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Points of View 57
control? What was she defending against?
To answer this question we’ll first look at how A.T.’s intellectual
defenses were related to her childhood and her relationship with her parents, and then see if perhaps there is even a more fundamental spiritual reason for them.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
A.T. was born in a rural area outside a comfortable small Massachusetts town—in natural surroundings, with a small brook that ran close to her home. She was the second of a sibship of four, having an older sister, younger sister and younger brother in that order. All sibs grew up excelling in school and finding responsible and productive professions.
A.T.’s parents were bright, creative people. Her father was an electrical engineer doing research and development. Her mother interrupted her education close to finishing her master’s degree in biochemistry in order to start the family and has now reentered the field, doing research as a field technician. A.T.’s older sister is a graduate of an eastern college with a B.S. in biology; her younger sister, a Ph.D. psychologist with a children’s day treatment center. Her younger brother has a B.S. degree in mathematics from Yale and is a consultant for a research lab.
A.T.’s early memories are wholesome and pleasant. She remembers her family as close and loving, free of drug problems, excessive aggressiveness or parental separations. For her first eight years the family was strongly Christian fundamentalist, but they became Unitarians when A.T.’s father felt uncomfortable teaching hell-fire and brimstone.
Although both parents were emotionally healthy, each was exposed to an element of psychological pain in childhood, resulting in some narrowing of consciousness. Later in life, A.T.’s father expressed this narrowness by dismissing as nonsense any subject that could not be clearly conceptualized in terms of forces, forms and mechanisms. Although having a strong spiritual side, he discounted most mystical thought as fuzzy, unclear, and unworthy of attention.
A.T.’s mother was born in Japan where her father was a Christian