Sylvia E. Flescher, MD, a graduate of Barnard College and New York Medical College, trained in psychiatry at Mount Sinai Medical Center and in psychoanalysis at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. She is on the faculty at Mount Sinai and is past president of the New Jersey Psychoanalytic Society. She has been published in Psychoanalytic Review, and her chapter “Elsa Lost and Found” is included in the anthology On Being Adjacent to Historical Violence. Married to a retired film editor, Sylvia has two daughters and one grandson. She lives and practices in Bergen County, New Jersey.

It is said that every memoir is an exorcism.

With a Jewish psychoanalyst father who’d lost his entire family in the Holocaust and a non-Jewish, emotionally repressed mother, where did that leave author Sylvia Flescher? For years Sylvia struggled with writers’ block, worried that her own story paled in the shadow of her parents’ enormous losses. However, after a powerful ceremony in Jerusalem that honored her mother for her courage in hiding her father in Rome during the Nazi occupation, Sylvia began to write—and she finally found her voice.

In The Reluctant Psychoanalyst, Sylvia describes how trauma can pass into the next generation. A devoted daughter, for decades she did not feel free to deviate from her father’s agenda for her. Failing to recognize his narcissism and toxic boundary-crossing for what it was, she complied with his demand that she join him in his mission to “save the world from another genocide” by spreading his version of the gospel of Freud. With this memoir, Sylvia fulfills her duty to memorialize her parents’ lives—and claims the right to tell her own story.