The Falling Idols of My 1963 A Story of Collateral Damage

"Now in my seventy-second year, I have what my eye doctor calls a "baby" cataract. When backlit by bright light, the images before me become blurred. But when I turn inward and reflect on my life, glaring truths no longer blind me. No longer need I atone for transgressions of others, for the sins of the father. My hope is that you, my readers, will learn from my struggles and that it will not take you a half century to acknowledge the abuses and betrayals to which you have borne witness, and which, in being disavowed and forgotten, take the free will out of your sails and propel the course of your lives. This is my story. And my story is your story." The Falling Idols of My 1963: A Story of Collateral Damage tells this story, one that is both universal and unique. It's about a teenage boy on the cusp of young adulthood struggling like his peers to let go of his parents, most especially his idealized father, and define himself as his own man. Ironically, this transition is made all the more rocky when his hero falls suddenly from grace, as it has been for numbers of young men who end up clinging to their fallen idols for much of their lives. Closing their eyes, numbing their minds, and freezing time, they surrender and pay them undue homage. Resurrecting their fathers as they once were for them, these sons would reverse the course of the life cycle, theirs and that of the parent who has seemed suddenly to fail them and who, they are acutely aware of, is doomed to die. At times, they claim their parents' nostalgia as their own and relive it over and over again. My sister Ellen, about to be apprenticed to Henry Moore, lay dying of lymphoma while my father, pretending to visit his grandchildren and bearded by my other sister and brother-in-law, had his twice weekly trysts with "the love of [his] life. My beautiful but ever more ghostly sister finally died with me close enough to feel on my cheek her failing breath, as, gasping and unseeing, she whispered " I hope Johnny loves Harvard." Two weeks later, having pulled the plug, "Daddy" left my bereaved mother with only her teenage son to care for her in our emptied out Park Avenue triplex. On the eve of my escaping to college, he introduced me to his new wife, and former patient (though I didn't know it at the time). Edith was a vain and shrewd woman who, ironically, suffered not at all. As with so many glaring sexual and monetary boundary violations on the part of mental health practitioners, those who are collateral damage--the family members of both doctor and patient along with the clinician's other clients--find themselves forgotten, lost in the shadows. Like others who bear witness to familial trauma, I didn't want to see it. Nor, it seems, did the illustrious psychoanalyst to whom my father sent me to quell my free-floating anger, want me to see "it." No wonder, I learned over the course of the next decade, for this prominent President of the American Psychoanalytic Association was himself in the throes of his own boundary violation along with an incipient opioid addiction and would commit suicide on the tenth anniversary my sister's last birthday. "Get over it, Johnny." Only I couldn't. "Don't you know how I feel?" How, you may ask, did I enter and then rise to the top of my father's and Dr. Rosen's profession? Disavowal. I didn't want to know what I knew.