At four years old he was handing out medicines and legal drugs?
Yes, it was the 1950s, before there were diagnoses like ADHD. They took me to the pediatrician because I wasn’t still, and the doctor said to put me to work.
A curious doctor.
At the age of four I could read and my father, who owned a pharmacy, put me to work with Roy, the black delivery boy who could not read. We started at six in the morning and sometimes finished at midnight. This was my job until I was 16. I remember going to brothels to bring medication, I saw all kinds of situations there.
What is your best memory?
When Marilyn Monroe came to shoot the movie Niagara, Roy and I would go to her apartment to deliver her medication and stay there for quite a while. I became famous, I lived that story for 20 years.
And the worst memory?
When I was 15, my father had a brain tumor and was losing his mind. He raised me, my mother never wanted to have children. Studies have been done of girls raised by men and they are very different, more authoritarian, more self-confident, less empathetic and have fewer children.
Roy became his lifelong tutor.
At that time there were no black people outside of Harlem. I used to go to black restaurants with Roy, I loved that culture. I remember one blizzard night, Roy’s people were laughing at the breakdowns and mishaps that had happened to their cars. For the whites that was a drama.
I understand.
I saw a huge difference in the psyche of the two cultures. The black one was much more fun. Everyone was dancing in the bars and I loved the people who were dancing alone. In white society, they never danced alone.
What happened in your teenage years?
I got involved in the civil rights movement to the point where the FBI investigated me, but after a while that movement didn’t want white people, and it hurt me.
What made you become a psychologist?
While writing my PhD in English Philology I worked nights in a gloomy psychiatric hospital. Many doctors were foreigners and I helped them write the cases, and I was good at it. He had read Freud.
Are all our therapeutic stories variations on the same themes?
Yes, in all of them there is an excess or lack of attachment, the need for love; very primitive aspects. Despite this, people have very different lives and parents.
What is it that heals us?
Although I’m at the top of the word resilience, when you’ve suffered extreme trauma you have to find a way to overcome it, and it’s very difficult. The case of Laura, who I narrate in the book, abandoned by her father in a cabin with her younger brothers when she is eight years old, is very significant.
explain it to me
She had to mother them. On TV she saw a series about the military in which there was a very kind colonel and Laura said to herself: “I will pretend that my father is that colonel and I will behave like him with my brother and sister”, and this he did
Did you get them to be okay?
Yes. When she felt cornered, she imagined that character telling her: “You must be the type of person who does not give up”. People who are determined to make things happen find this kind of resilience.
You have dealt with very difficult cases.
At a meeting of ex-students we all stood up to applaud the war heroes, and I thought: “In my consultation I have seen people of incredible daily courage, because the enemy lives with them”. All the people who are tortured in their families are prisoners of war. Keeping your sanity in these cases is true heroism.
What is the quality you most admire?
The kindness My parents gave time, energy and money to the needy, and if someone couldn’t pay for the medicine, my father gave it to them anyway. I always admired that, but I’m not like that, good by nature.
It is strange that he worked with four years.
It wasn’t such a bad idea, it instilled work habits in me, it gave me a purpose, it taught me to be independent and to trust myself. Niagara Falls was a very touristy place, so I met people from all over the world, it was very interesting.
And the cons?
I didn’t know how to play with other children and since I never saw a mother being a mother, it was something I had to learn.
Did that maternal disinterest mark her?
I do not think so. I loved her very much, she was a very intelligent woman and when I was growing up we did a lot of things together, we had a great time. It was a surprise to me to discover that mothers were telling their children what to do; she never did, thankfully.
