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It’s funny how we can remember events from 60 years ago as if they were yesterday. I was in college when I saw Hiroshima Mon Amour, at the time a path-breaking film of the French New Wave. A French actress and a Japanese architect meet in Hiroshima after the war. They have a brief love affair. They each explore the pain of their pasts, personal and political. The parallel in the film between the woman’s need to remember her past personal traumas, and all of our need to remember the horrors of Hiroshima, was overwhelming.
For some reason—I got it. Remembering the past is crucial. If we allow ourselves to forget, we cannot be fully alive. And there is no difference between the personal and the political. They are absolutely the same. It hit me like a bolt of lightning. I was 17 when I saw the film. I was just beginning to have a political consciousness. I had not yet had sex. I had no idea that five years later I would decide to become a psychiatrist, then a spiritual psychoanalyst.
And what strikes me now, as I write this, that is so moving to me, is that my understanding of this today, after 50 years of practice, is absolutely identical to what it was back then, as a 17 year old. I wouldn’t change a thing. With 60 more years of turbulent living in front of me—I got the whole thing. We must always remember.