Who Am I Really?

The author, a psychotherapist, reexamines his own past, including his parents, childhood, education, and career, and discusses the fantasies people create about themselves

A psychotherapist and author of If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!, Kopp offers his life story as an exercise in self-definition. The goal: for him (and readers) to "retell" childhood experiences so that "later on, our stories can end more happily than they began." Born an only child in a Jewish section in the Bronx, Kopp forever disappointed his mother and his father acquiesced in his wife's berating attitude. Kopp believed he was basically bad, and he notes that "in retrospect it seems that being 'bad' merely meant expressing my feelings of my own. I was not to be obviously beyond parental control." He recounts a stormy adolescence, difficult schooling (when he achieved much but was nonetheless dissatisfied), his troublesome early career years, his ongoing struggle with a brain tumor. Except for some choppy writing and inexplicably fleeting references to early girlfriends and his wife, this is a considered, inspiring book.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.