Coming November, 2026
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The Reluctant Psychoanalyst
A Daughter's Memoir
It is said that every memoir is an exorcism.
With a Jewish psychoanalyst father who’d lost his entire family in the Holocaust and a non-Jewish, emotionally repressed mother, where did that leave author Sylvia Flescher? For years Sylvia struggled with writers’ block, worried that her own story paled in the shadow of her parents’ enormous losses. However, after a powerful ceremony in Jerusalem that honored her mother for her courage in hiding her father in Rome during the Nazi occupation, Sylvia began to write—and she finally found her voice.
In The Reluctant Psychoanalyst, Sylvia describes how trauma can pass into the next generation. A devoted daughter, for decades she did not feel free to deviate from her father’s agenda for her. Failing to recognize his narcissism and toxic boundary-crossing for what it was, she complied with his demand that she join him in his mission to “save the world from another genocide” by spreading his version of the gospel of Freud. With this memoir, Sylvia fulfills her duty to memorialize her parents’ lives—and claims the right to tell her own story.
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
“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