The Transcendent Shrink
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Psychologist Lillian Rubin discusses why some people rise above childhood trauma while others don't -- and the challenge of being a therapist in a "culture of victimhood." |
By LAURA MILLER | Illustration by Frances Jetter
Lillian Rubin's bestselling 1976 book, "Worlds of Pain," gave many middle-class readers a rare glimpse into the complicated inner lives of America's working class. A compassionate, self-effacing interviewer, this therapist, sociologist and unabashed leftist later turned her attention to male/female relationships in 1983's "Intimate Strangers." But it is Rubin's most recent book, "The Transcendent Child," that springs most directly from her own experiences. She survived and thrived despite growing up in "a family where death, poverty, depression and a mother's nearly psychotic rage determined daily life." Her brother was not so lucky.
Why do some children manage to overcome horrific histories of abuse, neglect and abandonment, going on to lead fulfilling lives, while others, sometimes their own siblings, never recover? "The Transcendent Child" relates the stories of eight of these survivors and Rubin's efforts to find the strategies and traits they share. Diminutive, handsome and energetic, Rubin, 72, spoke with SALON in her San Francisco apartment, where she had plenty to say about the current state of psychology, politics and American society.
Why did you choose this particular topic?
For both personal and professional reasons. I am the transcendent child in my family, and as I watched my brother's often-failed struggle to manage his life successfully, I always wondered, why me
and not him? A couple of years ago he was killed in an auto crash that looked more like a suicide. In thinking about that, the old question came back again in haunting ways. It's been a lifelong issue for me. I didn't just want to write my own story. I've always looked for someone else to tell the story. So I decided to interview people whose lives suggested that they were transcendent children.
What are the common characteristics of the people you talked to?
Most importantly, they were all marginal children in their family. One guy said he felt like a dog in a cat family. And it isn't just marginality, but knowing and accepting it that lays the psychological basis for their ability to look for and see other alternatives. It has both positive and negative consequences for the rest of their lives. They have the capacity to disidentify with the family. All children separate but these consciously at some early point said, "I don't want to be like him/her/them."
They can stand back and observe the fray. That's part of their marginality, to get enough distance that they don't get caught in the family pathology. Now, some people are almost skinless; they feel everything. But these people had not only a skin but a capacity to repress and submerge the really difficult moments so that they weren't overwhelmed. That doesn't mean they didn't feel it. They felt it later in bits and pieces, when it was safer.
Another quality they share is what I call "adoptability." They don't just attract others -- a lot of people have that capacity -- but they can use what people give them. They all had some kind of mentor, surrogate, friend. Sometimes these were short-term relationships and sometimes longer. One time it was a political movement. Among the things that helped one of them transcend a criminal past was the Black Panthers, who came along at just the right moment, when he was 19 or 20, and convinced him that he had the right stuff to get into college.
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