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“You are not allowed to give up”
When I began my psychoanalytic training, Merle Molofsky was one of my first teachers. While never formally a supervisor, she became a mentor and, in time, a friend. I experienced her as an encouraging and patient steward of my curiosity and early explorations into psychoanalysis, nurturing my development as a psychoanalytic thinker and practitioner. We eventually began to exchange ideas and perspectives on countless topics and provide mutual support in our respective writing projects.
She has figured importantly in my psychoanalytic journey. There's a rightness that all these years later I would again engage with her thoughts and words on memory and culture. But I want to take Merle's article as a point of departure, a meditation sympathetically resonant with, not a discussion of.
I consider resonance a form of attachment. Whether taken as a feature of physics and acoustics or as a metaphoric descriptor for emotional connectedness, it is a phenomenon that involves a reflection or synchronous vibration of frequencies—a system of reverberation and amplitude. I think that we can construe it in a psychoanalytic frame as a way of describing a relationship, even as a type of love. And which, bearing the hallmarks of separation and individuation, is a mature love, for, while both objects are in relationship to each other, they are neither identical nor fused. They do not occupy precisely the same time or space although one cannot exist without the other.
By my reading, her piece travels, while also inviting us along too, into pastness. Drawing from her own life, experiences, and family history,
she explores how culture lives through memory across generations. Hers is a deeply personal peripatetic of Proustian remembrances—of relationships, foods, lullabies, and cultural touchstones. To her, these shared experiences, passed between generations and across communities, form the living fabric of culture. She shows how cultural memo