Composing a Further Life

adults—social workers, juvenile court judges, nurses, teachers—with an understanding of adolescent development and how sexual abuse and racism affected them, training people to do relationship-based work, and developing curricula.”
    “You know,” I interrupted, “what you’re saying involves trying to get the people that work with adolescents to switch from seeing them as problems to seeing them as potential, and it’s very close to the issue of people who work with the elderly and see only their deficits. They see them as vulnerable and as a problem, rather than seeing them as a source of strength for the society. It’s that same switch—”
    “From ‘at risk’ to ‘at promise,’ ” Jane cut in. Realizing the connections between our interests had us both leaping into the exchange. A change in phrasing can make the difference in how people see each other, like Jane’s use of the word
countenance
, making the connection to a face-to-face relationship, whereas I sometimes speak of recognition of the other. “That’s what it means to me, you know, grokking the totality of a person, 5 countenancing their whole humanity. The role of parents or surrogate parents is to reflect back to the child their beingness with eyes of love. Sometimes the eyes of the parents are covered with duct tape! That’s what narcissism does to eyes! Then the child doesn’t get that assurance of love.
    “I’ve studied photographs that I found, after I wrote my memoir, of myself with my father, when I was probably two, and I see love in his face, and that says to me, Aha, very early on I was
countenanced
by my father. Not by my mother, but by my father, and that’s partly where my resilience comes from, and then along the way mothers of my best friends countenanced me. They would do something that my parents never did, take me on their lap and talk to me about how I was supposed to behave, and, ‘Are you hearing me, Lady?’ ‘Don’t you think that that is the way it should be, Jane?’
    “Some of the training that we do, that I love, is called
reflective supervision
. It teaches people who work with children the difference between ‘you are a child-care provider’ and the give-and-take relatedness that you can have with a young child, which is what teaches the child ‘people are good and people pay attention to what I’m feeling and thinking.’ You know? That’s what we’re trying to teach people who work with young people. It’s hard with adolescents because they’re prickly and they want to make you think that they don’t care what you say and …”
    “You felt that you initially didn’t know that and you had to learn?” I asked.
    “Oh, I had to learn it, yes. I had to learn everything. It’s never too late, although it’s a lot harder to heal those early wounds if you weren’t there early on.”
    It occurred to me that Jane’s awareness of what she had missed was what made her aware at this stage of her life of the need for teaching it. “The other side of it is that you know in your bones that that kind of regard, that kind of attention, is not something that can be taken for granted, it’s not instinctive, it has to be learned,” I said. “People who learn it from their own childhood may have no memory of having learned it, so the fact that you had to learn it at a later stage of your life means that you have the memory of the learning process, and that underlies your ability to build an institution that will do this. One of the things that has happened over the last half century is an empathetic rethinking of what human beings have to learn that tends to be taken for granted and
how
they learn it. It turns up in psychotherapy, and it turns up in athletic coaching and in physical therapy.”
    “Right,” Jane responded. “This is the great historic contribution of the women’s movement. I’ll give an example. Freud as a very young psychoanalyst was listening to his young women patients, witnessing what was called hysteria, and as he built their trust they then revealed to him that they had been sexually abused by family members. He wrote a paper about it, and he was so shamed by his peers in academe that he withdrew his thesis and changed it into ‘They are fantasizing.’ 6
    “So a long time goes by to the early seventies and the beginning of feminism, with women going into various fields, including psychology, and they are taking on patients and participating in