And then the image thrust its way into my consciousness, like a plant breaking through soil, clear as I’d seen it as a child, plastered across the cover of the book. My parents were early in their careers as therapists and had invited their colleague Patrice Lyle over for a cocktail. They were always exchanging books and papers, then meeting to talk about them while I eavesdropped, or tried to—none of the theory made sense to me, the shop talk could be duller than my math class in school, but once in a while they’d share stories about their patients, and this was what I lived for.

I couldn’t remember what Patrice said, only my father’s rejoinder: “Well, no need to be Freudian about it!” I remembered him laughing, his eyebrows pushed up toward his hairline, a laugh that unsettled me, falling as it did in that frightening gap between pleasure and disdain. I was sitting in the corner of the couch, almost invisible, a book splayed open on my lap, though at best I had been tracing the shapes of the letters with my gaze. Patrice laughed and shrugged in response. I guessed she was trying to soften him. I felt pained and embarrassed for her, but envious, too: she had, after all, made him laugh, whatever kind of laugh it was.

“What’s ‘Freudian’?” I asked, to make myself known.

My mother explained that Freud had invented a kind of psychology a long time ago. “Like you?” I had asked, but my parents had shaken their heads, amused. No one believed his ideas anymore, they said; those theories had been disproven. “Neurosis is a high-class name for whining,” my father said. The kind of psychology my parents practiced, they explained, was supported by data. Freud’s kind gave people a cop-out, letting them talk themselves into oblivion. My father said studies had proven their mode of treatment worked best: “Sem-i-nal!” my mother replied in singsong. There was something in their tone that unsettled me—their certainty, maybe; their flippant dismissal; or maybe their unity.

“But who was he?” I said. “Why doesn’t anyone believe him anymore?” I looked from one to the other—at Patrice, who had sat back in her seat and was picking lint off her pants, to leave the matter to my parents; at my mother, who was looking toward my father, deferring. My father stood and left the room, and I wasn’t sure if he would come back, but a few moments later, he returned with the book in his hands and gave it to me. I held it in my lap; it was heavy and pressed the spine of the open book below it into my legs. My father tapped his large fingers on the cover.

“This is him,” he said. “Freud.”

And yes, there he was: the man in his three-piece suit, one hand on his hip, the other holding a cigar. He looked straight into the camera with what was almost a glare. Everything about his posture suggested power, supremacy, and I remembered staring so hard my eyes went dry.