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NADIA GHENT PAINTED A STUNNINGLY VIVID PORTRAIT OF HER FATHER Emmanuel when, at his funeral service last April, she told the story of their day together on Flat Mountain. The story captured a moment in Nadia's life with her father that distilled into a single enduring image much of what those of us who knew Mannie recognized as essential to his nature.
It is a story of what began as an ordinary summer outing, likely one of countless similar excursions that blend together in memory, comprising the endless summers of childhood. But along the way, this particular journey veered off the familiar route toward a different destination, bypassing the standard landmarks. The experience retains, even so many decades later, a dreamlike sense of wonder, mystery, and poignancy generated, I suspect, in that realm of experience that is a complex blend of objective reality and private, subjective experience. It is that personal dimension that Winnicott, one of Emmanuel's most significant psychoanalytic forebears, discovered and constructed, referring to it as “transitional experience.” It was a day in which a certain sort of illusion, a loving and playful sleight of hand made possible by Mannie's gentle, creative, unobtrusive responsiveness to Nadia's need, became the point of departure for an experience that, paradoxically perhaps, contained lasting truths that would sponsor solace and wisdom to his daughter and the rest of us so many years later.
If there were indeed a paradox to be found in the riddle of how the illusion of Flat Mountain conjured such enchantment, bringing the little girl on the cusp of a fever to surrender so perfectly to the delights of the late-day sun and the loving care of her parents, that paradox