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  • The Interpretations of Strangers
  • Warren S. Poland

The interpretation that yielded insight came in a jewelry store, brought to me by a clerk bearing a tray of expensive watches.

No heirlooms had been handed down across the generations of my family, no embodiments of tradition passed on from the long-distant past. My grandparents were young when they first arrived in the New World: it was they—not the new world—who had been brave. While their spirits were full, their hands were empty. Still, they planted their upended roots. After them, their children, my parents, labored to prove that the family could be hardy. They survived the setbacks and the hardships of the Great Depression.

I then grew in the shelter my parents and grandparents had provided, in a setting in which even the most tender of plants could flourish. Thus I had the good fortune eventually to age in relative ease. At last I came to a time of such comfort that I was able to wonder not only what I could provide to my own children but also what I could leave behind for them. Like most parents, I did the best I could to promote their experiences and values, knowing that I did so clumsily and far from ideally, as seems inevitable for anyone living in the world of reality.

At one point I wished there were something I could leave them as a tangible embodiment of the chain of family history, preferably something valuable they could themselves use and later pass on. Regretful that there was nothing of the sort that I had received from the generations before me, I decided to try to create such a family heirloom. Therefore, when for the first time I finally had sufficient discretionary funds, I decided to buy an expensive Swiss watch, as if for myself but in my mind mainly for my son to inherit from me in what I hoped [End Page 665] would be the distant future. I thought of the precious watch becoming his after I died, and I envisioned my son saying to admiring friends, "Oh, it was my father's watch" or "I got it from my father."

As the jeweler in Schaffhausen took out the small tray of watches that were at once mechanical masterpieces and elegant ornaments, I mentioned the reason I was making my purchase. She set down the tray, looked me in the eyes, and spoke.

"You can't imagine how often I have heard that story. Tell me," she asked, "do you like mechanical watches?"

Laughing, I confessed that I had no interest in them whatsoever.

"Then I'll tell you what you should do," she went on. "Take a few hundred dollars and buy yourself a first-rate quartz watch. That way you'll have a fine timepiece and a beautiful piece of jewelry. Then, take the rest of the money and spend it on yourself for your own pleasure—and that will be the best thing you can give your son!"

She talked herself out of the sale and she talked me into a new insight with a new world of understanding. A model for how to take care of oneself is infinitely more precious than a watch.

Few lessons from my psychoanalytic training many decades ago have held up as well and stood me in as good stead as the observation that children identify with the unconscious conflicts of their parents. Individuals continue to struggle over family battles that never were resolved, the interpersonal feuds that are waged openly from generation to generation. Those seem the easy part of clinical work, the part that barely requires psychoanalytic inquiry.

Much more difficult but much more fruitful in analytic work, the area that seems to provide greatest personal long-term freeing, is exploration of what could never be put into words, the deeper conflicts within each parent that, in contrast to open [End Page 666] family feuds, had been unspeakable. Somehow, children absorb those buried and unmentionable conflicts, shaping their own characters around them.

Specifically those subjects that were too hot for the parents themselves to handle, that were so dangerous as to leave them not...

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