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Kitty La Perriere has spent much of her life being an outsider even as she has pursued some of the most intimate work a person can do, practicing as a family therapist.
In her memoir, Mirrored Reflections, La Perriere shows readers the path she took from experiencing the geopolitical and emotional trauma of the Holocaust and World War II to becoming a psychologist, family therapist, and eventually president of the American Family Therapy Academy. Her story is one of trying to work through and transcend but, inevitably, having to live throughout her life with the trauma and loss of her childhood and the accompanying feeling, if not the reality, of being an outsider.
The book will appeal to anyone interested in how a turbulent world and a family's dynamics affect the psyche of a child and the adult she becomes. It will be especially fascinating for readers interested in the impact of World War II and the Holocaust on a Jewish child; in the interest of full disclosure, that was what motivated me to read it and write this review. For psychoanalysts, it is fascinating on both those levels, although it might be disappointing for those hoping for the story focused on how La Perriere evolved as a clinician. This is more of a personal rather than a professional memoir.
La Perriere was born in 1927 in Moravia in what was then Czechoslovakia and what is now part of the Czech Republic. In the first part of her book, La Perriere describes growing up in Moravia, clearly a beloved home. Her recall of details from childhood is impressive and added to the sense of loss I felt on her behalf when, in 1938, her family went to Switzerland during the Nazi invasion of Europe.
La Perriere is very open as she considers and describes her relationships with her parents. Her mother was distant and capable of dismissing her daughter's emotional pain, yet was also focused on how to save her family from the Nazis. La Perriere's anger toward her