Early Childhood

My path to psychoanalysis began in early childhood, avant la lettre. Born less than three years after the end of the war, I experienced, like so many of my generation, within my family of origin a complex web of anger, pain, fear, a thirst for adventure, vitality, and sensual pleasure. What left me profoundly confused was the silence and the lies of many people I loved: psychological phenomena that a child may be unable to comprehend cognitively, yet can intuitively perceive as being surrounded by taboos—questions that must not be asked and truths that must not be known.

The desire to decipher these prohibitions on knowing, and to make them intellectually and emotionally accessible to myself, became the origin of my interest in psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

I was born into a family that had been compelled to constitute itself as such only because of my existence—an existence unwanted by virtually everyone involved. My mother was engaged to a Jewish American officer when she became pregnant by a fellow student in Innsbruck. She refused an abortion that had already been arranged and, to the horror of her brothers, married my future father.

I spent the first six formative years of my life amid the bomb-damaged landscape of a small Tyrolean town. In and around the house of my widowed Italian-Marrano grandmother on Bahnhofstraße in Wörgl, I encountered people from the most disparate backgrounds: Communists who had escaped execution almost at the last moment; Social Democrats liberated from Dachau concentration camp; Nazi perpetrators who had been imprisoned for several months in Kufstein Fortress in 1945; former Nazi fellow travellers who referred to Hitler as “Adolf the First”; people liberated from the Wörgl camp for so-called “Mischlinge ersten Grades” (“first-degree mixed-race persons” under the Nazi racial laws); desperate disabled war veterans bending down to pick up cigarette butts; representatives of the French occupying forces in their striking uniforms; desperately poor East Prussian refugee families living in the barracks of the former Nazi camp; and attractive young women in home-sewn suits searching for a suitable husband.

Wörgl’s Jewish residents had been robbed, driven into exile, or murdered—among them my mother’s best friend. Now deprivation and hardship affected almost everyone, and somehow all these people had to endure one another.

We kept chickens and rabbits in our courtyard. The tenants in our building, some of whom had been billeted there during the war, were crowded into the smallest possible spaces. There was also a shoemaker’s workshop in the house, whose fragrant scraps of leather became my favourite toys. At home there was Italian opera and literature; outside our windows, behind lowered blinds, there was the spirited sound of brass-band music.

Italian was a kind of secret language between my grandmother and me. As a descendant of Trentino irredentists, she hated the tedeschi—the Germans—with all the passion expected of a member of the Calvi family, and she had rejoiced wholeheartedly at Germany’s defeat.

At the time of my birth, her mother Irina had arrived triumphantly from the province of Brescia. Three generations of Italian ladies—my great-grandmother, my grandmother, and my mother—picked their elegant way through the bombed-out ruins in high heels, with me, the fourth generation, in a pram.

As my early childhood progressed, I became part of a group of farmers’ and railway workers’ children who were allowed to roam freely through the town, fields, and woods. Our favourite playgrounds were Wörgl railway station and the sawmill belonging to relatives by marriage.

My one-eyed father took my mother and me on motorcycle excursions to Bavaria and across the Brenner Pass: all three of us perched on an unsteady motorbike, without helmets, protective clothing, or goggles. I was hidden beneath my mother’s voluminous coat, my legs tucked up, while contraband was concealed against her body.

There was no television, no telephone, scarcely any radio, no car, no running water in the flat, no washing machine, and no heating. Books and records were prohibitively expensive; newspapers were read at the school where my father worked. The neighbouring farmers’ wives distilled schnapps to keep their husbands quiet, while the black market dominated everyday shopping.

Of the eight rooms in our flat, only four were actually used: the kitchen, where everyone washed themselves in a single basin and gathered for meals; my parents’ bedroom; my room; and a room shared by my grandmother and uncle. The remaining rooms existed for appearances and remained unused. Most of the time, every room was bitterly cold.

Portraits of Hitler had already been removed from Tyrolean walls in the spring of 1945, shortly before the arrival of the American liberation forces. In our home, however, since we belonged to no religious denomination, the pale rectangle left behind was not transformed once again into the traditional Herrgottswinkel—the devotional corner found in many Catholic homes. Instead, it disappeared beneath imposing family photographs intended to evoke the illusion of an intact pre-war world.

Only later did I discover that several members of my mother’s family were absent from these portraits: three great-aunts and a great-uncle whose very existence had been erased and whose names were no longer spoken.

Decades later, I began to develop my own understanding of a fractured family, one that had fallen partly silent about the history of its own origins—a family for whom neither education nor prosperity had brought greater insight into how it had become what it was.

And after distancing myself from my family of origin for many years, my psychoanalytic training and my experience of life gradually brought with them a growing compassion for my family, as well as a desire for reconciliation.

These two qualities together—knowledge and non-judgemental empathy—are also indispensable foundations of the work I practise with people today.