Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir

by Irvin D. Yalom

For a great many years until my retirement I biked back and forth to Stanford every day from my home, stopping many days to admire the Rodin statues of the Burghers of Calais, or the gleaming mosaics on the chapel dominating the Quad, or to browse at the campus bookstore. Even after retirement I continued to bike around Palo Alto, running errands or visiting friends. But lately I’ve lost confidence in my balance, and so I avoid biking in traffic and limit my riding to bike paths for thirty or forty minutes at sundown. Though my routes have changed, the experience of biking has always been one of liberation and contemplation, and lately when I ride, the experience of the smooth, swift motion and the breeze in my face invariably transports me into the past.

  Aside from an intense ten-year affair with a motorcycle during my late twenties and early thirties, I’ve been faithful to bicycling since I was twelve, when, after a long, hard campaign of begging and wheedling, my parents gave in and bought me a flashy red American Flyer for my birthday. I was a persistent beggar and discovered at an early age a supremely effective technique, a technique that never failed: simply make a linkage between my desired object and my education. My parents were not forthcoming with money for any type of frivolity, but when it came to anything even remotely related to education—pens, paper, slide rules (remember those?), and books, especially books—they gave with both hands. Hence, when I told them I would use the bicycle to visit the grand Washington Central Library at Seventh and K Streets more often, they could not refuse my request.

  I kept my side of the bargain: every Saturday, without fail, I filled my bicycle leatherette saddlebags with the six books (the library limit) I had digested since the previous Saturday and took off on the forty-minute ride for new ones.

  THE AUTHOR AT AGE TEN.

  The library became my second home and I spent hours there each Saturday. My long afternoons served a dual purpose: the library put me in contact with the larger world I longed for, a world of history and culture and ideas, and at the same time it eased my parents’ anxiety and gave them the satisfaction of knowing that they had begotten a scholar. Also, from their standpoint, the more time I spent indoors reading, the better: our neighborhood was a dangerous one. My father’s store and our second-floor apartment were located in a low-income neighborhood of segregated Washington, DC, a few blocks from the border of the white neighborhood. The streets were rife with violence, theft, racial skirmishes, and drunkenness (much of that fueled by liquor from my father’s store). During the summer school vacations, they were wise to keep me off the dangerous streets (and out of their hair) by sending me, at considerable expense, from the age of seven onward, to summer camps in Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, or New Hampshire.

  The enormous reception hall on the library main floor inspired such awe that I tiptoed as I moved through it. In the very center of the first floor stood a massive bookcase housing biographies, in alphabetical order by subject. Only after I had circled it a great many times did I work up the nerve to approach the officious librarian for guidance. Without a word, she shushed me with a forefinger over her lips and pointed to the great marble circular stairway leading to the children’s section on the second floor where I belonged. Crestfallen, I followed her instructions, but nevertheless, each time I came to the library I continued to case the biography bookcase, and at some point I developed a plan: I would read one biography a week, beginning with a person whose name started with “A,” and work my way through the alphabet. I started with Henry Armstrong, a lightweight boxing champion of the 1930s. From the B’s I remember Juan Belmonte, the gifted matador of the early nineteenth century, and Francis Bacon, the Renaissance scholar. There was C for Ty Cobb, E for Thomas Edison, G for Lou Gehrig and Hetty Green (“The Witch of Wall Street”), and so on. In the J’s I discovered Edward Jenner, who became my hero for having eliminated smallpox. In the K’s I met Genghis Khan, and for weeks I wondered whether Jenner had saved more lives than Genghis Khan had destroyed. The K’s also housed Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters, which inspired me to read many books about the microscopic world; the following year, I worked on weekends as a soda jerk at Peoples Drug Store and saved enough money to buy a polished brass microscope, which I own to this day. The N’s offered me Red Nichols, the trumpet player, and introduced me also to a weird dude named Friedrich Nietzsche. The P’s led me to Saint Paul and Sam Patch, the first to survive a plunge over Niagara Falls.

  I recall ending my biography project at the T’s, where I discovered Albert Payson Terhune. I got sidetracked in the weeks that followed devouring his many books about such extraordinary collies as Lad and Lassie. Today I know I suffered no harm from this haphazard reading pattern, no harm from being the only child of ten or eleven in the world who knew so much about Hetty Green or Sam Patch, but still, what a waste! I yearned for some adult, some mainstream American mentor, someone like the man in the seersucker suit who would enter my father’s grocery store and announce that I was a lad of great promise. Looking back now, I feel tenderness for that lonely, frightened, determined young boy, and awe that he somehow made his way through his self-education, albeit haphazardly, without encouragement, models, or guidance.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE RELIGIOUS WAR

  Sister Miriam was a Catholic nun referred to me by her confessor, Brother Alfred, whom I had seen in therapy many years before, after the death of his tyrannical father. Brother Alfred had written me a note:

  Dear Dr. Yalom, (sorry but I still cannot refer to you as Irv—another year or two of therapy would be needed for that.) I hope you can see Sister Miriam——. She is a loving, generous soul but is encountering many obstacles to serenity.

  Sister Miriam was an attractive, engaging, but somewhat discouraged middle-aged woman, dressed without any sartorial mark of her calling. Open and forthright, she moved into her issues quickly and without embarrassment. For her entire career in the church, she had received considerable gratification from her hands-on charitable work with the poor, but because of her keen intelligence and executive abilities, she had been asked to assume higher and higher administrative posts in her order. Though she was highly effective in these positions, her quality of life had diminished. She had little time for her own prayers and meditation, and now, almost daily, she had conflicts with other administrators jockeying for more power. She felt stained by her rage toward them.

  I liked Sister Miriam from the very beginning, and as we continued to meet weekly I felt ever greater respect for this woman who, more than anyone I had ever known, had truly dedicated her life to service. I was resolved to do everything I could to be of help. She was exceptionally intelligent and extraordinarily devout. She never inquired about my religious beliefs and, after several months of therapy, had grown to trust me enough to bring her private diary to the session and read aloud several passages. She disclosed her deep loneliness, her sense of ungainliness, and her envy of other sisters blessed with beauty and grace. When she read of her sadness for what she had forgone—marriage, a sexual life, and motherhood—she broke into tears. I ached for her as I thought of my cherished bonds with my wife and children.

  Sister Miriam quickly pulled herself together and gave thanks for the presence of Jesus in her life. She spoke longingly of her early morning daily conversations with him, which had provided strength and consolation since her teenage years in the convent. Lately, her many administrative demands had made these early morning meditations all too rare, and she missed them greatly. I cared much for Sister Miriam and I was resolved to help her reinstate her morning connections with Jesus.

  One day, after our session, while on my bicycle ride, I realized how rigorously I silenced my own religious skepticism whenever I sat with Sister Miriam. Never before had I personally encountered such sacrifice and dedication. Though I, too, thought of my therapy as a life of service to my patients, I knew that my giving could not be compared with hers; I gave on my own schedule and was paid for my services. How had she developed such
selflessness? I thought of her early life and development. Her parents, poverty-stricken after a coal mining accident had disabled her father, had placed her, at age fourteen, into a convent school, and they had rarely visited her again. Her life from that time forward had been heavily regulated with prayers, intense Bible studies, and catechism, morning, noon, and night. There was precious little time for play, for fun, or for social activities, and, of course, no contact with males.

  After our sessions, I often reflected upon the ruins of my own religious education. Young Jewish males in the Washington, DC, of my day were exposed to an old-world doctrinaire approach that, in retrospect, seemed almost designed to drive us away from religious life. To the best of my knowledge, not a single one of my peers has retained any religious sentiment. My parents were ethnic Jews: Yiddish-speaking, meticulously adherent to kosher dietary laws, with four different sets of dishes in the kitchen (for dairy and meat during the year, and different sets for Passover), observant of the High Holidays, and ardent Zionists. They and their relatives and friends formed a tight group and almost never developed a friendship with a non-Jew or reached out in any way to join mainstream America.

  Yet despite their strong Jewish identity, I saw little evidence of true religious interest. Aside from the de rigueur synagogue attendance on the High Holidays, fasting on Yom Kippur, and avoiding leavened bread during Passover, none took religion seriously. Not a single one had a ritual of daily prayer, laying tefillin, reading the Bible, or lighting candles on the Sabbath.

  Most of the families operated small businesses, mostly grocery or liquor stores or delicatessens that they closed only on Sundays and on Christmas, New Year’s Day, and the major Jewish holidays. The High Holiday scene at the synagogue remains vivid in my mind: my father’s male friends and relatives all clustered in the same row downstairs, and the women, including my sister and mother, upstairs. I remember sitting next to my father, playing with the fringes of his blue and white prayer shawl, inhaling the scent of mothballs from his rarely worn High Holiday suit, leaning over his shoulder as he pointed to the Hebrew words being chanted by the cantor or the rabbi. Since they were all nonsense syllables to me, I concentrated as hard as I could on the English translation on the opposing page, which teemed with accounts of violent battles and miracles and exhaustingly endless glorification of God. Not a single line with any relevance to my own life. After a respectable period of time at my father’s side, I darted outside into the small courtyard where all the children gathered to talk, play, and flirt.

  Such was my religious exposure during my early years. It remains a mystery why my parents never, not once, attempted to teach me to read Hebrew or to impart important Jewish religious tenets. But as my thirteenth birthday and my Bar Mitzvah approached, things changed and I was sent to Sunday religious classes, where I was uncharacteristically unruly in class and persisted in asking such irreverent questions as, “If Adam and Eve were the first humans, then who did their children marry?” Or, “If the practice of not eating milk with meat was to avoid the possibility of the abomination of the calf being cooked in its mother’s milk, then, Rabbi, why should the rule extend to chickens? After all,” I reminded everyone annoyingly, “chickens give no milk.” Eventually the rabbi got fed up with me and expelled me from the school.

  But that wasn’t the end of it. There was no getting out of a Bar Mitzvah. My parents sent me to a private tutor, Mr. Darmstadt, a straight-backed, dignified, and patient man. The major Bar Mitzvah task facing every thirteen-year-old boy on his birthday is to chant, aloud, in Hebrew, that week’s Haftarah (a selection from the Book of Prophets) before the entire synagogue congregation.

  A serious problem arose in my work with Mr. Darmstadt: I could not (or would not) learn Hebrew! I was an excellent student in all other endeavors, always at the top of my class, but in this task I suddenly became entirely stupid: I couldn’t remember the letters or the sounds or the melody of the reading. Finally, the patient and much-beleaguered Mr. Darmstadt gave up and informed my father it was impossible: I would never learn the Haftarah. Hence, at my Bar Mitzvah ceremony, my father’s brother, my uncle Abe, chanted the Bar Mitzvah section in my place. The rabbi asked me to read the few lines of blessings in Hebrew, but in rehearsal it was evident I could not learn even these, and at the ceremony, the rabbi, resignedly, held up cue cards for me to read with the Hebrew transliterated into English letters.

  It must have been a day of great shame for my parents. How could it not have been? But I remember nothing pertaining to their shame—not an image, not a single word exchanged with my father or mother. I hope that their dismay was ameliorated by the excellent speech (in English) that their son gave at the evening dinner celebration. Lately as I review my life, I often wonder why my uncle, rather than my father, read my portion? Had my father been overcome with shame? How I wish I could ask him this question. And what of my work over several months with Mr. Darmstadt? I have almost complete amnesia of our lessons. What I do recall was my ritual of stepping off the trolley one stop before his home to snack at a Little Tavern hamburger stand—a chain in Washington, DC, each stand with a green tiled roof, offering three burgers for twenty-five cents. That they were forbidden made them all the more delicious: it was the first traif (non-kosher food) I had ever eaten!

  If an adolescent like the young Irvin, in the midst of an identity crisis, were to request a professional psychiatric consultation with me today and tell me that he could not learn to read Hebrew (even though he was an excellent student) and had been expelled from his religious school (though at no other time did he have significant behavioral problems), and moreover, that he had his first non-kosher meal on his way to his Hebrew teacher, then I believe he and I would have a consultation that ran something like this:

  DR. YALOM: Irvin, all these things you’ve said about your Bar Mitzvah cause me to wonder if you may be unconsciously rebelling against your parents and your culture. You tell me you are an excellent student, always at the top of your class, and yet, at this momentous time, the very moment when you are about to take your place as a Jewish adult, you suddenly develop an idiopathic pseudo-dementia and cannot learn to read another language.

  IRVIN: With all due respect, Dr. Yalom, I disagree: it is entirely explicable. It is a fact that I am very bad with languages. It is a fact that I’ve never been able to learn another language and I doubt if I ever will. It is a fact that I have made all A’s in school except for B’s in Latin and C’s in German. And it is a fact, also, that I’m tone deaf and cannot carry a tune. During class singing, the music teachers pointedly ask me not to sing but to hum softly. All my friends know this and know that there is no way I could chant the melody of a Bar Mitzvah reading or learn another language.

  DR. YALOM: But, Irvin, let me remind you this is not a matter of learning a language—probably less than 5 percent of American Jewish boys understand the Hebrew text they read at their Bar Mitzvah. Your task was not to learn to speak Hebrew, nor to understand Hebrew: your only task was to learn a few sounds and read a few pages aloud. How hard can that be? It is a task that tens of thousands of thirteen-year-olds accomplish every year. And let me point out that many of them are not A students but B and C and D students. No, I repeat, this is not a case of acute focal dementia: I am certain there is a better explanation. Tell me more about your feelings about being Jewish and about your family and your culture.

  IRVIN: I don’t know how to start.

  DR. YALOM: Just speak your thoughts aloud about being Jewish at thirteen. Don’t censor your thoughts—just utter them as they enter your mind. It’s what we therapists call free association.

  IRVIN: Free association, huh. Just think out loud? Wow! OK, I’ll give it a whirl. Being Jewish . . . God’s chosen people . . . what a joke that is for me—chosen? No, the exact opposite . . . being Jewish has not had one single advantage for me . . . Continual anti-Semitic remarks . . . Even Mr. Turner, the blond, red-faced barber on
ly three stores up from my father’s, calls me “Jew boy” when he cuts my hair . . . And Unk, the gym teacher, shouts, “Move it, Jew boy,” when I try, unsuccessfully, to climb up the rope hanging from the ceiling of the gym. And the shame at Christmas when other kids in school describe their presents—I was the only Jewish kid in my elementary school class and I regularly lied and pretended to have gotten presents. I know my cousins, Bea and Irene, tell classmates their Hanukkah gifts are Christmas gifts, but my folks are too busy in the store and don’t do any gift giving at Hanukkah. And they frown at my having any non-Jewish friends, including, especially, the black kids, who they will not permit me to bring home even though I regularly go to their houses.

  DR. YALOM: So, it seems obvious to me that you want nothing more than to get out of this culture and that your refusal to learn Hebrew for your Bar Mitzvah and your eating traif on your way to your Hebrew lessons are all saying the same thing, and saying it loudly, “Please. Please. Somebody get me out of here!”

  IRVIN: It’s hard to argue with that. And my folks must feel they are in a terrible dilemma. They want something different and better for me. They want me to succeed in the outside world, but, at the same time, they must fear the end of their own world.

  DR. YALOM: Have they ever expressed that to you?

  IRVIN: Not directly, but there are signs of it. For example, they speak Yiddish to one another but not to me or to my sister. They speak a type of pidgin English-Yiddish (Yinglish we call it) to us, but definitely they do not want us to learn Yiddish. They are also very secretive about their life in the old country. I have learned almost nothing about their lives in Russia. When I try to find out the exact location of their shtetl in the old country, my father, who has a wonderful sense of humor, jokes that they lived in Russia, but sometimes when they couldn’t bear the thought of another severe Russian winter, they called it Poland. And for World War II and the Nazis and the Holocaust? Not one word! Their lips are forever sealed. And that same silence reigns in the homes of all my Jewish friends.