressed
their failings as well as one’s own turning away from them. So we need to
tell our stories to others, so that we too might hear them for the first time,
and be able to restore something of the objective reality—the reality that the
others lived that is not excused but more completely understood in its impact
on us.
One virtue of a psychoanalytic retelling of the situation is an open
and honest exploration of all the details, to see their forgotten links and
emerging coherence. We appreciate the psychoanalytic ethic of the
obligation we all have to be in a continuous struggle for self-knowledge. A
psychoanalyst recognizes what seemingly is a moral obligation to be
responsible to himself for resolving his own conflicts. The telling of a life
story is metaphorically similar to the progression of a psychoanalytic case
2
with the loosening of repression and the emergence of insight and selfknowledge.
We play a role in creating and fostering what happens to us, and
indeed one measure of wisdom is the ability to recognize the way we
construct our own reality.
Continuarea la http://internationalpsychoanalysis.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/GargiulosBookReview-Jenkins2.pdf
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