The Wrong Son - Neil Griffiths

The Wrong Son is a memoir of emotional precision - a searching, unsparingaccount of what it means to come into being in the absence of love. In 1963, a young husband loses his pregnant wife and eighteen-month-old sonin a car accident. Six months later, he meets a woman who abandons her ownhusband and child for him - a man who seems to her everything she has everwanted. Within two years, a boy is born into this family of grief and guilt, into a housealready filled with ghosts, where neither parent can see him clearly throughwhat each has lost. His mother demands perfection. His father, meanwhile, decides early on thatthis child exists only because the first one died - and cannot forgive him for it. Moulded by his mother, rejected by his father, he is given no space in which tobecome himself. Throughout his life, no matter how much he tries to invent himself, he is drivenby the fear that nothing real exists underneath. Fifty years on, after his parents'deaths, that fear begins to unmoor him. He turns to the work of psychoanalysts who were pioneers of early childhoodpsychology around the time he was born. Drawing on the insights of D.W. Winnicott and Jacques Lacan, The Wrong Sontraces a life shaped not only by loss and violence, but by psychic damage thatmay never fully be shaken off. With forensic clarity and unexpected humour, The Wrong Son is a quietlydevastating work: deeply human, psychologically attuned, and u
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