February 1, 2023 at 11:05 am
“The First Years Decide” is the title of a book by the psychiatrist and psychotherapist Erwin Ringel, which caused a stir in the late 1980s because Ringel’s thesis was still provocative at the time: According to Ringel, parents and educators are responsible for whether a child grows up in a healthy or a neurotic environment. The first years of human life are crucial for later personality development.
A few years earlier, in 1982, an autobiographical story by Thomas Bernhard had been published, which supported Ringel’s theses: the shame of an illegitimate birth, the mother’s great worries and her constant accusation that he, the child, had destroyed her life, the missing father and the grandfather who was so important for Bernhard, his, as Bernhard writes, “great explainer, the first, the most important, basically the only one” – these are important people for the boy.
“Ein Kind”, published more than 40 years ago, is the first volume in a series of autobiographical stories by Thomas Bernhard. The story, which Thomas Bernhard wrote when he was 50, empathetically and sarcastically describes the effects of childhood experiences on his life.