Norman Rockwell, ‘Triple Self-Portrait’ gag photo Now that my father is ninety-four years old, he no longer remembers that he spent much of his life in therapy. He remembers his analyst Dr Wheelis in San Francisco, and that his father’s friend and own analyst, Erik Erikson, sent him there. But he has no recollection of the decades of therapy that followed, or his last therapist, whom he ran into in a local bookstore a few years after ‘graduating’ from therapy. My father was probably in his late sixties then and was distressed when his therapist stared at him coldly and walked away. It was only later that he learnt the man had Alzheimer’s and remembered no one. This act of forgetting was particularly devastating to him because it was this very analyst who had diagnosed him with a Narcissus Complex when he was in his late fifties. Not with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, mind you, because though my father is self-obsessed, he is a very nice man. The Narcissus Complex is an old school, Freudian diagnosis that would probably be hard to come by nowadays. It is defined as a variety of neurotic self-love spurred on by a lack of reciprocation of one’s love for others, particularly one’s parents. My father was very pleased by it. He loved having a name to attach to the way he had felt his entire life. It made him feel grand. But he was also the worst with names, and he always forgot what it was called. Hey Dais, he’d say, you know that story of the Greek guy who was staring at himself in the water and then he fell in? I’d say, Yeah, Narcissus. he would declare happily, Right! My analyst says I have one of those. This was always followed by laments about how little attention he’d been paid by his parents – his father because he was a workaholic, and his mother due to her mental health problems – and what a great burden it was to be the artist son of a famous artist father. Mary Rockwell, by Norman Rockwell It was my paternal grandmother’s mental health spiral that drew the whole family into a vortex of therapy for an array of mental health complaints. It is unclear what her diagnosis would have been nowadays, but back then, in the 1950’s, the mental health field was in its infancy, and I have heard an assortment of diagnoses attributed to her state: she was depressed, she was an alcoholic, she suffered from schizo-effective disorder. She was married to America’s favorite illustrator who insisted on living in the middle of nowhere (Arlington, Vermont), to get away from the social life expected of a celebrity artist. She was lonely, isolated, a mother of three in the woods. She was a Californian with a Stanford degree, married to a famous person with a singular compulsion to work relentlessly, day in, day out. She had to run the household, look after the children, manage the correspondence, and read aloud to the artist. My father recently told me that she read War and Peace aloud to my grandfather twice. Also, many works by Dickens, my grandfather’s favorite. Like Tony Last in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, who ends up in an Amazonian jungle reading Dickens aloud to his captor for the rest of his life, she was doomed to read the greats aloud to her spouse over and over. The situation was untenable. Norman had to look up from his work and find a solution. In 1953 they moved from Vermont to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, home of the Austen Riggs Center, a psychiatric treatment center founded in 1919 by Dr Austen Riggs, who had developed what was then a unique approach to psychological healing that involved extensive talk therapy and therapeutic activities, such as tennis, pottery and botany. Riggs is located in a row of stately, white clapboard houses that line the main street of Stockbridge. The beautiful campus, with its wide lawns, majestic trees and attractive tennis courts, looks more like a prep school than a psychiatric hospital. Riggs’s innovations attracted many notable mental health professionals, most famously, Erik Erikson, the psychoanalyst trained by Anna Freud, who arrived two years before my grandparents, in 1951. Mary was put under the care of the director, Dr Knight, as was my father’s younger brother soon after. There were no rules governing that sort of thing in those days. My uncle found Dr Knight absolutely terrifying, and a few years ago, when visiting Riggs for an event (in honor of the Riggs Nursery School, an outpatient program established as a way for patients to work as teachers’ aides and ‘experience childhood as observers and as participants’, of which I am myself an alumna), I went searching for the bathroom and discovered, to my astonishment, that the dimly lit hallway was lined with drawings, made by my grandfather, of all the 1950’s Riggs psychiatrists, and I saw my uncle’s point: Dr Knight had the look of some sort of dark lord. Mary Rockwell passed away suddenly in 1959, and since it was the era of dodgy electric shock treatments and lots and lots of sedatives, the family blamed her death on a combination of these dark arts, and perhaps by corollary, on Dr Knight himself. Portrait of Erik Erikson by Norman Rockwell But early psychiatry was also the era of Erik Erikson, who formulated, among other things, the idea of childhood and adolescent identity stages and the identity crisis. Erikson and my grandfather are said to have hit it off instantly. Officially, he was my grandfather’s analyst, and visited him regularly at the studio, where they held lengthy sessions. Erikson’s daughter, Sue Erikson Bloland, once intimated to my father that she believed they simply sat about quasi-narcissistically (in the Freudian sense) bonding over being very famous and good at what they did, and all the pressures that involved. Is it any wonder that my grandparent who drew the Erikson straw fared better than the one with the Knight straw? Coincidentally, those dark psychiatric arts of the 1950’s were also practiced by my maternal grandfather, who, as a general physician, switched to psychiatry in 1950 after repeated tuberculosis exposures in rural Maryland. My mother always described him as an evil psychiatrist, as though this were a known archetype, and, as a child, I always thought it was. Those early days of psychiatry, according to my mother’s descriptions, bore a strong resemblance to the horrors one sees in old movies. When one of his children would enter his presence and say something like, I can’t sleep, or I have a tummy ache, he’d reach his long fingers into a trouser pocket and fish out a handful of enormous pills of multiple colors interspersed with hoarded bits of string and rubber bands. Take a red one and a blue one, and you’ll be just fine, he’d intone. No one knew what they were; they found it profoundly sinister. After numerous extramarital affairs on the part of my maternal grandfather, my grandparents eventually divorced the year before I was born. When I got to know him, he had remarried to a former patient, a Welsh woman, who was said to suffer from water on the brain. She had pale, puffy skin and a halo of golden curls. She rarely spoke and often stared into the distance. On one occasion when they were staying at the family house in Stockbridge, she was found wandering down the middle of the street early in the morning, clad only in a white nightgown. Later, it was discovered that her condition was a result of a combination of alcohol and those multi-colored pills my grandfather kept in his pockets. Upon rejecting both substances, she emerged from her shell, a shrewd woman whom my mother came to regard as the enemy. Whilst my father’s family became fervent believers in the benefits of psychoanalysis and psychiatry, my mother’s family was quite the opposite and avoided the treatment at all costs out of a genuine terror of the profession. It is no wonder that many in my mother’s family were horrified when they learned that my husband had elected to join the field of psychiatry, and he has since had to contend, from time to time, with being viewed as a possible evil psychiatrist at family gatherings. My mother was so frightened by the profession that when she grew concerned by any signs of psychological disturbance in me as a teenager, she would anxiously tell me to shape up, or she would be forced to send me to a therapist. Her own experience as an analysand seemed to be limited to two short phases in her life, although, with her jagged moods, more might have proved useful. The first was a few sessions with a marriage counselor when things were on the rocks with my father. Her version of this story was that the (male) therapist, who bonded right away with my father, told her to simmer down and be a good wife. This therapist’s own wife, incidentally, later experienced a psychotic break. This was the early seventies, and my mother was a second-wave feminist and free-spirited artist who hated wearing shoes and following society’s rules. She did not simmer down, and the marriage fell apart by the time I was five. Susan Merrill, Woman in Flight, 1981 Her second encounter with therapy was of a Jungian flavor. My mother was a fervent believer in the power of dreams and used to write out as many as she could remember when she awoke. A frequent theme when I was ten or so were the dreams of flying, on which theme she made a series of paintings. She concluded from the flying dreams that my father had been like a pair of heavy shoes that had weighed her down. Now that she was free of him, she could soar, although at times there were dreams where I appeared and pulled her back from the ecstatic jump-off point. Her obsession with dreams led to a series of dream analysis sessions with the Jungian analyst husband of a cousin. Because, as a children’s art teacher, she did not earn enough to pay for such treatments, she proposed to barter her skills as an interior house painter, a solution which he agreed to. After reviewing her dream journals, the Jungian explained that she had the psyche of a small woodland creature and that was why she had so much trouble conforming to society. At least that is what she told me, although it’s very possible she didn’t share the entire diagnosis. Jarvis Rockwell, Portrait of a Woman (Korea), 1953 While the rest of his family was receiving mental health care at Riggs, my father, no less troubled at the time, was forced to go instead to Korea. His name had come up for the Korean War draft when he was in art school and the family was still in Vermont. Norman had pulled some strings, and after promising a general that he would paint his portrait, my father was instructed that although he had no relevant experience, he was to enlist in the Air Force, which would keep him out of the trenches. Off he went to an Air Force base in St Louis, where he was supposed to wait out the term of his enlistment. He had always been a mediocre student and had previously dropped out of high school to attend art school. After enlisting, he believed for some reason that going into the Air Force was like enrolling in college, and he made sure to pack plenty of books. Not long after he arrived at the base, however, Norman decided he did not wish to paint the portrait after all and informed the general of this. Perhaps he didn’t have time? My father was soon put on a plane to Korea, where he was not much use to anyone. His time there was spent on office work, which included sketching his superior officers for the base newspaper and giving slide shows on venereal disease. He also read voraciously, mentioning T.S. Eliot and Erich Fromm, among others, in his letters home, and repeatedly asking to be sent the autobiography of Matisse. In one letter he reveals that he belonged to a book club on the base. The club had read Patrick Mullahy’s Oedipus: Myth and Complex, and he mentions that Freud’s view on ‘the artist’ shook the hell out of me, and, had me in knots for weeks. Letter from Jarvis Rockwell to Mary Rockwell, 1952 After returning from Korea, my father’s mental health was not the greatest, not that it had been before, and one can see this clearly from his letters home, in which he wrote things like: At any rate I am sure that I am coming out of my neurosis faster and faster every day. I shall very probably be close to the end of it when I return home. Upon his return, his neurosis was still intact, although he had managed to earn a GED in a wooden shack in the outskirts of Pusan, so perhaps enlistment was a little bit like college after all. Erik Erikson was consulted on his mental health and advised not treatment with Dr Knight, but a move west, to California. Go west, young man, it’s in your blood! my father always cries when telling this story, misquoting a classic nineteenth century expansionist exhortation. He dutifully packed his car and set off for San Francisco, where Dr Wheelis awaited him. The main thing my father has told me of this phase of treatment is the following: when he told Dr Wheelis that he was upset by his inability to draw hands properly, Dr Wheelis instructed him to go home and draw one hundred hands and bring them back to him. This he did, and it cured him of his problem with drawing hands (the subtext is that I would also benefit from such an exercise). During this period, my father spent his time: 1. Drawing in his apartment and staring suspiciously out the window; 2. Going to the psychoanalyst; 3. Working for the Lorenzini Brothers Italian grocery store on Fillmore Street delivering meat and frozen fish. Even now, when my father’s memory is not what it once was, his recollection of working for the Lorenzini Brothers is crystal clear. The brothers were four, all named after Italian opera heroes: Maximiliano (Max), Spartacus (Spot), William Tell (Tell), and Leonidas (Nini). Max was the head of the San Francisco opera chorus and had a deep, resonant voice, Spot cleaned the chickens, Tell was gay, and Nini told a lot of dirty jokes. The butchers, Marcel and Henri La Pouillade, were French. My father’s days were spent double-parking the delivery truck on downtown San Francisco’s famous hills and running into the homes of prominent families carrying packages of meat cuts and frozen fish. Jarvis Rockwell, self portrait, c. 1956 This was the era of the Beatniks in San Francisco, and although my father does not consider himself a Beat artist, he tells me the story of his one meeting with Allen Ginsberg nearly every time I see him nowadays. An acquaintance of his summoned him to a nearby café (it could have been the famous Beatnik hang-out, the Coexistence Bagel Shop, but he’s not sure), saying, There’s someone I want you to meet. Allen Ginsberg was seated at a table with a group of people. My father contends that the person doing the introducing simply wanted to see Allen Ginsberg meet Norman Rockwell’s son, as though this was a potentially combustible event, one which brought together two opposing forces. The introduction was effected, but apathetically on the part of the Beat poet, whose hand, my father insists, was limp and flaccid, like a damp fish. Nowadays, according to my husband, the psychiatrist, my father suffers from moderate to advanced dementia. Besides his focus on San Francisco in the fifties, he also produces a remarkable number of lines from old popular songs, such as ten cents a dance, that’s all they pay me, oh how they weigh me down, and smoking cigarettes and watching Captain Kangaroo, don’t tell me I’ve got nothing to do. He knows who we are, and he reads the New York Times every day, although he doesn’t retain much, except the horror of it all. For an extended period between his graduation from therapy and the current era, probably twenty years or so, he was obsessed with what would happen when he died. This obsession led him away from the great works of literature he had always read and into the occult sections of secondhand bookshops. He became fascinated with life after death experiences, reincarnation and alien abductions, reading ‘at’ a large number of books on these topics (his term for repeatedly reading bits of a book, but never finishing it). His chair in the living room became surrounded with teetering piles of such books, which he still dips into each day. He even signed up for past life regression therapy at one time and learned that he had been, in a past life, a genteel lady in the era of Henry James. He looked down and saw the buckles on his shoes. But now he says he no longer believes in heaven or reincarnation, and he knows that when he leaves, he’ll simply be gone. After years of perseverative conversations about the afterlife, which became so aggravating that most people in the family would find an excuse to escape whenever the topic arose, we find ourselves on the other side of the equation, cheerfully endorsing the notion of heaven and reincarnation. Somehow it feels depressing that he has simply given up on the whole thing. And I think about that line from one of his letters home from Korea: Jarvis Rockwell, letter from Korea to Norman Rockwell, c. 1953 When I first read them in a recently discovered trove of letters he had written home from Korea, I thought about how sad it was that he had never in fact come out of his neurosis in view of all the anxiety and self-absorption that had occupied him for decades. And that his mother certainly never recovered either. But now I think of the relative peace he feels in his latter years, and I recall how neurotic he was when I was a child. How he would sit hunched up over his drawing board with a ruler and pen and ink creating on tightly designed geometrical infinities large illustration boards while smoking two packs of True Blue cigarettes a day. Maybe all those years of psychoanalysis did something after all, and maybe he was right to celebrate his Narcissus Complex diagnosis, to relish it, even, because, for him, it conjured that captivating image of the Greek guy staring at his own reflection. And for my father, visual imagery, not abstract thought or the written word, is the apotheosis of human experience. Perhaps the ability to imagine his plight as a visual image was what ultimately set him free from the miasma of familial mental illness in the 1950s that had clouded his perceptions for so long. Jarvis Rockwell, ‘Fantasy’, 1967 • My father passed away shortly before the publication of this essay, on 25 th April, 2026. I have chosen to leave the text in the present tense because it feels too soon to relegate him to the past. Triple Self-Portrait , Portrait of Mary Rockwell and Portrait of Erik Erikson reproduced courtesy of The Norman Rockwell Family Agency.