About Marianne | Marianne Goldsmith

This book begins in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, and tells of a childhood lost to overwhelming trauma: to the loss of a father in the dead of night when I was barely four, and the loss of my home in the midst of war; to the numbing fear of a terrifying illness and the loss of my beloved brother; to the three awful years in a Japanese concentration camp in World War II, and finally, to the painful loss of parental love.

In the years that followed war’s end, my parents’ frequent absences – unintentional abandonments – made me feel I no longer mattered. Repressed or dissociated, I never thought about those losses, until the analysis that began when I was fifty. By then, I was a pediatrician and a child psychiatrist, with a successful private practice and a home office. I had a happy marriage, a loving husband and three wonderful children, college graduates in their mid-twenties, well on their way.

Yet that was the life in which my dreadful anger first began to surface. My anger was hurting my children and especially, the husband I loved. Whence did it come? I didn’t understand it; I hated it–refused to believe that it was part of me–yet in the end, my analyst convinced me that I had no choice but to accept the fact that it was. This was the first step, and the last, of a miracle cure that over the years, we accomplished together.

Brother Hans and me as an infant

My mother holding me, standing, 10 months

In the immediate post-war period of our liberation, my mother, brother and I sailed away on an old American freighter, called the Sea Hydra. We crossed the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and months later, docked in New Orleans, eventually arriving in San Francisco by train. My father didn’t come. The three of us spent nine unforgettable months in Carmel, California, a sleepy village back then, heaven on earth as I remember it, to recuperate from the years of starvation and brutality in the camp.

We arrived in Holland shortly after my eighth birthday. It was then that the separations from both parents began. After our arrival, my mother gave birth to a new little brother, and taking the infant with her, she left to join my father in Moscow, where he’d been appointed the Netherlands' ambassador. For two bleak years, I lived with my father’s sister and her husband, a Dutch Reformed minister, in Apeldoorn, and went to school. I tried to do what was expected of me and don’t remember what I was feeling. I don’t even remember where my brother was staying. I left my aunt and uncle when my father bought a house for us in Wassenaar, a suburb of The Hague. I think my father would have liked to stay. But the family reunion was short-lived.

When I turned eleven, my parents deserted me again. Appointed Governor General by his beloved Queen Juliana, my father was tasked to bring the Netherlands’ long history of colonial rule in Indonesia to a peaceful end. Remarkably, the signal dream of my analysis fixated on that very year. An omen or an early warning signal of emerging, but unconscious, conflicts or anxieties, the signal dream is central to an analysis. This dream, the so-called “deer dream,” singled out crucial events of that year that symbolized painful feelings of abandonment and neglect unconsciously felt – and never expressed - by my 11-year-old self.

When my parents returned from Indonesia, I was twelve. My father was reassigned as the Netherlands ambassador to Canada and I was forced to part from my newfound friends in Holland. I began my adolescence in a strange country, woefully unprepared for its challenges. In the analysis, a sense of disorientation and confusion would tend to bring those years to mind.

Before my parents' departure to Indonesia in 1949: Mother, me with my arm in a cast, my brother Hans, and my two-year-old brother Anton.

Nonetheless, I did well academically, and at sixteen, three years ahead of my classmates, I entered a six-year medical school program–two years pre-med and four years of medical school–at the University of Ontario, 400 miles away from home. At the age of twenty-two, I would have my MD and fulfill a lifelong dream. But that first semester, my hair started falling out. Dismayed, with fearful fantasies of going bald, I never shared my fear with my mother. In retrospect, it was probably the first tangible evidence of my propensity for separation anxiety. Once home at Christmas time, all was well again.

Me and my brother Hans, shortly

before he contracted polio at age 7.

I completed the two years pre-med, but fled from the next stage of medical training, dreading anatomy lab, suddenly aghast at the notion of having to see, smell and dissect a cadaver–someone who was once a living, breathing, human being! My “forgotten” –i.e., repressed–experience of having seen and smelled multiple dead bodies in the Japanese concentration camp might have had something to do with my change of heart. Much later, when I delved into my dogged wish to be a doctor, I discovered that long ago, when I was only four, I’d made a promise to myself that I’d save my brother one day from the polio that had almost killed him.

Temporarily derailed, I left medical school and transferred to nearby Queen’s University, where I continued my interest in biology and took three senior classes in philosophy. I turned 19 and received my bachelor’s degree that spring. But a permanent home was not to be. As the Netherlands ambassador, my father was being transferred to Australia. My mother wept and wailed, but my father insisted that he had no choice. My family was leaving Canada, indefinitely. I had two younger brothers by then, around 12 and 10, I think, the same boys I had lovingly mothered in Wassenaar when they were small.

Determined to strike out on my own, I consulted a professor at Queen’s. A former Rhodes Scholar, he offered to write a recommendation for me to Oxford University. Thrilled by the prospect, I passed the entrance examinations, and thus began two of the best years of my young life, free from all the parental injunctions and losses that had dampened my spirit. Each night, I loved to ride my bike and all alone, fly to my “digs” and home, through the dark and damp and misty night with its mystical, refracted light. Freedom!

It was the next summer, returning from a visit to my family in Canberra, Australia, that I met my husband-for-life, on the railroad platform at Didcot Station, halfway between London and Oxford. After a whirlwind romance, we were married the following June at St. Margaret Lothbury in London, in 1959. I was twenty-one. My mother orchestrated a massively flowered reception at the Canadian Embassy, but my father, disapproving of my husband-to-be, did not attend.

My three children at the beach

I forgot to mention that the “real” reason–if there is such a thing–that I dropped out of medical school, was that more than anything, I wanted, and felt I needed, a family of my own, and could not imagine I could do both; to be a good mother and a caring doctor for my patients at the same time. It was the 60s, when “a woman’s place was in the home.” Given my history of loss, I was comfortable with that perspective. Will and I arrived penniless in New York City, but my resourceful husband soon found a job, and a year later, I joyfully greeted my first-born. Caring for my three young children and joining them in their play as they grew did much to heal me from my own lost childhood. Just being with them, l loved it!

When my oldest child turned ten, I happened to be listening to my car radio and heard about a summer course at Wellesley College in calculus, one of the required subjects for medical school applications. It reawakened my abandoned wish to become a doctor. The women’s movement had arrived–the tide had turned. Three years later, I became one of the first older women with three children on board, to be admitted to Harvard. The year was 1973 and I was 35 years old.

Pediatrics and my love of children was probably an inevitable choice, and psychiatry, my second choice, was not far off. The National Health Service had paid for my medical school fees, and upon graduation, I served three years in a pediatric public health clinic in Watertown, Massachusetts, in order to pay the government back. This experience taught me that the social and economic issues that arise from poverty indirectly expose children to health problems that often have a psychosomatic basis as well.

But too busy in my clinic to address these issues in the family context, I decided to pursue another residency, this time, in psychiatry. It was then that I met my first therapist, Dr. Coleman, and dissociated the traumatic loss of my father when I was barely four. My analysis and my journal were soon to follow. I have come full circle.

Portrait of my almost 4-year-old self