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Psychoanalysis: The Magic and The Lie Diary of a Five Day A Week Analysis by  Esther Altshul Helfgott, Ph.D.

This page was last updated on: July 20, 2005

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The website was created on July 27, 2005

November 9, 2000 - The Cinderella Complex or The Thesis As Baby and Mother Takes the Rap This is the most ridiculous piece of writing.  Where was my head when I wrote this?   How far away from today, November 9, 2000, was January 11, 1994? Was I so stupid, so overwhelmed by the Cinderella Complex, all the while calling myself a feminist?  Here's what I wrote: The thesis represents Mr. Doctor Institute and me, the romantic, in-love real part of us.  The thesis is the baby we have made together and the growing up together - rather than away from each other - inside our psychoanalytic selves.  That's why when he held my thesis pages in his lap and rocked them on his knee, those simple acts represented his loving our baby and his loving me enough, so much so that he could make a baby with me and even stay with me during the labor.  But instead of allowing us/me to flow into the belief that he would stay with me once the baby was/is delivered, I ran away and into a shaygitz fantasy.      The thesis is ours, absolutely; but the journal is old stuff.  I've been keeping this diary forever.  This is where I've always needed to run to my mother (journal), tell her/it all these feelings I was having about my father and other males.  So Mr. Dr. was right yesterday when he said I was testing him to see if he would behave like my mother.  She would have thrown my diaries out.  She probably did. Nonsense. Mother would not have done a thing in the world to hurt me, knowingly or unknowingly.  Ok, maybe I am exaggerating now.  My relationship with my parents - what I needed from them and did not get -  is certainly key to my development.  But the process of psychoanalysis, as I experienced it, exaggerated my mother's supposed neglect of me.  She never neglected my physical needs and she did not have the emotional wherewithal herself to pay more than limited attention to my own emotional center. She didn't even pay attention to her own emotional center, as far as I can tell. Perhaps these six years away from psychoanalysis, at least its formal expression (because I do go see him now and again), have been significant in moving away from the self I used to manifest in my relationship with others. (Is this bull shit?) That is what psychoanalysis is supposed to do, after all.  Am I saying now, after all my expressed anger of psychoanalysis, that it was good for me?  But was it good for those around me?  How good was it for my mother, the woman I beat up  in the therapy room; and what went on there certainly influenced my behavior outside that room.     I do wish I had my Teenage Diaries.  Interesting:  I didn't miss them for years, didn't even think about them.  Until I developed a sense of women's history and the importance of saving historical documents. Actually, I don't remember where my teenage diaries went after I got married at age 19.  Maybe I  threw them out myself.  And what of all those Pledge Diaries from Alpha Lambda Phi sorority. Woudn't they be a kick to read, but that's another story for quite another day. copyright2005Esther Altshul Helfgott

I think maybe this was the month after the 1963 moratorium on Washington, Martin Luther King's I Have A Dream speech day. They were out marching while I was I don't-now-how-many-months-pregnant and home knitting baby clothes. I could feel my parents shame toward me, but I was proud of them, and still am.