Divorcing Mom
Ralph Bowden. Rev. Divorcing Mom by Melissa Knox. Malvern Pennsylvania: Cynren Press, 2019.
Everyone has influential people in their lives. Melissa Knox, in Divorcing Mom, describes a life, hers, influenced excessively and mostly negatively by her long-term psychoanalyst and her mother.
The context is Manhattan, upper west side, and a wealthy culture in which nobody would think of trying to grow up and navigate the stresses of life without the help of an analyst. Another feature of the culture—at least as viewed by an outsider—is a certain emotional excess and tendency toward drama in interpersonal relations leading to repeated bursting into tears, pounding on things, screaming fits and breakdowns. Relieved from the practical burdens that the rest of us bear—jobs, house and yard work, cooking and cleaning, and making ends meet—these people pour their energies into outsized personality disorders and relational conflicts. No wonder that psychoanalysis is a thriving business.
Melissa Knox makes it to age fourteen without it, but she’s not doing particularly well in school and has exhibited some deviant, anti social behavior at summer camp, fixating on sex, vampires, and related dark issues. Her completely dysfunctional family contributes to her problems. Her younger brother is an early pothead and slides into schizophrenic episodes. Her father is inconsistent and unpredictable, drinks too much, and alternates between violent rages and fits of weeping. He fondles Melissa sexually as a young child and has exhibitionist tendencies. Melissa’s mother is worse, with her childlike neediness and her own embarrassingly extreme exhibitionism. Melissa’s parents fight chronically. No wonder she’s troubled enough that her parents ask their analyst to choose an analyst for Melissa, ‘Dr.’ Oscar Sternbach, a Viennese, Jewish refugee from Nazi persecution. Much of the book deals with his supposedly Freudian analysis of Melissa.
He’s an abusive bully with a huge ego, bombastic and prone to angry outbursts where he slams his fist on the couch and shouts insults. He repeatedly tells Melissa she is an “idiot,” “narcissistic,” “self centered,” and “ungrateful.” His psychotherapy is interventionist. Insight into his patient’s problems or desires is not the point; he provides guidance to strengthen Melissa and tells her what she must think and do with her life as she struggles through adolescence and her twenties and thirties. He orders her to give up the “frivolous” dance lessons which she enjoys and concentrate on her studies and career. He insists she go to graduate school, for which she feels ill-suited, and provides autocratic advice concerning her romantic involvements and intimate sexual development. He insists Melissa’s mother is a perfect model who loves Melissa and wants only the best for her.
The book is a study in successful indoctrination. For decades, Melissa believes with an almost religious faith that Dr. Sternbach must be right in all things, as he himself insists. She has a hard time forcing what she experiences of her mother into his assessment, but for the most part feels bound to accept it. Only after marriage, motherhood, a successful career, and distance from both Dr. Sternbach and her mother, does Ms. Knox belatedly come to realize how she has let both of them manipulate her for 30 years.
The writing is full of exquisitely detailed scenes in which Ms. Knox spotlights every nuance of movement, emotion, and expression second by second to illustrate the intensity of personal interactions. The themes are serious; Ms. Knox questions the foundations of psychotherapy, and ridicules its practice, at least Dr. Sternbach’s perverted variety. Yet she writes with enough detachment and good natured humor to lighten the reader’s experience and leave a likeable image of herself.
Melissa Knox’s recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Offbeat, Eclectica, Lunch Ticket, and Volney Road Review. She writes a blog, “The Critical Mom.” Find more about her here: melissaknox.com.
