This memoir is a story of loss and gain, of alienation and reconciliation, and of how such experiences go into the making of a psychoanalyst. In sharing his own very troubled family history, his decade as a Carmelite monk, his marriage and career as a psychoanalyst, Gargiulo shows how the diverse pieces of one's life can fit together into something that is meaningful and real. This is one person's life - but it relates to us all. "We are bound together, each of us," the author writes, "in our living, our troubles and our joys. As we hear another's story, we are, simultaneously, writing our own autobiography."