Walking Heads: On the Secret Fantasy of Being an Exception. By Antonie Ladan. Translated from the Dutch by Marjolijn de Jager. New York:  Other Press, 2005.  146 pp.

This is a wonderful little book. It is clear, cogent, and full of clinical wisdom. It focuses upon a major defensive stratagem employed by certain remarkable people to contend with an extremely difficult childhood from which they cannot escape. They suppress awareness of their emotional needs and desires, which are not being fulfilled, and they resort to a powerful fantasy that they are not helpless children, but already are the highly capable and competent adults they expect to be in the future but need to be in the present. They give up their ability to be children, split themselves off from their shameful, uncontrollable bodily urges and impulses, and become seemingly proficient pseudo-adults. At times, they also assume the role of caretaker of their siblings and even of their floundering parents.

These individuals grow up into outwardly content, autonomous, independent adults who, to a greater or lesser extent, maintain a self-protective aloofness from close, intense relationships with others. The loneliness that ensues is compensated for by a secret fantasy of being an exceptionally important, powerful, deeply loved and admired, even heroic personage. They are each, to a significant extent, all head and no body—hence the title of the book —and each is an adult without ever having been a child, impressively competent and efficient. They have no conscious awareness that their efficiency and independence serve an important defensive function.

Ladan provides interesting clinical material to illustrate the thesis that these people live out a life scenario that is anchored in implicit rather than explicit memory. Its self-protective nature has to be deciphered in the course of treatment from its expression in action, long before it emerges as isolated bits of explicit memory and revelatory, verbal glimpses of carefully guarded secrets.

For example, he describes his work with a woman who spent three years, beginning when she was two, in a Japanese internment