[DOWNLOAD] Optimal Distance: A Divided Life, Part One (Volume 1) by Joan Carol Lieberman ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free

Part Oneof Joan Carol Lieberman’s two-part autobiography, OPTIMAL DISTANCE, A Divided Life, reveals the genesis of her family in prose and photographs. The book’s title comes from early recognition that her survival was dependent on maintaining a safe distance from her mother, the descendant of prominent Mormon pioneers, who tragically developed paranoid schizophrenia at the time of the author’s birth. Perpetually alert to the distance between herself and others, her narrative draws upon the attachment theory of D.W. Winnicott, British pediatrician and psychoanalyst. Part One includes two of the five smaller books found in this autobiography: the author’s “CHILDHOOD” from her birth as a Gentile in Salt Lake City in 1942 to her first pregnancy in 1962 in Berkeley; and “MOTHERHOOD” from 1963, when the author gave birth to her daughter, to her mother’s death on the morning of the author’s fortieth birthday in June 1982.The author’s father was a federal research entomologist assigned to conduct the first experiments using DDT for agricultural purposes in Delta, Utah. He was born in Newark, New Jersey, but spent most of his childhood in Ogden, Utah. He was distantly related to Simon Bamberger, the only Jewish governor of Utah. After World War II, he was transferred from Delta to Logan, Utah, where he headed the USDA lab at Utah State. It was in Logan that the author found safe harbor in the Mormon Church. When she was five, she followed a playmate to a Ward House, where her presence was welcomed. Knowing her mother would never follow her there, she felt the Mormon Church was a safe place to hide. Or as she writes: “I always felt like a small wild animal desperately trying to hide from danger among a large herd of domineering dairy cows.” At age eight, she went to the Mormon Temple alone to be baptized. At fourteen, her father was transferred to Bozeman, Montana, and the author left Utah and Mormonism behind. Less than a year later, her father was sent to Bakersfield, California, where she graduated from high school. During high school she was a National Science Fair winner and finally learned the name and cause of her mother’s mental illness. In that era, most psychiatric experts believed schizophrenia was caused by “perverse mothering.” Having had nothing but that, the author concluded that she was doomed, a fear that haunted her for the next twenty years, even as she began a hopeless quest to heal her mother.After studies at the University of California at Berkeley, Joan Carol Lieberman traveled in Europe and worked as a medical volunteer in Africa, where she contracted Yellow Fever. By the time she returned to America, her father had been transferred to Tucson, Arizona. The first night she was home from Africa, her mother made an attempt on her life. She committed her mother to a Tucson hospital where she was treated for the first time with the first pyschotropic drug, Thorazine. After a month in Tucson, the author returned to Berkeley to continue her studies. Increasingly resilient, she was able to withstand the sadness of her mother’s illness, even while she faced an illegitimate pregnancy, shotgun marriage, divorce, and single-working-motherhood. Granted excommunication from the Mormon Church on the grounds of apostasy in 1966, she moved to Northern Idaho to finish her thesis on leadership. After accepting a managerial position in Boulder, Colorado, she began breaking through the glass ceilings facing women and never stopped. Her poignant, detailed journey is both exhaustively researched and intimately personal. Locales include: Salt Lake City, Delta, and Logan, Utah; Yellowstone, Wyoming; Bozeman, Montana; Bakersfield and Berkeley, California; Europe; Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; Troy, Idaho; Boulder, Colorado.