The Listener

A moving and beautifully written memoir in which the author turns the exploratory lens of a brilliant psychoanalytic mind on the dark corners of his own life. Allen Wheelis has helped many patients understand themselves and cope with the legacies of trauma or obsession that shape the neurotic personality. Here he uses his own life as the uncharted territory for this same process of discovery. The story begins with his parents' courtship and a life of extreme poverty in rural Texas....
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A moving and beautifully written memoir in which the author turns the exploratory lens of a brilliant psychoanalytic mind on the dark corners of his own life. Allen Wheelis has helped many patients understand themselves and cope with the legacies of trauma or obsession that shape the neurotic personality. Here he uses his own life as the uncharted territory for this same process of discovery. The story begins with his parents' courtship and a life of extreme poverty in rural Texas. When Wheelis is a small boy, his father contracts tuberculosis. He will spend several years bedridden and dying, exercising to the last a tyrannical control over his family. In one searing scene, Wheelis is punished by being made to cut the grass in the yard with a razor, a task that will occupy every day of his summer. Timidity, insecurity, and a cloyingly close connection to his mother mark Wheelis's efforts to establish himself in the adult world. In the course of trying to write a novel as a young man, Wheelis falls mysteriously ill. Eventually he realizes that he has made himself ill so that his failure to write can be excused. It is this perception that leads him to the study of medicine, and eventually psychiatry. Through his eyes, we come to understand how a gift for analysis--like a gift for prophecy--brings little comfort to its possessor, and no guarantee of happiness.