NYPSI Gets Gopnik-ed
N. Szajnberg, MD, Managing Editor
“Children reconnect us to romance…..The passions … rise for them everyday….They compel us to see the world as an unusual place again. Sharing a life with them is sharing a life with lovers, explorers, scientists, pirates, poets. It makes for interesting mornings.” from Through the Children’s Gate.
Adam Gopnik, interviewed by Lois Oppenheim, brought this warm sensibility to NYPSI’s centennial celebration last Friday night; it was a stellar hit for psychoanlaysis. Gopnik, a writer for the New Yorker and author of seven books including The Table Comes First: Family, France and the Meaning of Food, may be one of the better spokesmen for psychoanalysis: not only does he speak openly about his personal treatment, but also his thoughtfulness, depth and candor speaks eloquently to what a good upbringing with dedicated parents (and five siblings), dedication to his own family and what analytic work (appears to) facilitate.
Gopnik’s books often come from his life experiences, yet enlighten the world he inhabits. His Paris to the Moon makes deeply personal his five years in Paris, first with his first son, then after his daughter’s birth. The chapter, “The Rookie,” in which he tells of a five-year-old championship pitcher for a New York ball team, arose from his bedtime stories to his son, whom, he feared, would know nothing of baseball growing up in Paris. Through the Children’s Gate refers to the gate at Seventy-Fifth and Fifth, named by Olmsted and Vaughn, but in fact refers to his experience of returning to New York in 2000 after the Paris sojourn, the assault upon the City’s sensibility after the Twin Towers, all scene through the kaleidoscope of children’s eyes in the maelstrom and munificence of New York. Angels and Ages, overtly about Darwin’s and Lincoln’s upon modernity, also captures the personal influences of his mother’s love (as a geneticist) and his father’s (a professor literature and admirer of Lincoln). The Table Comes First, while pitched as a book on food, is more an account of family, friends and lovers around food.
Gopnik brings a keen eye to contemporary American life. He also brings a subtle sense of complexity to judging matters such as psychoanalysis. While he can recount with some humor, his unusual treatment with the famous “Dr. Grosskurth,” he recalls phrases of wisdom that have served him well over time. He spoke of how truly extraordinary ideas are met with initial disbelief, then years later with a sense as if we always knew this. He could cross swords with Grosskurth on the intellectual weaknesses of psychoanalytic theory, yet he could inhale the wisdom of his clinical experience. The fragrance of something almost evanescent in fact stays with him.
The audience had a good bit of time to ask questions and Gopnik answered, sometimes more than once. When asked about whether his son Luke recalls his bed time The Rookie story, Gopnik reflected, then mentioned that Luke says that when someone mentions this story to him, he still has the taste of milk in his three-year old mouth, the residua of a good feed.
NYPSI has found a way to truly celebrate the century of what it has contributed to psychoanalysis; Adam Gopnik enlivens the possibilities for NYPSI to be a center of psychoanalytic thoughtfulness and wisdom in New York.