Introduction
Yet another memoir?
Well, not exactly. For all the biographical elements here, my intention has never been to record my own life. Rather, I have tried to convey the defining nature of our earliest relationships and the transformative, at times magical, workings of the process called psychoanalysis.
From childhood we are destined to be shaped by the primary objects in our lives, and in this regard, my relation to my father was no different from any other. But however much the themes might follow a universal developmental path, our own particulars are unique, some mix of constitution, history, and even the serendipitous. When ghosts from childhood haunt us or determine the patterns that constrict us as we go about the business of life, retracing our steps and filtering the primary colors from the mix can become essential toward freeing us to live most fully in the present.
What follows is about my journey to become my own person, a journey that has culminated in my becoming a psychoanalyst, an astonishing yet inevitable outgrowth of my efforts to grapple with the difficulties inherent in growing up as the daughter of a remarkable man, an esteemed jurist who set a standard that seemed impossible to reach. It is also about how and why tennis, almost the sole form of relaxation in the life of a man who was dedicated to his work, initially provided some rare common ground between us—and about how a game became symptom and symptomatic, the playing field on which I would enact some of the profound flicts of my life. The story begins and ends with tennis; in between is a great deal about the conflicts and dramas of the mind.
Born into my father’s universe of unyielding logic and reason, I first had to fall out of his kingdom and then, in the process of picking myself up, discover another language, one that governs how the past and present meet, collide or battle within us—the language of the unconscious, the language of psychoanalysis and my work.
In keeping with this language and characteristic unfolding of a psychoanalytic process, where one wanders back and forth between the present and the past, following the logic of associations and themes, the narrative does not follow a chronological time line. The unconscious is timeless, and if we can relax the bounds of reason and the linear, we can put together the disparate pieces of our personal puzzle in multiple ways and in so doing, find new meaning to familiar people and events.
No one, from Freud on down, has ever claimed that psycho- analysis can cure us of the human condition. Still, in an era of the quick fix, of spin, of massive denial, of mis-attribution, of suppression and repression, I do believe that psychoanalysis has the power to help us to recognize and resolve conflicts that all too often drive us to act in destructive ways. Beyond that, that it can enable us to discover better and more fulfilling compromises. I believe that it is only through our capacity to identify and come to terms with the dark unconscious forces within us that we can free ourselves from the grip of blind and rigid passions to live lives of compassion, creativity, and joy—in our relationships, in our work, and in our play. Hence, this psychoanalytic tale. It is dedicated with respect, love, and some lingering (if mild) ambivalence toward my father, the late Judge Edward Weinfeld (1901-1988).
