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 29, 2005
September 9, 2003 - Psychoanalysis, Culture, Buxbaum, Me and an Analyst-Cousin's Comment Writing and reading about Edith Buxbaum has been important to an understanding of myself. She was someone I could never be - well-trained and studied from childhood; organized in her thinking, living and work; sophisticated culturally and socially. "It seems, more than ever, in poetry as in life," writes the poet Rika Lesser, "I need/the warmth of lives fully lived" (p.23)* It is not that my life has not been "fully lived," but it has been lived differently than I might have lived it had I known how to live it differently, had I lived an Edith Buxbaum kind of life. But this is silly, isn't it? We are born who we are and helped or hindered along by those we are born to and, further, by those we meet on the way to adulthood and more: to oldhood. In addition to writing poetry, Lesser is a translator of poems from the Swedish and Finnish. She quotes the poet and literary critic, John Hollander: "Those who translate admit others' lives into their own, become, in that process, the others they cannot be" (p. 21). This is true in my on-the-page (and in-the-mind) relationship with Edith Buxbaum. She lived a life I admire and look up to. From an early age, Buxbaum knew what she wanted to do and be in this life. She rarely hesitated in making decisions about her education and her work. Early on, as a young teenager, she knew she wanted to study psychoanalysis and use it in her life, love and work. Psychoanalysis may have been all the rage in the Vienna of Buxbaum's youth - it was part of the culture - but she was of the educated children who grabbed hold of psychoanalysis and made it hers. That her mother was a classic hysteric (as she reported in a 1978 interview with Lawrence Schwartz) salt and peppered the pot. Psychoanalysis, including its intellectual and academic roots, was Edith Buxbaum's way of being in the world. *Rika Lesser, All We Need of Hell: Poems, 1995 July 15, 2005 post-script My way of being in the world may have contained introspection and reflection and watching out for others, out of a feeling of responsibility and, no doubt, fear, but the 1950s Baltimore, Maryland Jewish ghetto as I knew it contained not a lick of psychoanalytic thought or practice. While a psychoanalytic sensibility had always been a part of my intrinsic nature, psychoanalytic study did not come to me until I demanded it of myself, quite into middle age. |
In the first year of my analysis, a paternal cousin, ten years my senior, from the upper middle class - outside-the-ghetto - segment of our family came to visit me in Seattle. I hadn't seen him in years and still have no idea why he called. As a child, I feared and adored this man, and he was now a prominent East Coast analyst. He and his wife took me out to dinner (my husband was away at a conference). There, at Ray's Boathouse, with my own analyst seredipitously sitting in the booth behind us, this cousin, whom I still feared, told me he always thought of me "as a beautiful air head... I'm glad to know you're not," he said. I sat stunned; after all those years of growing into a real live adult, a mother, wife, writer and teacher, I could not address his comment, not even to myself. A few present-day thoughts: 1) If I had impressed him as such an air head, why didn't he help me become more of what he would have liked a younger cousin to be and become? This, instead of his prescription for me. 2) Funny he thought I was beautiful. That might have been nice to know at the time, since I thought of myself as ugly, as well as stupid. Turns out there wasn't much wrong with me; I was just Jewish and poor. 3) What kind of an analyst is he? Was my entrance into analysis the reason for his visit? (And how strange that my own analyst was sitting right behind us. 4) He was a major male figure in my life. One wonders how many other girls and women he wrote, and continues to write, intellectual and social prescriptions for. |
Psychoanalysis: The Magic and The Lie - Diary of a Five Day A Week Analysis copyright2005Esther Altshul Helfgott All Rights Reserved COPYRIGHT NOTICE: If you wish to cite material from the diaries, please include: the name of the author, Esther Altshul Helfgott, the name of this publication, Psychoanalysis: The Magic and The Lie - Diary of a Five Day A Week Analysis and the URL, www.psychoanalyticdiary.homestead.com . For a Bibliography, please include, as well, the month and year that you accessed the material. Thank you for respecting authors' rights. |
July 23, 2005 another post-script |
