Hide and Seek/Hidden and Found: In Search of a Balanced Life: Psychoanalytic Memoirs, Stories, and Essays by Howard L. Schwartz
$24.50
Click Here For a Book Review: by Carol L. Skolnick of Hide and Seek/Hidden and Found: In Search of a Balanced Life: Memoirs, Stories,and Essays by Howard L. Schwartz.
Hide and Seek/Hidden and Found—In Search Of A Balanced Life: Psychoanalytic Memoirs, Stories and Essays by Howard L. Schwartz, MD. A departure from the academic style of many books by psychoanalysts, this volume combines entertaining stories about the author’s own life with fanciful tales about his grandchildren, his childhood, and family, all interwoven with a deep and sincere self-analysis, and told in the author’s very personal and homespun style.
True to his title, the author begins with a story of two best friends using their imagination to visit places they’ve never been and ends with a story about hieroglyphics and the value of preserving books and reading itself. Along the way he offers an applied analysis of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in his review of Hadestown, a musical he loved, an essay of his discovery that he suffered posttraumatic stress as an officer deciding who should be returned to duty in Vietnam, and a long essay of his analytic understanding of two classic coming-of-age-and-
identity-formation novels: Catcher in the Rye, and The Moviegoer. A reader since childhood, he ends with an essay / book review of How to Write Like Tolstoy: A Journey into the Minds of our Greatest Writers by Richard Cohen (an author he considers a model of a “Balanced Life”—essayist, novelist, publisher and four-time sabre champion of Great Britain, and Olympic fencer.) Recognizing his difficulty with endings he writes a Coda: “Delivering the Placenta,” and then adds dream specimens with his own uncensored free associations. Last but not least, his memoirs reveal an author committed to honesty and authenticity.
“Dr. Howard Schwartz, an experienced and gifted psychoanalyst, has given us, in Hide and Seek/Hidden and Found, a work that is informative, insightful and emotionally moving. Drawing on his experience as a patient in analysis as well as his subsequent self analysis, he has put together what is, at once, a memoir, a collection of short stories, and a host of insights gained from his lifetime of clinical work and self reflections. The reader will be moved by Dr. Schwartz’s thoughts and insights into his relationships with his parents, brother, wife, children and, perhaps the most touching, with his love for his grand children, for whom he has written a number of books and short stories.”
—Martin S. Willick, MD, Training & Supervising Analyst, New York Psychoanalytic Institute
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