Not Having Been Loved

I am in my 83rd year now, an African American therapist, a psychoanalyst (and retired professor of English) working on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for more than 30 years. My clientele reflects the diverse demographic of my area, as well as the diverse interests people have that might send them to me. Socioeconomic, cultural, racial, gender concerns are reflected in the choosing of a therapist, with the expectations of shared background and the comfort of being understood. This is particularly important for American Blacks. People might want a prominent practitioner, or someone recognized for dealing with what they imagine their problem is; clients might be prompted to explore the possibilities of basic human similarity among those of different or divergent identities, or an unstated or unconscious interest in disproving this idea; or fantasizing in any way about what benefit my identity might hold for them, as in “he's Black but he's good.”

I say this to emphasize how the lure of the interior world exercises pressure on what we do. Of greatest importance are the earliest emotional attachments and how they were experienced. They typically drive people to seek them out again, reflecting how they were emotionally used, rewarded, tolerated, loved, disregarded, affirmed, abused—these are the driving motives for so many of the choices people make that get explored in therapy.

Recently I was asked by a long-standing patient to come to a book reading at 82nd Street Barnes and Noble in Manhattan. You may have heard of I Am Nobody's Slave, by Lee Hawkins, who is a social commentator and prize-winning journalist. He has talked about the book in a multipart Podcast “What Happened in Alabama.”

The book deals with the intergenerational relations and transmission of trauma in a Black family, presenting the intimate and anguished relations of Black men, women and children from slavery times to the present. Lee did extensive research on his family lineage, consulting

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