Abstract
I was blessed with a very sweet mother. When we went to the beach, we delighted in collecting seashells and showing them to each other. Every article or book I write is a seashell I show to my readers. Look what I found!
My father was a very good husband and passionate about his work as a nuclear physicist. But being rather full of himself, he had difficulty seeing his sons. He took pride in speaking to us as equals, but in doing so, he denied generational difference. In college, I became fascinated by the theories of developmental psychology. They offered confirmation that there is, indeed, a difference between children and adults.
In elementary school the girls played four square and the boys played baseball. I didn’t like baseball and wasn’t good at it either. I spent my time near the swings with a magnet, mining iron filings out of the sand until I had a bottle of pure black sand. It was like an “alchemical” process of extracting the pure iron filings from the raw dirty sand—an attempt at rescuing something sacred lost in the profane.
In high school, after class, I would pack up my rock hammer, ride my bicycle out on the country roads, and break up boulders along the way in search of 20-million-year-old marine fossils—clams, snails, worm tubes, and sand dollars. While fossil hunting, I thought about Darwin’s evolutionary theory and had two recurring fantasies. One was that I was going to break open a rock and find a little animal still quivering with life—rather like a bit of my own childhood vitality and creativity still alive but somehow trapped in the neurotic matrix of stone. The other fantasy was that I would find a fossil so big and so important that I would need the assistance of a paleontologist from the university to help me extract it from the rock. Putting the two fantasies together, I needed an expert to help me liberate a bit of my own aliveness trapped within.
When I was 21, I found an idea (a seashell) that fascinated me: the representation of the mouth and its relation to autism. It was a reflection on the autistic child’s psychological task of embodiment—of coming down to earth. I wrote it up when I was 25, and it became the starting point for my magnum opus on the relationship of libido development to cultural evolution from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic, the High Neolithic, and the Urban Revolution. This idea was full of bits of my own aliveness, which I needed the help of many experts to liberate. It was a new approach to the phylogenetic project of psychoanalysis along the lines of Freud’s Totem and Taboo.
After completing the first version of the manuscript in 1982, I lay down on the floor to meditate on the question “What is the place of a book in a man’s life?” I wasn’t expecting an answer, but one arrived in a flash: “The place of a book in a man’s life is on the bookshelf!” To write a book, an author must become passionately involved in creating a universe and, when finished, must place it on the bookshelf and go have lunch.
One of my mentors said that this first draft presented “a marvelous conception,” but that I would never get it published until I published a journal article. It was the kindest way possible to tell me I didn’t know how to write worth a damn, and, of course, he was right. I got to work. I wrote up my chapter about the mouth and autism as an article. I rewrote it countless times, each time improving my writing style. Then while reviewing the galleys, I suddenly found myself fascinated with the content of my article, as though I were reading it for the first time. I asked myself, “Who is my audience?” I quickly replied, “An open-minded and intelligent person.” I then said, “No, who is my real audience?” The answer came just as quickly: “My father.” I then had a wishful fantasy of my father reading it and saying, “I don’t understand it completely, but I can see that my son is really onto something very big.” All alone, I suddenly had an uncanny feeling of my father embracing me, and the thought occurred to me, “The father and the son are one.” I could then see that I was my own disbelieving father and that I needed to write this book so that I could understand and believe it myself.
In 1983 my article on the mouth and autism was published, and I immediately thought that it warranted a ticker tape parade down Market Street in San Francisco, like those that were given for returning astronauts. So where was the parade? In 2022 my magnum opus, Libido, Culture, and Consciousness: Revisiting Freud’s Totem and Taboo was published. I was very pleased with it, and I placed it on the bookshelf. I leave it as a gift (a seashell) to the younger generation and the generations yet to come.
In 1968, Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders took the famous photo of the Earth rising above the horizon of the moon. Later, Anders reflected, “We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth” (Jet Propulsion Laboratory 2020). That is what writing is all about for me: I write about the worlds I’ve explored and discover a bit of myself in the process. For example, when I wrote about the autistic child coming down to earth, it was also about me coming down to earth. My biography of W. Ernest Freud and his relation to his grandfather was partially driven by my curiosity about my paternal grandfather, who died while my mother was pregnant with me. Libido, Culture, and Consciousness has many autobiographical components related to death, the caveman within, the awe of being, generational difference, and more.
You’ll recall that in school I was a lousy baseball player, but, curiously enough, when W. Ernest Freud, Freud’s oldest grandson and the fort-da baby, asked if I would like to write his biography, I suddenly felt I was out in centerfield and a high fly was dropping—WHACK!—right into my mitt! Then when I received one of the endorsements for my book Libido, Culture, and Consciousness, it confirmed for me that I had indeed been understood, and suddenly I heard the crack of the bat and saw the ball sailing over the big green wall!
Whether writing about clinical or theoretical matters, the act of writing functions to balance, stabilize, or contain my mind in response to the turbulence of clinical work and the rest of life itself. Narrativizing is a creative defense. My drive to write comes from my awareness that I am going to die one day, and if I don’t work at it, my writing may not get done. I relish the process of writing, being read, and of being understood. When writing, I find things. And as with the seashells of my youth, I love showing what I have found.