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Friday, May 21, 2004 - Reading Edith Buxbaum 5:38 AM I loved reading for that particular group of prose writers, so honed is their work and thinking. This was a great time for me to hear the sound of my own words developing voice in the air, mixing them as I do with Buxbaum's thought. She didn't annoy me tonight. I enjoyed the Letter to Edith format and this audience of writers did as well. I overheard some women say they were "blown away."  That makes me happy. I always feel the Buxbaum work is boring to people (maybe to me?), but I love this letter-writing form, always have. In Letters to Edith I am able to combine autobiography with biography, which is what I wanted to do when I started thinking about the project 10 years ago.  Then I put myself aside and went the more traditional route, once again.  Now I think I can get back to my initial thinking on the project. I  want to know the reason people write biographies and want to uncover, from a psychoanalytic perspective, my reason. Most important, the form spurs me on and intertwines with other pieces of writing I'm working on. The Uncle Benny material, integral to my latency period, is part poem and will be a strong addition to my poetry manuscript. I DREAM OF UNCLE BENNY AND STRAWBERRIES I'm eight years old, and Uncle Benny  doesn't have to go back to the Rosewood State Training Center for Boys out in Reisterstown, Maryland anymore.  He never ever has to go back because he lives in our house now and guess what his room is filled with strawberry ice cream. The walls are covered with ice cream. The chairs are.  Uncle Benny's bed is made of  strawberry, and the carpet is strawberry plush. In my dream, Uncle Benny's sitting at his desk, which mother and I bought for him.  The desk is the color of strawberry.  Uncle Benny's sitting at the desk and he's writing.  He's copying letters out of my first grade reader, my Dick and Jane book.  All of a sudden, a strawberry walks into his room. She touches Uncle Benny's shoulder.  She touches his shoulder and it's no longer twisted into his sternum. Now, the strawberry touches Uncle Benny's spine and he sits straight up.   She touches his knees and he gets out of the chair, stands straight to the sky and throws his cane into the strawberry waste basket.  He bends down to pick up the cane and it turns into a strawberry ice cream soda.  Uncle Benny drinks the ice cream soda and then in a voice that is no longer unintelligible, he reads Dick and Jane to me, the whole story, about Sally and Spot and the little kitty Puff.  I awaken from my dream and run into the kitchen to find Mother wiping strawberry ice cream off of Uncle Benny's unshaven chin, which won't get shaved until Uncle Izzy comes home from the print shop. Then we'll get back in the car and drive out to Rosewood where we'll leave my Uncle Benny on the steps of his cottage.                             -Esther Altshul Helfgott from Esther Altshul Helfgott, Edith Buxbaum, Latency and Me: Between the Oedipus Complex and Adolescence:  The 'Quiet' Time' - Letter to Edith  (the Uncle Benny poem is supposed to be right justified to fit exactly underneath the title, but I can't get the margins right in this format). 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007copyrightEsther Altshul Helfgott eahelfgott2@comcast.net

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: January 24, 2007

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Uncle Beny and Aunt Fanny (she said Call me Tanta) sitting on the stoop of Aunt Ruth's and Uncle Izzy's row house. Aunt Ruth's in the background behind the screen door. Baltimore, 1950s. Were Billy and Judy born yet?

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Dear Edith, I guess you're wondering why I've chosen to write a biography about you "Why me," I hear you say.  "What did I do to unleash your wrath, your impertinence?  "Who do you think you are intruding on my life which I've spent quite simply all these past twenty-two years in my jar of ashes in Seattle's Washelli Cemetery?" But then I see you smiling, Edith ... .