How My Greatest Trauma Helped to Shape My Life (article)

A close psychoanalyst friend asked me what the greatest trauma was in my life. My instant response surprised me as I declared that it was when, as a four or five-year-old, I felt terrified and desperately in need of my mother. The images that came to mind were of intense combat and fears of the rats running on the metal ceilings in the apartment over the family’s store in a terrible neighborhood to raise children. The uncertainty of what I saw one evening was a terrifying nightmare or a visual image that continued after I opened my eyes. As a little person, I was inconsolable, screaming for my mom. She came, comforted me, and sought to create a safe image of a perfect world with a fence around it. A calming world of neat houses, stores, and a train station. Indeed, to my young self, this world was the perfect miniaturized railroad community that was visible in store windows or the movie billboard at the corner. I calmed down and ultimately was better able to tolerate the dangerous neighborhood in which I was being raised at that point and my internal demons that had shown themselves in my waking or frightening night dreams. Yet as a frightened and sometimes sickly little boy, I longed for maternal comfort and reassurance. A consequence of this early terror is a subsequent lifelong inability to have a visual memory, except in dreams. I am saddened by my inability to visualize my long dead parents, brother, sister, and people and events that have touched my life.

The other part of my trauma collage is while my older brother and sister were off at school and I was sick in bed trying not to bang on the pipe, which was my signal to my mother below to care and comfort me. I must have been ill because had I been healthy, even as a very small boy, I would’ve been downstairs underfoot in my parents’ work areas as my dad worked on his machines and my mother did various needlework, paperwork, and, when a customer arrived, sales in the front of the store where I was not allowed and in fact too shy to go if strangers were there. I would desperately try not to bang on the pipe because it was “a bad thing” to do unless I was just too sick. But how is a lonely four or five-year-old to know how sick he is? I do know that I would feel badly if when my mother rushed up the steps in her always hurried way, she found my head to be cool or only warm rather than hot with a fever. I believe that she tried not to be impatient with me, but how could she be otherwise? She was torn between my needs and the requirements of her never-ending work; her need to be in

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the store should a customer come because my father was nearly incapable of writing a receipt in English and was indeed very poor at customer relations unless he was called down to conclude a sale as the expert furrier. (I have followed her example and become a workaholic. Indeed, prior to my analysis, like her I would deny my own bodily needs when feeling ill.)

My childhood revolved around the currently politically incorrect fur business at a time when the warmth of animal skin coats was prized by women waiting for buses on street corners in our industrial city. For more affluent women, these coats served as a sign of glamor. As a very small boy playing between racks of coats waiting to be stored or remodeled, I could identify most newly made coats by their smell, which greatly amused my father.

The collage of frightening events and memories of my childhood surprised me when it came to mind as being my greatest trauma. There certainly were other contenders: when as a five-year-old I almost died of a misdiagnosed ruptured appendix when I was treated at home for three and a half days before being rushed to the hospital at the point of death; the failure of my first marriage; and the discovery that my utopian dream of creating a perfect institution of learning at the brand-new college where I am a founding faculty member collapsed into shades of dystopia. The fear that the U.S. Army used during basic training to try and shape me into a soldier was not in contention as a trauma because as a young man I was eager to prove myself in the face of its heavy-handed approach. (After all, I knew what to expect and had the comradeship of other draftees). While it is possible that my separation from my mother when I was hospitalized for about three weeks as a premature baby may have been a greater trauma than the one discussed in this essay, I am pessimistic about getting a grasp on this preverbal trauma.

Peter Petschauer, Inna Rozentsvit, and other colleagues are interested in developing the notion of “traumatic growth.” Certainly, there was some truth in Nietzsche’s aphorism “that which does not kill us, makes us stronger.” Since Nietzsche ultimately went insane (was that caused by his syphilis or his own psychodynamics?), perhaps he is not the greatest advocate for this position. Nevertheless, I think this early traumatic collage of lonely terrors played a role in shaping who I am. Perhaps there is an element of fighting my early loneliness in my professional devotion to connecting people as a psychohistorical author, educator, and editor. I found elements of this trait of wanting to connect positively with

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people even as a young college student when I went to New York to watch plays. There, I attempted to make personal contact through eye contact and a friendly exchange with strangers on an elevator, subway, or on the street.

My need for maternal reassurance led to becoming my mother’s helper as she shaped me to achieve what had been denied her as an immigrant girl who seemed to have had only a few years of night school. Although I would not promise to become a college professor, as she requested on her deathbed, it was already clear that I would fulfill her dream of pursuing education. Repeatedly telling me that I had two left arms, two left feet, and that if my head was not attached, I would lose it may or may not have been a conscious part of this agenda. Consequently, I found myself to be inept at athletics and inhibited in fighting anti-Semitic bullies by her frowning on fighting as wrong. I dreamed of having an adventurous life like that of my father who grew up amidst war and revolution before escaping to the U.S. at age 14 as a political refugee. It was in history books, not reality, where I could encounter war, revolution, and the fascinating things that I dreamed of doing.

Mom educated me to be a secular Yeshiva Bucher (Jewish Scholar of the Old Testament), which was in keeping with her family’s conversion from Judaism to Marxism (although I only knew her as an FDR and Stevenson Democrat). I certainly followed in her steps as a workaholic. The Army was as close as I got to the adventurous life I longed for as a boy and young man, although I have a most adventuresome intellectual life based on my choice to take the road less traveled by historians as a psychological scholar and advocate for psychohistory.

The term trauma was coined by ancient Greeks to refer to a physical wound, but now it is emotional wounds that one hears about mostly these days in the intellectual world. Sometimes I wonder if the concept of psychological trauma is being watered down to the point of having less meaning. Certainly, the idea of trauma has become much more common in recent years. Almost any hurt out of the ordinary is now called a trauma. What used to be referred to as a setback to overcome, a moral injury, a life crisis, or life’s turning point is now called an emotional trauma. Whatever we humans choose to call it, it can be life changing.

Without the advantage of a long and deep psychoanalysis, I would not have uncovered the collage of early trauma that shaped

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my life in significant ways.

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