Chris Forhan My Father Before Me

《My Father Before Me》是一本深刻探讨父子关系及其对彼此一生影响的书籍。作者迈克尔·J.戴蒙德通过超30年的父子关系研究，以精神分析思想为核心，结合发展心理学的脉络，为我们呈现了一幅父子情感联结与成长的画卷。

‌书中强调了父子关系的相互影响与重要性‌。作者指出，父亲并不仅仅是家庭中的一个角色或称呼，更是一种责任与传承。父亲的作用远超过母亲，是孩子通向世界的引路人。孩子与父亲的关系，将决定他与世界的关系。这种深刻的见解，让我们重新审视父亲在家庭和社会中的定位与价值‌。

‌书中提出了“足够好的父亲”这一概念‌。一个能够培养自己的情感、全身心投入孩子内心的父亲，将对孩子的成长产生深远的影响。这样的父亲，不仅是孩子成长道路上的灯塔，更是他们闯荡世界的底气。通过书中的案例与分析，我们得以窥见父子间那份超越生命的力量与联结‌。

‌此外，书中还详细阐述了父亲在孩子成长每个阶段的作用与责任‌。从幼儿时期与母亲的分离，到与父亲产生联结；从学步期与父母分离，鼓励与物理世界接触；再到青春期与家庭分离，摆脱稚嫩、充满理想化的依恋模式；直至成人远离父母，经济独立。父亲在每一个阶段都扮演着不可或缺的角色，为孩子独立性的建立提供有力的支持。

《My Father Before Me》是一本值得每位父亲、母亲乃至孩子阅读的书籍。它不仅让我们深刻理解了父子关系的复杂性与重要性，更指引我们在成为更好父亲的道路上不断前行。

书名：My Father Before Me

作者：Chris Forhan

简介：An award-winning poet offers a multi-generational portrait of an American family—weaving together the lives of his ancestors, his parents, and his own coming of age in the 60s and 70s in the wake of his father’s suicide, in this superbly written, “fiercely honest” (Nick Flynn) memoir.

The fifth of eight children, Chris Forhan was born into a family of silence. He and his siblings learned, without being told, that certain thoughts and feelings were not to be shared. On the evenings his father didn’t come home, the rest of the family would eat dinner without him, his whereabouts unknown, his absence pronounced but not mentioned. And on a cold night in 1973, just before Christmas, Forhan’s father killed himself in the carport.

Forty years later, Forhan “bravely considers the way he is and is not his father’s son” (Larry Watson), digging into his family’s past and finding within each generation the same abandonment, loss, and silence in which he was raised. Like Ian Frazier in Family or Frank McCourt in Angela’s Ashes , Forhan shows his family members as both a part and a product of their time. My Father Before Me is a family history, an investigation into a death, and a stirring portrait of growing up in an Irish Catholic childhood, all set against a backdrop of America from the Great Depression to the Ramones.

Marrying the literary scope of memoirists Geoffrey Wolff and J.R. Moehringer with the intensity of family novels like The Corrections and We Are Not Ourselves , My Father Before Me is the kind of epic, immersive memoir that comes along once in a decade。