ABSTRACT
In this chapter, a psychoanalyst raised by alcoholic parents helps her adult alcoholic son move toward recovery. By sharing nightly reading sessions over the telephone for several years, the psychoanalyst mother and alcoholic son are able to reconnect. As communication is reopened, the mother, using her psychoanalytic experience, is able to recognize ways in which her past traumatic experience has been re-enacted in her own parenting. The author is able to integrate more of her own past experience. Her son is freed from transference projections and comes to be known and accepted as a unique individual. Both his and her development along a line of healthy dependence on others is fostered.
