Mothers and Their Legacies: Their Psychohistorian Daughters (article)

The aim of this project is to determine if there is a significant relationship between my mother’s psychological life experience, her influence in my psychological development, and my choice of looking at human functioning as the product of psychological and historical components.

There are sides to my mother’s personality that I, to this day and after years of analysis, have not been able to integrate. What analysis helped me to do was accept the incongruities in her makeup and let go of my need to make it all fit into a harmonious whole. Her name, Rozi (Roszshee), which is Hungarian for Rose and the name my father always called her, went very well with two of my childhood perceptions of her: as a lighthearted, happy person with a bubbly waterfall laughter; and as a light, creamy, puffy Viennese pastry, which she love to bake. She was the epitome of the middle class genteel woman. To me, and I think to others, she was a beautiful woman. She had delicate features, jet black hair and porcelain skin. And she was elegant.

She was born in 1908 in Kalasa, Transylvania, a town that was originally part of Romania but later became part of Hungary. She was the youngest of 11 children, born to an upper middle class family. The story goes that my grandmother, orphaned at an early age, was brought up in a baron’s home. My grandfather was the son of upper middle class landowners who lived off their cattle and produce. He aspired to be a politician or a rabbi but accomplished neither. There are two significant events in my mother’s early memories: one was her almost being kidnapped by a Gypsy woman; the other was moving to Budapest. The former left her with a fear of strangers; the latter expanded her life and helped bring out a sense of determinism. I have lived with these two opposite messages, fear and

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determinism, all of my life, and I think they are the essence of my need to clarify and make sense of all psychological experience. Another influential component in my psychological development has been my mother’s vagueness about her family history. Why did my grandfather give up the land? Why did he move the family to Budapest? Was there a personal reason? A political reason relating to World War I? Or was it anti-Semitism?

My mother talks of her life until the death of her mother when she was 15 as having been spoiled by her parents and by her siblings. She acquired a sort of little princess syndrome. The death of her mother, I believe, woke her up to some of the realities of life; but it also fixated her to an adolescent mode of integrating experiences which she never quite managed to give up. Four years after her mother’s death, her father died. By then my mother had begun to establish herself as a legal secretary-researcher. She had toyed with the idea of studying law, but when her father died she went to Prague to stay with her older sister and remained there for a year. During her stay she met my father, who was a mechanical engineering student at the University of Prague. My parents’ courtship continued in Budapest where my father’s family also lived. My mother was quite taken with my father, a strikingly handsome blond, blue-eyed, intellectual man, 12 years older than she. Having been a prisoner of war in Russia when he fought with the Hungarian army, he had come to university late. He loved to tell the story of how he escaped from the Russian camp dressed as a Russian peasant. He had been assigned to kitchen duty, which gave him more freedom of movement in the camp, and a greater opportunity to learn the language. According to my mother she was warned by my paternal grandmother that she should think carefully about dating my father, that his war experience and the increasing anti-Semitism at the University of Prague had turned him into a moody, angry man. My grandmother thought my mother to be too sweet and too vulnerable to tolerate my father’s moods. I guess they did not foresee my mother’s inherent resolve.

After graduation from the University of Prague, my father’s closest friend, a classmate, had left to work in Mexico. It was he who found my father a job with the petroleum industry in Monterrey, Mexico, which my father accepted because of the anti-Semitism he encountered in Prague. He was so intent on leaving Europe that my mother was not at this point included in his plans. He was going to leave Europe without her. But she didn’t let him, strong willed as she was. She bought her own ticket for the same trip and sailed with him. The story is that they got married on the boat. They arrived in Monterrey on March 31, 1931. My brother was born the following January.

My mother did not take well to the Mexican climate or the food and she was often sick. She knew nothing about cooking or housekeeping. My oldest sister was born several years later. I was born five years after my sister, under dire circumstances for my mother. The nationalization of the petroleum industry had taken place. All foreign businesses were confiscated and had to dismiss all foreign-born employees. My father was out of work for a few years. Our family was barely staying afloat. To make matters worse my mother had contracted trichinosis while pregnant with me. She could not digest any foods and was extremely weak. The doctors did not think we would survive. But we both did. She recuperated and I was strong. She told the story from time to time of how much she had suffered during her pregnancy and how her hair turned gray. Throughout my childhood and early adolescence I carried the psychological burden of having damaged my mother. This in fact became a very strong component in my need to help others work through the internalized psychic distortions of their childhood perceptions. A month after my birth, we moved to Mexico City and the situation improved. My father found work and my mother came in contact with a large Hungarian community, where she met her best friend until the end of their lives. This woman ran a bridge club as a business, which provided my mother with a social life in which she thrived. Often hosting dinner parties at our home, my mother earned a reputation as an excellent cook and baker. Three more children were born after me, two girls and a boy.

Growing up, my experience was quite different from my siblings. Five years difference between my older sister and myself, and four years difference between myself and the next, made me feel at times like an only child. Of all the children I was the only one to have my father’s full attention. Because my mother was recovering from her illness he took it upon himself to be mother and father to me, at least for the first three years of my life. He loved to tell the story of how he would warm up my bath water in the sun until it was just the right temperature. Indeed a very

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strong special bond existed between the two of us. We lived then in a house opposite Chapultepec Park. I remember the walks in the Park he and I took alone. He would point out things such as bird nests and ant mounds. When I was older he took me on trips with his mountain climbing club.

Just prior to my entering elementary school we moved to a less populated area of Mexico City not too far from the cement manufacturing plant where my father worked. He was in charge of production. The house we lived in was designed and built by my father. I was not happy there. My father was always busy and we lived behind locked gates. I wanted Chapultepec Park back and the freedom it provided. I wanted to escape my mother’s over-protectiveness. She also seemed sad. It was not until much later that I learned that it was the developments in Europe that were causing her so much distress. Two of her sisters and their families had been sent to concentration camps and had been killed. A musician cousin of mine, during a concert tour in Russia, disappeared without a trace. My mother began to have chronic headaches. Often she would ask me to rub her neck and shoulders. She claimed that I was the only one who was able to relieve her pain. I guess it was the healer in me beginning to emerge. Towards the end of elementary school I went through a tomboy period. My thoughts were of becoming a doctor or a scientist, maybe another Madam Curie. My mother was also changing. While my father worked she ran a business manufacturing welding rod that my father had started in an area behind the house. I think they were both worried about economic stability. She was actually quite good at the business. With total fascination I would watch her cut the wire and dip it into the welding mixture. She also took to raising her own geese which she hand fed.

In my last year of the baccalaureate in biology I was advised by my psychology teacher to consider a career in psychology instead, for which he thought I was better suited. My friends apparently thought the same. They nicknamed me “Doctora Corazon,” which was the title of an advice column in a major Mexico City newspaper. But I was unreceptive. My identification with my father and the interest he developed in me for the natural sciences was stronger. During this period my mother seemed to me immature, nonintellectual, and unable to meet my developmental needs. She wanted me to be more feminine, to find a rich boyfriend and security. Yet she was very proud of my scholastic accomplishments. Again the incongruities. During my first year at the University of Mexico my parents and my three younger siblings went to live in Israel. This was my father’s idea. He requested and got a job managing the cement production at a manufacturing plant outside of Tel Aviv. I came to New York to live with my older sister, who had married a New Yorker, and enrolled in Brooklyn College. My mother found it very difficult to adjust to a new culture, nor did she like living there without her older children. A year-and-a-half later my parents came to the United States. Six months later my father died.

During my last year at Brooklyn College I changed my major to psychology. It seemed a very natural thing to do. A combination of psychology and the natural sciences matched my needs. I actually graduated with a BS in psychology and not a BA. I believe that the components that went into making this decision were maturational, the product of further integrating who my parents were. The microbiology lab just seemed too arid all by itself. In many ways it was representational of my father’s tendencies to isolate himself. My need to investigate and get to the meaning of things comes from my father; my need to interact and make contact with others derives from my mother. It was through my social work and psychoanalytic experience that I was able to complete the integration of my intellectual father and my feeling mother. One can say that my mother provided me with the fertile emotional inner ground and my father provided the world of facts and ideas. My mother was home base; my father, the world outside.

I bring to my clinical work the integration of the developmental experience with my parents, my social environment, and the historical events of my own time. As I practice it, psychoanalysis is an inter-subjective experience. That which resonates within myself is my patients’ projected subjectivity. His or her subjectivity, like mine, is composed of the developmental experience with his or her own parents, the social environment, and the historical events that impacted on them. It is this understanding that shades the interpretative work, which in turn is therapeutic. Each individual has his or her very specific brand of psychohistorical experience and it is this understanding between us that reshapes their subjective and objective reality within the

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therapeutic setting.

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