Composing a Life

scientist, an artist.
    We also edit the past to make it more intelligible in cultural terms. As memories blur, we supply details from a pool of general knowledge. With every retelling, words that barely fit begin to seem more appropriate as the meaning slips and slides to fit the stereotype. Was my English nanny as perfectly true to form as I remember her, or has the memory been smoothed and normalized? And what about the smoothing that denies the painful parts of happy memories and even makes nightmares more consistent? What about the inappropriate emotions denied and the anomalies that drop out of our storytelling? Even for the recent past and in situations where there would seem to be little motivation for distortion, memories are modified and details supplied to fit cultural expectations.
    Women and men who pioneer new roles have a difficult time, for to the extent that their present defies cultural stereotypes, their past may be elusive, and yet too much forgetting can be a mistake, for any fragment of the past may prove to be important when a changed present makes new demands. When my husband and I were in Iran, I organized a cross-cultural research group on Iranian values, but I had great difficulty finding Iranian women who could play the double role involved, contributing both memory and analysis, social science and introspection. For the men in the group, the challenge of bridging the gap between early experience and training was rewarding; for the women, the chasm between socialization and mature roles was greater and harder to bridge. To remember what it was like to be a child, being prepared for traditional roles in Iranian society, and then to violate those roles by analytic discussion was too painful. There were women who were skilled and analytic scholars, but their childhood memories were blurred and remote; they had adjusted to dissonance by forgetting. There were also articulate traditional women who delighted in recalling the vivid details of their childhoods, but could not dissect or compare. American women who matured before the women’s movement have the same kind of problem but to a lesser degree, for they have a far narrower chasm to bridge.
    I have not tried to verify these narratives, beyond attending to issues of internal consistency and checking them against my knowledge of the individuals The accounts as I heard them are themselves part of the process of composing lives. They are autobiographical, not biographical, shaped by each person’s choice and selective memory and by the circumstances of our work together No doubt they are shaped again by my own selections, resonating variously with my own experience. These are stories I have used to think with, sometimes quoting at length and sometimes very briefly, sometimes approaching an issue almost entirely through the eyes of one woman and at other times lining them all up for comparison.
    Storytelling is fundamental to the human search for meaning, whether we tell tales of the creation of the earth or of our own early choices. Each of these women is engaged in inventing a new kind of story. Not only is it impossible to know what the future holds for them, it is impossible to know what their memories of the past will be when they bring them out again in the future, in some new and changed context.
    The process of improvisation that goes into composing a life is compounded in the process of remembering a life, like a patchwork quilt in a watercolor painting, rumpled and evocative. Yet it is this second process, composing a life through memory as well as through day-to-day choices, that seems to me most essential to creative living. The past empowers the present, and the groping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.

THREE
FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH

    J OAN AND E RIK MARRIED IN 1931 IN V IENNA , where he was being trained by Anna Freud to be a child analyst. They came to the United States in 1933 and moved to the West Coast in 1939, where I first met them after the war. Erik became more and more involved in research and writing in addition to seeing patients, building on Freud’s theories of the origins of sexuality in childhood and the role of the ego in the healthy personality. His theory of the life cycle focused on the emergence of characteristic strengths through the resolution of developmental crises, from infancy, when children struggle for trust and will, to old age, when the danger is despair. During