As a psychoanalyst, Alan 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 for the same process of discovery. The story begins with his parents' life of poverty in rural Texas. When Wheelis was a small boy, his father contracted tuberculosis. He spent several years dying, exercising a tyrannical control over his family. In one searing scene, Wheelis is made to cut the lawn with a razor, a task that occupies every day of his summer. Timidity, insecurity and a cloyingly close connection to his mother mark Wheelis' efforts to establish himself in the adult world. When trying to write a novel as a young man, he falls mysteriously ill. Eventually he realizes that he has "made" himself ill so that his failure to write can be excused. This perception leads him to the study of medicine and eventually psychiatry. As Wheelis turns his explanatory lens on the dark corners of his own life, 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.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Brooding yet illuminating, this memoir reveals the struggle of a psychoanalyst practicing in San Francisco to reach a deeper understanding of the effect of childhood trauma on his own life. Having grown up in rural Texas with a cruel, consumptive father and a confused mother, Wheelis examines the disastrous results of bitter poverty and complex psychological woes on a family largely devoid of love and kindness. As his bedridden, dying father sought new ways to torment everyone within the sound of his voice, Wheelis, as a boy, became more insecure and withdrawn. His mother, unable to find solace in her religious fervor, created a world of comforting myths, amiable ghosts and soul-numbing fantasies to help her face her husband's inevitable decline. Told in extended bursts of free-flowing thought, short asides and emotionally charged rants, the book is chiefly a shattering portrait of a family that becomes more bizarre and inhumane with each page until Wheelis recounts how his father, nearing his end, ordered him to cut foot-high grass on an expansive lawn with a straight razorAa backbreaking task that took almost an entire summer to complete. Wheelis's sister escaped by departing for college, leaving Wheelis and his mother in a strange limbo of emotional dependence, sensuality and need. The author, seeking a stable sense of self, later stumbled through two marriages, believing that a so-called happy marriage is nothing more than "an agreed-upon diminishment of life." This cleverly written celebration of cynicism and despair ultimately wears down the reader with its self-absorbed and disturbingly one-dimensional view of love and life. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Now in his 80s, this noted psychoanalyst turns his finely honed technique on himself. Wheelis is a fluid writer, yet some of his subject matter--his still-powerful sexual fantasies; his mother's pain-racked death--doesn't always make for easy reading. He knows his approach is risky: "Since I intended in this work the utmost honesty, the reader, if I am successful, cannot in the end think well of me. If he or she does, I will have failed." Wheelis vividly describes the key elements that shaped his life: his father's wasting death from tuberculosis; his intense relationship with his mother; a painful experience in his 20s of trying, and failing, to write a novel; and his analytic training at the Menniger Clinic. He learned during his training that "the heart of analysis is to look elsewhere--to be presented with experience which the patient means to be understood at one level" while the truth may "lie at another level...[in an] area the patient does not want you to notice." The reader sometimes wants to scold Wheelis for his pessimism, as his wife, Ilse, does: "A shadow falls for one moment across a beautiful day," she tells him. "You seize upon the shadow, will not see the sunshine. Why do you do that?" Wheelis isn't sure, wondering himself how others "do" this thing called life. "There must be a secret, some simple solution.... Always and forever the student and still I don't know how. Are there no classes in living?"
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Has a more honest autobiography ever been written?,
By
This review is from: The Listener: A Psychoanalyst Examines His Life (Hardcover)
Allen Wheelis who has written a series of extraordinary novels and professional psychiatric books, offers a moving, beautiful, and powerfully evocative memoir. Psychoanalysts, he says, know too much to hide behind self-decption and this astonishing book reveals the shape of a life seen straight, seen without distorting lenses.
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A book that changed my life,
By
This review is from: The Listener: A Psychoanalyst Examines His Life (Hardcover)
I am editor of the professional journal "Psychotherapy In Australia" and also a therapist. So I've read many many books on, by, and for therapy and therapists. Allen Wheelis' "The Listener" is utterly distinctive and forced me to confront myself about just how honest I have been with myself in my own life. It is also beautifully written. I've read this book three times now, ans gained more each time, and I've set off on a quest to read all his other books. Irvin Yalom has reviewed this book by asking if a more honest autobiography has ever been written. I have no fear in answering "No".
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Incisive, lucid, powerful,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Listener: A Psychoanalyst Examines His Life (Hardcover)
This remarkable memoir will become a classic for its sparse yet elegant portrayal of a man's life told with ruthless honesty, crystalline clarity, and moving effect. The reader is pulled into the unfolding story of a life often painful yet ever struggling toward mastery. The subtitle reference to psychoanalysis ought not be off-putting. This is a memoir informed by the knowledge that has come from intimate exposure to other people's lives as well as the author's own, but devoid of jargon or cant. Engaging and masterful, an outstanding read.
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