ABSTRACT
I became a psychologist and psychoanalyst with the image of a couch in my head. I began my own therapy as a doctoral student in clinical psychology and as a dancer. Being a dancer, as a well as a budding psychologist and psychoanalyst, my first choice of psychotherapy was dance therapy. But even back then, in my early twenties, the vision of the death of my father from cancer, when I was ten, was with me. One of my dance therapy demonstrations for a central New York dance therapy center emerged as a mournful circular dance with grief-stricken scream at the end. The cry of grief evolved out of my mournful dance. However, one day my mother came to one of these demonstrations and saw my dance of mourning. When she was in the room I could not be fully within myself with the feelings for my father, and my scream came out late, not organically from within. Of course this is what my mother noticed. The story of my life was right there, being left with the critical mother after my adoring father died, a father who cherished and celebrated me. But later I would learn there was much more to it. There was my father’s punitive side and my guilt over my hatred towards my mother. There was also my constant need for recognition to counteract my mother’s negative comparisons to my older sister.
