Going Home

Of the original psychoanalytic triumvirate of Freud, Adler, and Jung, perhaps the most forgotten was Alfred Adler. Adler was best known for the creation of the term “inferiority complex”, but perhaps his greatest contributions were his founding of the child guidance movement, community mental health centers, and his humanistic approach to psychopathology in general.
Adler died suddenly and unexpectedly, most likely of a heart attack, while on a speaking tour in Scotland. He was cremated there, but oddly, his ashes disappeared, perhaps in the chaotic runup to the Second World War. The ashes were just recently found on a shelf just a few hundred yards from the crematorium in Edinburgh, and are being returned to Vienna to be buried in an honored place in the central cemetery.
I am writing these words in a hotel in New York, not far from the hospital where I was born almost six decades ago. Yesterday a cab driver took me down Park Avenue, to a writer’s bar in Greenwich Village I wanted to see. As you travel south from midtown, you drive through a tunnel carved not out of a mountain, but under a building—the Metropolitan Life building (now the Helmsley building). It is an interesting way to build something, and the road itself takes a sharp carve just after you go through the building.
I have not lived in New York for more than half a century, so the experience seemed new to me. But tonight, as I let the thick air of Manhattan surround me as I walked, I remembered it. As a child I would often perch myself on the ledge behind the back seat that most cars had then. I could stare straight up at the world through the back window. That odd sensation of driving down a central street in Manhattan, entering the mouth of a big building, the sky disappearing, and then quickly entering a curve, like a horizontal roller coaster, just came back to me. I remember the strangeness of it, the slight dizziness, not unlike I felt last night in the taxi.
I am not terribly nostalgic about coming home. Life was not good when I lived here. In fact, it was mostly horrible. But it is a touchstone, something that makes one remember who one is. Of course, it is a silly cliché that we all end up going home eventually; we start as ashes and dust and end as ashes and dust.
But there is still something compelling about going back to that original nest, the comfort and safety of the womb, or at least the illusion of that safety.
I left New York and moved to California in high school. Neil Diamond, who went to my high school in New York and had the same music teacher, wrote “L.A.’s fine but it ain’t home, New York’s home but it ain’t mine no more.” What then, is it?
“Home” becomes a touchstone, that which we touch to remind us that we are still alive. It is an anchor, of sorts, a mooring whenever the seas get rough.
Pacific Child began as a dream of independence from the mental health clinics where I had worked previously. Yet it has been my home for 23 years now. As my connection to the heartbeat of PCFA moves closer and more distant, it is my touchstone, my home, my illusion of safety, yet still just a stopover somewhere between ashes and ashes.