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Lore Reich Rubin, MD, has written a fascinating case history of a little girl, the daughter of psychoanalytic luminaries, who grew up to become a psychoanalyst herself. If that weren’t enough, the little girl described is also the author of this case history. If you read it as a book about her well-known parents, Annie Reich and Wilhelm Reich, you’ll not be disappointed, but in truth this is a book about another Reich, their daughter Lore. Memories of a Chaotic World: Growing up as the Daughter of Annie Reich and Wilhelm Reich is an extraordinary accomplishment, a psychoanalytically sophisticated self-analysis. We learn of Reich Rubin’s love for her mother, her fascination with her father, and her disappointments with both.
The ambivalence is held and elaborated in all directions. Reich Rubin demonstrates how theoretical issues, clinical technique, and institutional power dynamics are sometimes more clearly revealed in the first-person narratives of psychoanalytic history than in the official or party-line books and journal articles dedicated to these topics.
Living a thoroughly psychoanalytic life, she has contextualized theory and technique in personal, social, political, and economic contexts. She navigates the exciting years in Vienna, the rise of Nazism, the emigrations, the hardships, the changing directions of psychoanalysis, and the changing trends in European and North American left-wing politics. Emigration is a planned psychological trauma, and Reich Rubin captures the developmental turmoil of a pubescent girl on the run from Hitler and the coming war who then arrives in a new land with a changing body, a new language to learn and a mother from the old country who is trying to adapt. She then launches a career in psychoanalysis, studying with the emigre analysts in New York City who were not only giants in the field but also family friends since her childhood. This is an extraordinary book. It is autobiography. It is analysis. It is history.
