In this candid and revealing memoir, a psychoanalyst struggles to free herself from the influence of her overbearing, Holocaust-haunted father.

It is said that every memoir is an exorcism.

With a Jewish psychoanalyst father who’d lost his entire family in the Holocaust and a non-Jewish, emotionally repressed mother, where did that leave author Sylvia Flescher? For years Sylvia struggled with writers’ block, worried that her own story paled in the shadow of her parents’ enormous losses. However, after a powerful ceremony in Jerusalem that honored her mother for her courage in hiding her father in Rome during the Nazi occupation, Sylvia began to write—and she finally found her voice.

In The Reluctant Psychoanalyst, Sylvia describes how trauma can pass into the next generation. A devoted daughter, for decades she did not feel free to deviate from her father’s agenda for her. Failing to recognize his narcissism and toxic boundary-crossing for what it was, she complied with his demand that she join him in his mission to “save the world from another genocide” by spreading his version of the gospel of Freud. With this memoir, Sylvia fulfills her duty to memorialize her parents’ lives—and claims the right to tell her own story.

FOR LOVERS OF MEMOIR: Readers who enjoyed Educated by Tara Westover, Inheritance by Dani Shapiro, The Empathy Diaries by Sherry Turkle, and After Long Silence by Helen Fremon, will be moved by Sylvia’s thoughtful account of her life, how her parents’ traumatic losses were passed on to her, and how she has come to find her voice.

EDUCATIONAL VALUE: Anyone who has been in therapy will find this look behind the curtain fascinating. Sylvia describes key moments on the couch with a rigid Freudian analyst and then with her beloved therapist, bringing readers into the intimate process of achieving greater self-understanding and emotional freedom.

FOR STUDENTS OF INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION OF TRAUMA: This memoir demonstrates how trauma passes into the next generation, reminding us that current traumas inflicted on our fellow Americans will haunt us for decades to come.

FOR STUDENTS OF THE HOLOCAUST: The author recounts how she discovered the existence of the diary of her second cousin, who wrote a moving first-hand account of life in a Polish ghetto before she was killed at age twenty.

FOR STUDENTS OF WORLD WAR II: The author includes her father’s experience under the Nazi occupation in Rome, where he narrowly escaped capture and certain death.
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