Sylvia Flescher

/ author

Coming November, 2026
Pre-order It now:

The Reluctant Psychoanalyst

A Daughter's Memoir

It is said that every memoir is an exorcism.

Sylvia’s charismatic Polish Jewish father, a psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor, expected her—indeed, groomed her—to join him in his quixotic mission to save the world from another genocide by spreading his version of the gospel of Freud. As his doting daughter, completely enmeshed with him, she complied, blind to his narcissism and toxic boundary-crossing. Then, when she was twenty-three and just two days into her psychiatric residency, he died.

Left with an introverted Gentile mother with her own tragic past, Sylvia remained professionally hobbled by ambivalence towards her not-so-freely-chosen profession. But decades later, after a powerful ceremony at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem honoring her mother’s courage for hiding her father in Rome during the war, Sylvia began to write . . . and finally found her voice.

 

Praise

“The Reluctant Psychoanalyst is a fascinating exploration of the historical background and family dynamics of  an American woman raised in the shadow of the Holocaust. With great insight and compassion, Flescher reveals the tenacity of our childhood perceptions of our parents and assumptions about ourselves, while charting the arduous path to discovering and reclaiming her true identity.”
—Helen Fremont, national bestselling author of After Long Silence

“What is it like to be the daughter of a Holocaust survivor father, who also happens to be a psychoanalyst? In this beautifully written and compassionate memoir, Sylvia Flescher explores her father’s outsize presence in her life (including his expectation that she follow in his footsteps) as she labors to develop her own voice and vocation. A profound meditation on the intergenerational transmission of trauma, The Reluctant Psychoanalyst is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand the ongoing legacy of the Holocaust, as well as the healing possibilities of gentle, quiet, and sustained reflection.”  
    —Madelon Sprengnether, author of Crying at the Movies 

“Sylvia Flescher’s memoir is far more than a memoir. It is a first-hand report of how the Nazi atrocities in mid-20th century Europe devastated — and also failed to devastate — Jewish people, how this massive trauma was trans-generationally transmitted, and how her family’s cohesion and capacities for sublimation helped transform their wounds into creative writing, playful and self-invented ‘family therapy’, and altruistic devotion towards others. Simultaneously historical and contemporary, emotional and thoughtful, interpersonal and intrapsychic, this autobiographical account of the daughter of a Holocaust survivor is bound to occupy a prominent place in both psychoanalytic and literary works on this great human tragedy.”
    —Salman Akhtar, MD, Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry, Jefferson Medical      College, and author of Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (2009).
 

“The Reluctant Psychoanalyst: A Daughter’s Memoir is a moving story of grief, inheritance, and finding one’s voice. Sylvia Flescher looks back at a childhood shaped by her close and complicated relationship with a larger-than-life psychoanalyst father too big to separate from, and a mother too wounded to fully reach—and finds, in looking back, both compassion and freedom. Through the discovery of her cousin Elsa’s diary from the Stanislavov ghetto, Flescher shows how writing can be a way to heal and to keep our loved ones alive.”                —Kerry Malawista, author of Meet the Moon and Wearing My Tutu to Analysis