Growing Up Observed

Tales From Analysts' Children

Herbert S Strean

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317773894
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This fascinating book features the writings from therapists'children--ranging in age from seven to over eighty--as they explore how they feel about their parents and themselves. Observe the emotional health of analysts'children, whether they are more mature than children whose parents are in other professions, what their unique difficulties and strengths are, and how they relate to the people around them.

Part I

Life with Father: Franz Alexander, MD

Francesca Alexander, PhD

Lucy Freeman, associate editor of this journal, and I had frequently discussed the possibility of my working on an autobiographical work in which my life with my father would be featured. This project always stayed in the somewhat nebulous state of, “Gee, that’s a great idea and I’ll get to it sometime in the future.” But on January 22, 1986 Lucy wrote me a note once more discussing this project. I looked at the date, and decided now was the time. It’s not that it is really a more convenient time, but January 22 was my father’s birthday.

Looking back on the period of growing up, and adulthood I realize that my views concerning both my parents have obviously undergone several radical changes. Moving from resentment to admiration, and finally to compassion has taken me a long time. But, above all, it is still difficult for me to realize there was something different or special in growing up as the daughter of one of the pioneers of psychoanalysis. It’s difficult to recognize this was a unique situation because when you are growing up in a given family there is little to measure it against and see how it compares with the way other people grow up.

What was he Like?

First of all my father, like all fathers, had a definite personality, relationship with his wife, and children. Like anyone else when he was home, he was not playing the role of Franz Alexander, director of one of the first Institutes for Psychoanalysis in this country, but was a man with his own hopes, fears, and passions. He didn’t share these private aspects of himself with many, in fact, he was a private man. It was only during the last few years of his life, and the intervening years, that I have been able to know him. And in the past two years, some twenty years after his death, I’ve gotten to know him even better, or at least differently. This has been made possible because I’ve had the opportunity to obtain personal papers, letters, films, and tapes that my parents kept over the years—many dating back to times before I was born. The Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago established the Alexander archives, and I felt that these documents belonged there. I gathered them together, studied them, and sent them “home” to the Institute. For me this has become a period of learning, and growth. It has helped fulfill a gap in my own understanding, and also made it possible to provide a living legacy for others, not the least of whom is my son, Alexander Levine.

My father was a man who was hesitant about being close with others, and at the same time needed the sustained support of others around him. He was courageous and needful; he was forward looking and clung tenaciously to tradition. These contradictions marked many people who had frequent interactions with him.

As I look back, I realize that my father had a hard time dealing with his children. He really wasn’t comfortable with us. Often his behavior was stiff, or abstracted. At the time, I felt he didn’t really care about me and my sister. I remember when I was in first grade he came up to me and asked, “What did you learn in school today?” I was delighted to have his interest and attention. I poured out the activities and adventures of the day. He made some noncommittal comment and went on with his work at his desk. Later that evening after dinner, he once more looked at me when I was walking through the living room, and asked, “What did you do in school today?” I was angry, and hurt. He hadn’t remembered. I responded by saying, “You don’t care.”

The episode was repeated many times throughout my school years. As time went by my responses became more angry, but the feeling of being depreciated also continued. My mother would often point out the obvious by saying, “It doesn’t matter what you tell him, he won’t remember anyway.” Her bitterness probably stemmed from the same root, she too wanted more attention than she received. My father had a love affair with work. As I look back, it seems that he must have been molded by a Puritan culture which demanded that he produce. Rare was the day even on vacations or weekends that he did not spend several hours at home at his desk writing or making notes on something. None of this is supposed to mean that he didn’t play with us. I remember many Sundays in the winter when my father would take me ice-skating at the Lincoln Park lagoons. It was during those days I developed a habit I still have of avidly reading the weather forecasts in the paper. I didn’t look forward to the Spring thaw. The summers were O.K. too when we were in our summer home in La Jolla, California; in La Jolla he would play tennis with me.

How Do You Live with Psychoanalysis?

As a child, I didn’t know what psychoanalysis was, nor the prominent position my father held in what was at that time a slightly deviant occupation. I do remember that if I told my school friends that my father was a psychoanalyst they would often express puzzlement. “What’s that?” It was hard to explain, and when I did I often felt that being a doctor who cured crazy people didn’t really gain their admiration. After a few years of this, I learned to answer the question, “What does your father do?” with the simple response, “He’s a doctor.” Somehow this had more credibility and status than being a psychoanalyst.

At home my father would also talk about the difficulty of convincing the established medical men to recognize the value of psychoanalysis. Often at dinner he would discuss with my mother the fact that many of Chicago’s medical community seemed to feel that if you couldn’t find an organic cause for some aberrant behavior then you didn’t have a legitimate illness. How pleased he was when some internists, allergists, and even surgeons recognized the validity of psychodynamic explanations of human behavior. I often thought that one of the reasons he got involved in psychosomatic medicine was to create a path of common interest with those who practiced traditional medicine, as well as an intellectual concern with the field. I remember asking him why only physicians should be trained as psychoanalysts. His explanation was simple. When we came to this country and helped bring psychoanalysis here, he believed psychoanalysis still didn’t have much credibility, but physicians did. He said, “If doctors with their status practice this specialty, then it will more quickly receive acceptance by Americans.” The truth of his contention that the medical community did not accept this new area as legitimate can be seen in the year he spent as professor of psychoanalysis at the University of Chicago which ended in near disaster. He was not understood by the medical community; the medical school faculty shunned his lectures, although the social and behavioral sciences supported him.

As I look back on it now, there were a few special problems in being the daughter of a psychoanalyst. First of all, just like the child of a minister, my sister and I were often regarded as being different, and of being expected to be “normal.” How I learned to hate the word “normal.” The questions I asked myself, reflections of the questions that had been asked of me by my parents and others, focused my thoughts on examining my actions, thoughts and feelings for their normalcy. Later, virtual strangers would come up to me and ask, “Does your father psychoanalyze you?” I always felt embarrassed by these questions; they reflected the ignorance of the person doing the questioning, and alluded to the perennial question about being normal.

When I was approaching my fifth birthday, my father asked one morning if I had dreamt the night before. I said, “Yes.” He responded, “What did you dream about?” I told him with enthusiasm that I had dreamt about getting a toy car for my birthday—the kind you can sit in and pedal to make it go. When asked what I wanted for my birthday, I told both my parents I wanted a large teddy bear that I had seen in a department store. When my birthday came around, I got the toy car. It was pretty, a taxi-cab type, complete with passenger seat, and trunk loaded with tools. But, it was not what I wanted. My father misinterpreted my dream. Years later when I was in analysis, I discovered that cars have always been a frequent symbol in my dreams, but they rarely, if ever, have any relationship to means of transportation. At any rate, I quickly learned to keep my dreams to myself. Other events in life with which most people cope without undue stress, became major in my family. For example, when I had my first menstrual period I had known what to expect since my mother had explained sexual maturation to me, and I felt fine about “growing up.” However, that night when my father came home, I overheard my mother tell him that I had “become a woman.” His immediate response was, “Do you think she’ll need to be analyzed?” Once again, I was forced to examine my reactions to my maturity and see if they were “normal.”

Later in my adolescence when I desperately felt the need to get some psychotherapy, it wasn’t so easy. Then I had to convince my father not of my normalcy, but of my desperation. At the end of high school, I went into a depression. I could not find direction or meaning in my life. I explained to my parents that I was miserable; they didn’t want to believe me until I threatened suicide. That got attention, and help. The problem then became who should analyze Alexander’s daughter. It had to be a colleague who liked and respected him, but who also would not be intimidated by him. The search ended when a member of the Institute, but not one of the established faculty, was chosen. The choice was good, and in a few years I graduated to my second analyst, a training analyst but again not one of the Institute’s faculty. It was only years later that I realized this was not only a painful period for me, but it must have also been difficult for my father. After all one of his children needed professional help; somewhere something in my formative years had gone wrong or had been neglected.

Sometimes I think psychoanalytic theory jeopardized my growing up. As most children, I wanted to be close to my parents. However, my father always kept me at arms length. The shades of Oedipus were so strong that when I came home on a vacation after graduating college my father shook hands with me, but avoided putting his arms around me. I think I had worked through my feelings, but had he ever addressed his own?

Family Relationships

As in every family, each person played a particular role vis à vis the other members. My father was central in the family in as much as his schedule and his needs were always considered first, and family life revolved around that schedule. He was not central in that he was so frequently absent, or involved in his work that a great deal of actual living was done without his presence. My mother was the dominant figure in the house because she organized everything, and was present. She played a peculiar role in relation to my father in that she was his constant support, and confidant, yet she also felt she was the one to make sure that he did not develop an overwhelming sense of self-importance. Mother liked to tell him and us the truth, especially if the truth could be somewhat negative or critical. I feel that mother also believed the primary responsibility for raising both my sister and myself was hers. She was the one who showed concern about our well-being.

My sister, who looks a lot like my mother, was my father’s daughter. By that I mean she was not expected to be a career woman, or to make a name for herself. She was decorative, and raised to play the traditional role of woman. I, the younger, did not have such a straightforward definition of my destiny. When I was born both my parents were hoping to have a son. Inadequate though I was to play that role, that was the one I was cast into. I remember both my parents would say to me, “You must have a career, that is something no one can take away from you and you need not depend on anyone else then.” I guess I never really thought of not having a career; the big problem was to choose what I should do. From the time I entered high school, my father repeatedly asked me to go into medicine, and then assured me I could become the next director of the Institute. As I gained knowledge about the larger world, I questioned whether or not the Institute should or would tolerate a family dynastic rule. He brushed these considerations aside. However, I did not want to become another psychoanalyst; I found that I needed an identity larger than, and more personal than, being Dr. Alexander’s daughter. When I was a little girl, Anna Freud was often held up to me by my mother as representing the dangers of not developing one’s own identity: “If you don’t work on being somebody yourself, you can be like Anna Freud, who is important only because she stands in the shadow of her father.’’ Although I believe my mother’s assessment of Anna Freud is wrong, it still explains my effort at developing my own direction in life. When I met people during my years in college and later, I was often asked “Aren’t you Alexander’s daughter?” When I answered yes, I frequently wanted to add, “but I’m somebody too.” Perhaps to escape this identification, I first majored in English at college. What could be a farther cry from psychoanalysis? Later, however, I decided that I needed something more alive than dusty tomes, and earned my doctorate in sociology. Interestingly enough, I don’t think I was consciously aware that much of my father’s interest was in sociology, which can be seen in at least two of his books—Our Age of Unreason and The Western Mind in Transition.

Who Were They?

Who were my parents? My father was the first son of a Hungarian professor of philosophy. Evidently his gender played an extremely important role in his family because both of his parents had looked forward to producing a son after having had three daughters. His father was prominent in the intellectual circles of Budapest, and urged his son to follow a somewhat similar career. Despite this urging, my father elected to study medicine, an occupation not defined as an intellectually acceptable career in pre-World War I Europe. He graduated from medical school just in time to become a physician in the Austro-Hungarian army. The first two years of the war, he was medical officer on a hospital train traveling from Vienna to Budapest. They were years of adventure for him; he always spoke with fondness of this period. It was his first time away from home, and he had a position of respect and authority. The second two years of the war were not so easy. He was assigned to be a medical officer on the Italian front. It was during this period that he met my mother. She was a novitiate in a convent in the Alps of northern Italy. The convent had been evacuated because the Austro-Hungarian troops were invading, but mother was left behind, sick with typhoid fever and malaria. When my father chose the convent’s buildings to be the field hospital, she was there. He administered medical care; she survived and eventually married him.

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Table Of Contents
• Growing Up Observed
• Growing Up Observed
• Life with Father
• About King Laius and Oedipus: Reminiscences from a Childhood Under the Spell of Freud
• A Letter from Dr. Alfred Adler's Granddaughter
• I Look at Life from Both Sides Now
• Confessions of a Freudian's Offspring
• La Vie avec Maman (Life with “Maman”)
• Reflections on Being the Son of a Psychoanalyst
• What It's Like Having a Shrink for a Mother
• My Mother Answers Questions
• Both My Parents Are Analysts
• Breast-Fed on Psychoanalysis
• Feel Scared and Do It Anyway!
• Mom and Dad Are Psychoanalysts
• Profound Distrust
• A Psychotherapist's Discussion with Her Daughter
• Son of Analyst Leads “Fairly Normal Life”
• The Analyst as Parent
• The Children of Psychoanalysts
• Psychotherapy with Children of Psychotherapists