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All sorts of questions arise in my mind as I begin writing the review of this elegant and engaging memoir by the Boston-based psychoanalyst Joan Wheelis. The cacophony of inquiry puts a lid on the emotions that have become liquid inside me. I feel the tenderness of an older brother, the vaguely remorseful glee of a voyeur (I know the author and her analyst parents), the admiration of a demanding reader, and the envy of a proud writer. More powerfully, I experience the empathic resonance of a fellow human being with the fact that we—all of us—lead lives of pleasure and pain, certainty and doubt, rupture and continuity, reality and imagination. The questions that crowd my mind may be intended to divert attention from this sentimental chaos, but that does not diminish their significance.
Prominent among these questions are the following: Should I be “scientific” in my approach to the book? Should my review be replete with page numbers of cited passages, references to pertinent psychoanalytic literature, and “translations” of the author's observations into psychoanalytic jargon? Or, like someone seeing the Taj Mahal for the first time, should I allow rapture to take over, to become mesmerized and haunted by the tales, true and apocryphal, about the monument and its maker? Another line of inquiry presses me to ask if a modicum of self-disclosure (regarding my parents, my childhood, my personal life) will add to or detract from my giving the reader of this review a full sense of Wheelis's highly personal account? What should I do with this literary countertransference? And, finally, there is the big question: How do I avoid the risk of “wild analysis” here? Being a psychoanalyst faced with emotionally charged recollections of people's relationships with their parents certainly tempts one to poke at the impish conceit of memory, unmask what lurks