Inter Alia: A Memoir by Ernest Kafka

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“Inter Alia can be read as a memoir or as a textbook in psychoanalysis with the author as the case study. What bridges the two genres is the author’s ongoing reflection on what made him who he was and his impatient desire  to overcome his shortcomings by introspection and through psychoanalytic treatment. It must also be said that it is is a love story. It is not saccharine—no one is larger than life, everyone has flaws—but nonetheless it is a story  About love. It is about the author’s love for his parents, his children, and his wife, but also his love for his colleagues, his patients and for the people who helped him along the way. Viewed as the hero’s journey the  protagonist moves from a position of alienation, bitterness, and envy towards a position of forgiveness, acceptance, and inner harmony. It is a book about how the author became a better person, and it is a tribute to Dr. Kafka’s achievement that by the close of the book the reader also wants to become a better person and, while
under the influence of the book, believes this is possible. Franz Kafka, a distant relative of the author, wrote that “If the book we are reading does not wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading it for?” This book had that that effect on this reader.”
—PETER DUNN, MD, Faculty Member and Former Director of Clinical Services, New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute

“Ernest Kafka’s memoir grips the reader’s attention like an adventure story, with its tales of fleeing Austria as Hitler moved in; his father’s aristocratic Jewish orphanage; the family’s comfortable existence in Vienna ending in an encounter with the Gestapo; their protection by a French-resident Jewish aristocrat; and their emigration to  New York. The author’s old-fashioned liberal education at Harvard precedes medical school, and training as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Marriage to Barbara, an internationally celebrated food writer from a remarkable, wealthy, philanthropic family, leads him to write about aspects of their lives that intersect with the contemporary art world of Frank Stella, Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, and the writer delves into his own musical life and gifts. There were children and grandchildren, several houses, travel, starry restaurants, the Jewish jokes and the perpetual table at Elaine’s. But Kafka has another purpose in writing this autobiography: the discussion of psychoanalysis, theoretical, historical and practical, in a context that makes it of equal interest to the professional and to the general reader. This treatment of one man’s life raises questions of importance to
all our lives—and is a thumping good read.”

—PAUL LEVY, PHD, journalist, writer, ArtsJournal.com, author of several books on Lytton Strachey, The Official Foodie Handbook, and others

“The economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who knew and admired Dr. Ernest Kafka, once observed that memoirs are mostly written for the pleasure of the author and not the reader. Dr Kafka’s memoir—recounting a life that began as a Jewish child in prewar Vienna, a timely escape from the Nazis, becoming one of the most  consequential psychoanalysts since Sigmund Freud, befriending New York’s most prominent artists and writers and being married to a cookbook author whose following rivaled Julia Child’s—is a pleasure to read.”
—AMBASSADOR PETER W GALBRAITH