Shari Thurer, ScD, is a BPSI Psychotherapist Member. Her below remarks originally appeared in the Fall 2020 issue of the library newsletter, which can be read here.
Among the torturous obligations of my American adolescence was the reading of Carson McCuller’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, about four losers in a godforsaken town in 1930s Georgia. Rereading it now in my geriatric years with a modicum of maturity and psychoanalytic training, I realize that John Singer, a deaf mute who became an object of worship, was the perfect blank screen onto which his peers could project their fantasies. Singer’s only attachment was to another deaf mute, an empty soul who cared for nothing except food. Of course the novel is about our inability to communicate….but as a teenager I wondered why we had to read about such pathetic individuals. Then I grew up.
Shari Thurer, ScD, is a BPSI Psychotherapist and Library Committee Member, a former Adjunct Associate Professor at Boston University, a psychologist in Boston, and the author of many noted publications, including Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994) and The End of Gender: A Psychological Autopsy (Routledge, 2005). Among her recent book reviews are Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot’s Balm in Gilead, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, and Tania Crasnianski’s Children of Nazis.
Shari Thurer can be contacted by email here.
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