Who we are is a product of where we have been. Psychotherapists usually understand this in respect of a given patient’s personal history - the absent father, the critical mother, the jealous sibling, the abusive cousin - but equally, there can be no denying the importance of one’s social history either. The areas we live in, the schools we attend, the quantity and quality of our caregiving, the various affirmations and discriminations that come our way - each of these experiences is layered in complex ways by social, economic and political forces far beyond the control of any single person.

“This is a key idea: “memories” from childhood are not vestiges from the actual past but images coloring the present. They are not history but filters for seeing certain aspects of what is going on now.

In general, Hillman defined memory as a form of imagination. As you remember what life was like as a child, you are reimagining your past life and returning to a child’s way of seeing the world. The child is always present but comes to the surface at the appropriate times.

The immensity is the story; the rest is situation. That this son must come into his own by making war not on a parent who is willful and self-involved (which he is) but on one filled with the tender regard that alone gives a growing creature the ability to declare itself (which he also is). This is the thing the reader is meant to register; this is the narrator’s wisdom. It is the betrayal of love that is required in order that one become.

Winnicott, my psychoanalytic hero, had something to say about this kind of situation. He was writing about parents’ concerns about children’s lies, but his insights go well beyond lying.

If development proceeds well the individual becomes able to

deceive, to lie, to compromise, to accept conflict as a fact and to

abandon the extreme ideas of perfection and an opposite to

perfection that make existence intolerable. Capacity for compromise

is not a characteristic of the insane. The mature human being is

neither so nice nor so nasty as the immature. The water in the glass

is muddy, but is not mud.