Memories of the Son of a Psychiatrist

When I return to Pisa, I carry with me a suitcase full of memories. I remember when I used to come here as a child to visit my grandparents. I remember seeing the damage done to the buildings during the Second World War. I remember touring the apartment where my father was born. I remember visiting my grandfather in the hospital near the Leaning Tower a week before he died. I remember putting stones on the graves of my grandparents in the Jewish Cemetery just outside the wall of the city. But most of all I remember the Pisa my father spoke about, and how he breathed its music and sighed its history. Thus it is for me a tender joy to be here to speak with you, not as a professor of philosophy or of classical philology, but as the son of the man we are here to remember.

I think my father's contribution to the world lay in exploring the spiritual dimension to human suffering. Some, like the ancient poet Aeschylus, realized that in suffering there might come wisdom; some, like the Epicureans and also the Stoics, saw that an experience of physical pain might lead to a dissociation from that pain, a dissociation that enabled philosophical and intellectual growth. My father's contribution was the insight that mental illness might itself be an attempt to preserve one's humanity in a savage world and that mental illness itself might be ennobling and spiritually uplifting.

My father was a unity of his qualities: His strengths were inseparable from his weaknesses, his genius inseparable from his eccentricities. And if it were not for the presence of so much sorrow in his life, it is difficult to see how he would have enjoyed his triumphs. My father was reflective and introspective by nature, and little passed that did not stir him to reflect on its broader meaning in the scheme of things. Sometimes, of course, the reflection and the psychoanalyzing were irritating—especially for a teenager.

I can't help smiling as I recall an incident that occurred when I was a university student