Dear Marion, Appended are three dated letters to Margrit which speak for themselves. To each there was a hand-written signature: "Dein Jochen" I don't know in where in Belmont the letters of Margrit which I am answering are stored; but I'm certain I did not knowingly destroy them. When the letters are found, I'll scan them and send copies to you as pdf files. Following our telephone conversation, which I found useful and constructive, I've tentatively decided not to reimburse myself for the debts of Margrit's estate which I paid, but to distribute the entirety of her probate estate to William Nease, Georgette Fleischer, Hannah Atkinson and or Mary Atkinson. In what proportion to each, I don't know. My inference is that because Georgette rejected her, Margrit in effect disinherited poor Georgette, - but so did Georgette's father, setting the stage for a Eugene O'Neill tragedy in which I do not wish to be an actor. I suspect that Margrit's designating Harold Atkinson as beneficiary of her two retirement accounts reflects a misunderstanding on Margrit's part. She appointed Harold Atkinson to be trustee of the educational trust she envisioned, and mistakenly thought to achieve this purpose she had to name him as beneficiary, while in actuality the educational trust would have been funded by the probate estate. Presumably, as a professor at the University of Windsor, Harold Atkinson's retirement was provided for, as was that of Mary Atkinson, his widow. William Nease and Georgette Fleischer on the other hand are of marginal means and need the money. I ask myself whether it's wise for me to make such distributions until I am informed of the content of the codicil to Margrit's will which Ute Wigley-Mueller has not (yet) disclosed to me, or until I have reason to conclude that this information will be withheld. I'm open to all suggestions and comments. Jochen ========================================= September 7, 1991 Liebe Margrit, Your letter arrived yesterday, and I thought it might be helpful if I tried to make a beginning of answering it, although the issues you raise are very difficult and I know I cannot do justice to them in a single letter, if at all. You have sometimes criticized me for my attitude, for what I have done in the past, or what amounts to the same thing, for the sort of person I have been. While such criticism doesn't offend me, and while I try to learn from it, these are matters that I cannot change. I cannot change the person that I am. I cannot change the past. If you are dissatisfied, tell me what you would like me to do now, this week, this month, this year. Of course I cannot promise you that I will comply with every request. What I can promise is: 1) that I will try to understand what you ask, 2) that I will try to do what you request of me, and 3) if what I am able or willing to do is unsatisfactory to you, I will try to explain myself in however great detail you wish. The best hope of improving the relationship is my trying to understand your requests, and your trying to understand my answers when they do not fully satisfy you. A preliminary problem for me is that you merge your complaints against Mutti and Papa and against Klemens with your complaints against me. I hold myself responsible for everything that I have done, but I cannot be responsible for Mutti and Papa. In my own mind I have often been very crit- ical of them, to the extent where I became ashamed of my own criticism, but I can do nothing about them. I can also not be held accountable for Klemens, who is now thirty-five years old and largely responsible for the renal dialysis unit and the renal clinic at his hospital. It is true that we regularly share ideas and information and that our judg- ments coincide in many respects, but it is also true that we are different persons, and I do some things which are not congenial to him, and he does some things which are not con- genial to me. With respect to his relationship to you, you should know that last May he specifically requested that I stay away from Konnarock to give him an opportunity to confirm his own relationship to you, and I complied with that request. Your letter referred specifically to "the issue around Klemens and the children," I infer that much of your unhap- piness stems from the fact that you have not had the oppor- tunity to take charge of Rebekah and Nathaniel. I think the most constructive perspective in which to look at this issue is to consider: 1) They are not my children, and their upbringing is not under my control. I am not critical of Klemens and Laura in the least, but there are very important aspects of their education which I would manage differently, and to argue whether I would or would not have you take charge of them if they were my children is like arguing about whether I would sell you the Brooklyn Bridge if it belonged to me. 2) They are not only Klemens's children but also Laura's. Laura has various uncles and aunts (of whom I know four), and it is totally inconceivable to me that her children would be left in the charge of any of them except in an emergency the nature of which again I cannot imagine. The relationship of Rebekah and Nathaniel to you, therefore, is completely symmetric with their relationship to their other great-aunts and uncles, and objectively there is no reason why you should feel disproportionately excluded from their care. You have said from time to time that we do not trust you. I have thought about "trust" a good deal, since I make my living by persuading my patients to trust me. The term trust is too general and too much weighed down with emotion to be very useful. Let me suggest that the term "trust" has at least three different objects: loyalty, judgment, and skill. It is slightly embarassing, but to clarify the issue, let me remind you that I trust Margaret's loyalty abso- lutely, but I would never trust her legal judgment, or her ability to drive a car. So far as you yourself are con- cerned, forgive me for saying that I also trust your loyalty absolutely, and that so far as your judgment and skills are concerned, of some I am convinced, to some I am open-minded, and of others I am open to persuasion. It is important to remember that if judgment and skills exist, trust in them will arise as soon as they are demonstrated, (this is the case, even where there is no loyalty), and where they do not exist, they can be learned. One is constantly entrusting individuals with tasks which they have newly learned and in which they have demonstrated their competence only recently. This is an issue, which, if you think it useful, we can talk about at greater length. A systematic issue which it is necessary to clarify at an early stage of our reconciliation, is the circumstance that while you are critical and angry at me, I do not recip- rocate. It has been many years since I was critical of you or angry. This stance of intellectual and emotional forbearance is conscious and deliberate and extends to all members of my family. I remember very vividly, even fifty years later, one day in the medical center when Mutti and Papa fought either with each other or with you. I was standing in the second floor hallway, halfway between your room and mine, when I made the conscious resolve to train myself never to become angry at any member of my family, and to create for my family an environment free of anger and dissention. I was very serious about this, and thought about it a great deal. I remember when I was a third year medical student learning psychiatry at what was then the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, a class discussion, in which the instructor, a man, I suppose in his mid forties, was discussing the emotional dynamics of family relationships and asserting the inevitability of hostility and anger. I remember declaring then with youthful self-confidence that I was never going to fight with any of my children or for that matter with any members of my family. and I have often thought of the instructor's embarrassed and hostile reply: "If you never get angry at them they will think that you are one first class son of a bitch because you don't even care enough to get angry with them." As I get older, I think there may be something to that, and I suspect that if I were to be critical of you, wenn ich Dir jetzt Vorwuerfe machte, we could have a real quarrel after which, you might feel much better, or you might feel much worse. It is possible that you will not believe me, that you will argue that although I speak no criticism and express no anger, nonetheless I harbor unspoken criticism and unex- pressed anger. You might accuse me, as Mutti would have done, of dissembling, of being "unaufrichtig", untruthful, because although my words were uncritical and conciliatory, my attitude (Einstellung) was hostile. Such an argument would presuppose that you knew me better than I know myself. This, however, would be an accusation subject neither to proof or disproof, which is meaningful only in a realm of metapsychology to which I have never paid much attention. In the context of our relationship, the accusation that my profession of tolerance and charity was dishonest would mean that you really didn't want anything to do with me. It would amount to a rejection of my personality, a rejection which would preclude any discourse between us until it was rescinded. The fundamental question about our relationship which we must decide, is how close and strong we wish it to be. On this question also, I am amenable to your wishes. For my part I would always prefer an active exchange of ideas and feelings, but I would not be hurt if, in the end, you wished to spend your time and energy on other matters. If we want to understand each other better, then as a first step, we should spend more time, much more time, talking with each other, and the obvious way to do this is to spend half an hour or so each week, discussing on the telephone, the sub- stantive issues which are of concern to us. I suspect that we could make a great deal of progress in a very short time. ==========================================` September 10, 1991 Liebe Margrit, I don't know whether you will feel better if I try to answer your letter to Margaret. I am always concerned that what I say might just make things worse, but since implicit in any letter is a request for a reply, I think I would be remiss if I did not at least make an effort. There are several separate items about which I might comment. I really don't think I have been unkind to you or done you wrong, at least not for many years. I take your accusation that I prevented you from developing a relationship to Klemens at face value. My memory for what happened twenty or thirty years ago is perhaps not very good. But so far as I can remember, nothing prevented you from coming to visit us whenever and for however long you wanted, and forming with Klemens whatever relationship you wished. It is true that for many years you asked Klemens to visit you without us. He did not accept your invitation because he didn't want to come, and the reason he didn't want to come is because you asked him to come without us, and he didn't want to be separated from us. Underlying your complaint is the assumption that it is desirable for a relative or family friend like yourself to take a child from its parents and to give the child an expe- rience independent of and perhaps adverse to the parental environment. What proportion of intelligent adults would share that assumption, I don't know. But not I. What you are really complaining about is the closeness of Klemens relationship to us. I admit, I did not arrange for him to go to visit you in the way that parents customarily arrange for their children to go to camp. Parents do this, because their children get on their nerves, and they don't know what to do with their children. That is why we got sent to Juist and to Berlin. But Klemens never got on my nerves, and I never wanted to send him away. It was he who did not wish to come without us, and it was not I who prevented him from coming. Did I really have an obligation to send him away from me? Neither Mutti and Papa nor Margaret's parents ever asked Klemens to visit them without us. As a matter of fact, he visited Mutti and Papa by himself only once, and that was when he was twenty three years old, and Margaret's parents he never visited by himself at all. But even if he had, such visits to his grandparents could not be inter- preted as any neglect of you. You might have cause to com- plain if he had visited his other aunts and uncles, Alex, Janet, *) or Peter, but he never did, and none of them ----------- *) The only exception is a ten day visit to Dobbs Ferry, just after he had finished medical school, to take care of Robert Bingham as he was dying. accuse Margaret or myself of having interfered with their relationship to him. The root of your dissatisfaction with me is your inability to accept the differences between us. You measure me against your friends as a standard, and take offence that I am different from them. Well, I am different from them, I refused to send my child to a day care center or to a kindergarten, or to camp, to Sunday School or to church. I regarded formal schooling as an unavoidable evil. I have many patients whom I like very much and to whom I am very generous, but I have no friends such as you have; and I don't want any. I want only to take care of my family. Your relationship to Rebekah and Nathaniel is, as I wrote you in my last letter, an issue not between us, but between yourself and Klemens and Laura. I think it is destructive for you to blame me for Klemens' and Laura's refusal to let you take charge of their children. I also don't think you should fight with Klemens and Laura over it. As I wrote to you in my last letter, none of Laura's uncles or aunts have made such a request nor have Janet, Peter or Alex, and to none of them would such a request be granted. I can imagine circumstances, if you lived nearby and the children knew you well, and you were willing to take care of them as an agent of their parents and according to their parents' instructions, that the kind of arrangement you desire would evolve naturally, but the attempt to force such an arrangement by threatening to cut yourself of from your family unless your demand was granted is, to say the least, counterproductive, and if I were you, I would apologize to Klemens and Laura for having made it. As for the question of whether we should spend a few days in Konnarock together, the answer is yes, but I think it would be very desirable that we should have some very frank telephone conversations beforehand. I don't think we should plan to meet in Konnarock in order to fight. I con- strue my feelings about being together in the context of my childhood memories, when our family, Papa, Mutti, and you were the only society that had any meaning to me, and when my only concern, and the only real prayers that I every prayed were that we should "always" remain together. This attitude clearly has much to do with the separation anxiety which so dominated my early childhood. You can probably see the consistency of my behavior, my anxiety about separation from Mutti and Papa was replaced by my reluctance to be sep- arated from Margaret and Klemens, and it does not take a psychoanalyst to see that the relationship which I have built to Klemens is the one that I wished I could have had to my own father. The efforts I have put into the preserva- tion of the Konnarock house, my buying the house next door for Mutti and Papa, the care that I took of them in Kon- narock rather than in a nursing home, the substantial gifts I have made to Klemens and his family and to you, are all expressive of my desire to preserve my family of which you are and always will always be a part. ============================================== September 12, 1991 Liebe Margrit, Thank you for the packet of accumulated letters. I am sad about the pain out of which they arose, and I don't want to do anything which would cause you more sorrow. There are, as you can imagine, many things you say with which I dis- agree and many things you do which I would do differently or not at all. However, except in the occasional instance where I anticipate that my opinion might be of value to you, I think nothing is gained by talking about something that cannot be changed. Your account of how you take care of the children of your friends and how much your efforts are valued, is very persuasive to me. I suspect that in those situations you probably function very well because you are free of the bur- dens of your childhood. But at us you are terribly angry, and have been for many years, and I assume it is that anger which makes you do and say things which complicate your relationship to us. Perhaps if that anger would ebb, you could have the kind of relationship to Klemens and Laura and their children that you would like to have. But that is a matter between yourself and them. Of the other matters that concern you, my advice that you not fly to Konnarock when Muttis illness took a turn for the worse, was deliberate and considered. I am still unable to convince myself that it was incorrect, or that I should not have given it. So far as the silver if concerned, it was my considered judgment that portable valuables should not be left in an unattended house, and I still feel that way. Please think it over: If you really want all those things kept in Konnarock, I will take them down when I go on September 28, if you will tell me where you want them put. From your description of my arguments as sophistry I infer that you can neither accept nor rebut them. "Gegen die grossen Vorzuege eines anderen, gibt es kein Ret- tungsmittel als die Liebe," and I suppose so far, you haven't been able to muster enough of that. But then there is always the future. As for the December plans, I would very much like to see you in Konnarock, and I suggest we discuss our differences on the telephone beforehand, so that there might be a minimum amount of fighting.