Samuel Osherson

I am a psychologist who writes fiction as well as nonfiction. My novel, the Stethoscope Cure, centers on a young psychiatrist just holding on by a thread as he tries to deal with the flood of vets coming into a VA hospital during the Vietnam War. This is a time when I, too, came of age professionally, doing my internship in the Boston VA hospital in the late Sixties. The story is not a thinly-disguised rendering of my experiences, though it does draw on what I observed at the time. I turned to fiction to explore matters dear to my heart. Fiction offered ways to get deeper into things than nonfiction. I am fascinated by the inner life of therapists, particularly the wonderful irony that we are often able to help other people when we are so dearly in need of help ourselves. The struggle of Dr. Paul Gilverstein-- the novel's main character-- to be true to himself and his experiences without abandoning his responsibilities to others (his patients and his marriage, among others) seems to me to be a key question for us all today. The Vietnam era-- with its endless wars, social dislocation, and changing roles-- was a different time than today and yet not so different after all. The Stethoscope Cure offers an exploration of what it means to really listen to someone else, to truly hear and respond to those we are involved with. The story speaks directly to our needs today.

Before I turned to fiction I wrote a series of nonfiction books over a span of thirty years, each exploring some aspect of how we renew our creativity and hopefulness while remaining loyal to the roles and responsibilities that we hold dear, whether it be a job, marriage, parenting, our sense of where we've come from or our connection to our faith. How to stay "me" while also being a part of "we"? Each book was born out of my own experience. One of the advantages of being a psychologist is that you get to study what give you trouble.

So, for example, early in my career-- when I wanted to chuck my tenure-track teaching position and go study the classical guitar (not a good career move, given my musical talent)-- I wound up developing a careful interview study of men who left successful professional careers at midlife in order to pursue ultimately successful careers in the creative or performing arts. That study became my first solo book: Holding On or Letting Go: Men and Career Change At Midlife.

As I became successful and established in my own career, married, aged into my thirties and found myself on the edge of becoming a father, I found myself thinking a lot about my own father and the ways in which my struggles with him helped to shape my life and personality. I spent a number of years-- and grant money-- doing intensive interviews with men about their relationships with their fathers. I found that I was not alone. There is a complicated, profound, and often unspoken, connection between grown men and their fathers. The result was my book, Finding Our Fathers: How A Man's Life Is Shaped By The Relationship With His Father. Finding Our Fathers is a combination of memoir and psychological report, a sort of creative nonfiction before there was such a thing. I am pleased that Finding Our Fathers contributed to the growing awareness of the key roles of fathers in children's development. And, the book offered an early model of how scholarly authors can move away from the stultifying "expert," third- person, hierarchical authorial voice.

Another book of mine followed, further exploring men's dilemmas in finding their own voice amidst intimate experiences: Wrestling With Love: How Men Struggle With Intimacy. And, as my children aged, so appeared (ta-dah!) two books on parenting. One of them, The Passions of Fatherhood, is a closely observed portrait of the inner life of fathers as they experience the development of their daughters and sons. I wanted to explode the image of fathers as remote, stuffy, withdrawn figures who have trouble really feeling. Instead, I try to capture the "intimate dilemmas" of parenthood, and how fathers, like mothers, constantly struggle with the not- knowing that comes with raising a child, all the while being hopelessly in love with that child. Similarly, The Hidden Wisdom of Parenthood uses interviews with parents to capture the times that parents actually succeed in managing very difficult situations. It's a hopeful and eye- opening book. I have been impressed (and moved) in my work as a therapists and in public and professional workshops by how lonely parenting is and how often even successful parents harbor a secret sense of failure or not living up. Our culture puts tremendous strain on parents and often oppresses families with false beliefs about the power of parents.

Speaking of false beliefs, is there any subject more loaded than religion? A struggle to find a comfortable place within one's faith of origin is a theme that runs through much of my writing, and is a subtheme in The Stethoscope Cure. Raised in a Jewish family in post World War 2 Westchester, a family where there was a hidden and not-so-hidden struggle between the conservative Judaism of my father and the more progressive reformed Judaism of my mother (with the burgeoning women's movement mixed in), I have thought long and hard about what Judaism means to me. That meaning has changed and evolved at different points in my life. Rekindling the Flame: How Jews are Returning to their Faith uses stories from a broad range of men and women mixed with my own experiences to explore how to make a faith feel like one's own without losing the sense of where you come from. The core human struggle: how to feel like "me" without losing the "we"?