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Generational Glue
| Article
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20319 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1992 |
2,056 Words |
| Author
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Catherine Maclay
Catherline Maclay is a writer and editor who lives in
Berkeley, California. |
FAMILY TALES, FAMILY WISDOM
How to Gather the Stories of a Lifetime
and Share Them with Your Family
Robert U. Akeret with Daniel Klein
New York: William Morrow and Company, 1992
234 pp., $17.00
"In remembering we seem to attain that impossible synthesis . . . that life yearns for," Sartre wrote in Being and Nothingness. In our memories of the past we create a defined and meaningful world that can accompany us as we journey though the chaos of the present, and that we can offer as a guide to those who come after us. With its selectivity, its hunger for interpretation, memory makes art and philosophy out of each life story. But today, argues New York psychoanalyst Robert Akeret, family storytelling is a lost art, and both the old and the young suffer for it. In his persuasive and practical book, Family Tales, Family Wisdom, he makes a case for why we need these stories, and then sets forth a program for making certain that they are told before it is too late. Citing an African proverb, "when a knowledgeable old person dies a whole library disappears," he sets up his "elder-tale program" as a way to save from extinction the library of knowledge and wisdom that is gathered in the course of each lifetime. The program is designed to strengthen the bonds between generations, giving dignity to the lives of the old and courage to the young.
One may hesitate at thought of having to follow a program to achieve what should be a spontaneous event, but Akeret provides a flexible and workable method that will appeal even to skeptics. His approach is gentle and nondogmatic, and Akeret (author of Photoanalysis and a professional memoir entitled Not by Words Alone) fills Family Tales, Family Wisdom with moving excerpts from "elder tales" he has facilitated. In his attempt to provide a "framework for a natural desire," Akeret cites the nativist revival among North American Indians, the Coast Salish of British Columbia in particular, who have turned to their elders to rediscover their identity through the myths, rituals, and lost arts of their people. "There is a culturally universal desire of elders to make contact with the generations that will survive them," he writes. "This hankering to serve as a living historical link--as 'generational glue'--seems, in its way, as natural as the sex drive, and, ultimately, has the same goal: continuity of the species."
The elder tale program consists of ten successive
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