After four decades of experience as a psychoanalyst and psychologist, I was approaching the age when my friends and contemporaries were considering retirement and next chapters. I, too, began to wonder what might replace my professional work. After some consideration, I decided to take up the study of a string instrument: the cello. I subsequently found a teacher who encouraged me to think of my musical studies as a journey, an odyssey into uncharted and unfamiliar physical and mental territories.
As part of my daily ritual, I was persuaded to keep both a lesson journal to record important teachings and a practice record to notate my weekly plans, objectives, and progress. In addition, I decided to keep a diary of my musical voyage, including personal thoughts and ideas, concerts attended, and all music-related activities. I wanted to document and archive this new learning for myself, hoping for fresh insights and self-discovery.
While fully prepared for a novel and inspiring adventure, I certainly wasn’t ready for the path upon which I found myself nor the transformative impact it had on me. From meeting my teacher in an overcrowded café, through the arduous and demanding task of cello learning with its persistent strains and stresses on my body, I could never have foreseen all the shifts and changes, openings and new beginnings, accidents and celebrations that followed. An unfortunate bicycle accident, causing serious injuries to my left arm, threw my musical world upside down. Concerned I would not be able to continue my lessons, I bounced back with persistence and intense physiotherapy. Then a secondary setback from an unhealed fracture, once again, placed my progress in jeopardy.
I am convinced of the timelessness of self-discovery and the power of perseverance in the face of challenges. And it is this awakening of personal desire and the hope to share it with others that inspired my writing of this memoir, Cello Notes: Music and the Urgency of Time.
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THE POWER OF NAMES: Uncovering the Mystery of What We Are Called (published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2016) is a study of personal and family names and how they shape our lives. Most of us do not stop to think that our names are as much a part of us as our own skin, and so we rarely turn to examine the part they play in what makes us who we are.
In this book, I explore both the profound ambivalence that many of us feel toward our names and the conscious and unconscious impact our names have on our lives. I discuss cultural practices associated with naming, the derivation and historical importance of names, and why, historically, names and naming have had such power in myth and legend.
I attempt to answer such question as: What does your name mean to you? How does it reveal or conceal who you are? What psychological repercussions does a modification in the spelling of a name have on its bearer? And what are the consequences of voluntary and involuntary name-changing?
In writing this, I have reflected on my own name, as well as those of friends and strangers who have shared their stories with me. By combining psychoanalytic insights, clinical vignettes and literary texts, I have tried to re-examine that oft quoted phrase “What’s in a name?”
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THE SACRED BODY: A Therapist’s Journey (published by Stoddart Press in 2002) is a book I wrote in an attempt to answer the repeated question about my involvement in the cancer community: “How do you do this kind of work?” It is a personal narrative of my work with cancer patients as I struggle with such difficult issues as death and dying; alternative medicines and radical treatments and their implications for healing and cure; and the meaning of suffering and hope in everyday life.
This book was not intended as a how-to book but rather as a personal journey through the world of cancer with its conscious and unconscious meanings in the lives of others and myself.