Memories of a Chaotic World: Growing Up as the Daughter of Annie Reich and Wilhelm Reich. By Lore Reich Rubin. New York:  IPBooks, 2021,  297 pp., $25.99 paperback.

In her memoir Memories of a Chaotic World: Growing Up as the Daughter of Annie Reich and Wilhelm Reich, Lore Reich Rubin, a psychoanalyst who trained at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, essentially authored her own case study. Born in 1928 to Wilhelm and Annie Reich, Rubin takes us on her journey from her earliest childhood to her father's death in prison in 1957. The richness and poverty, advantages and strains of her life as a child of well-known psychoanalysts inspire many of her engaging stories.

Rubin started to write, “just as a creative expression of some vivid early memories” (p. xv). With encouragement from colleagues, and from Wolfram Ratz of the Wilhelm Reich Institute in Vienna, Rubin, at 93, decided to write and publish her story. Perhaps one of Rubin's goals was to resurrect her father's reputation and place in psychoanalytic history. Her memoir offers more than that, however; it gives a child's perspective on this history—a close-in view of growing up with a prominent, difficult father, a disinvested mother, and ultimately a ruptured family, during the lead-up to World War II. Throughout the book, the reader benefits from glimpses of Rubin's work in therapy as a child and from her adult analysis as she looks back on her childish formulations.

This memoir's strengths extend beyond a child's developmental perspective. There are vivid depictions of daily life in Europe, the

psychoanalytic world, and the family's subsequent emigration to New York City in 1938, when Rubin was just 10 years old.

The memoir opens in 2000, when Rubin visits her birthplace, Vienna, and recalls her earliest years. Poignantly, she describes a double set of memories, her own recollections in contrast to the home movies that her father showed repeatedly:

In my memory, Vienna is gray, even our food is gray. In the movies, we smile, it is sunny, we eat cherri