The Imprinters: Surviving the Unlived Life of Our Parents

Therapists and laypersons alike have continually urged Eileen Walkenstein to detail the personal odyssey of 1975-76 that led to the creation of The Nucleus concept in group therapy. The Imprinters is Dr. Walkenstein s intriguing, intensely personal, and honest account of that time and the six women who shared in that journey of honest self-discovery an insightful journey of both anguish and triumph. Told through colorful narrative, personal notes, journal entries, and revelatory transcripts, the book reads more like a novel than a memoir. The sins of our fathers and mothers are visited upon us, Walkenstein explains. It is what we do with the consequences that determines the degree of our integration and wholeness. Therapy heals us only when it heals our parents within us. So the best therapy is that which treats the grand crimes of our parents against us. That is our job, and what we were born in order to accomplish. At the professional heart of this book, Walkenstein reveals that The Nucleus is not a technique, not a new tool for therapeutic manipulation of people, not a new psychoanalysis to push people down on their backs and run roughshod over them with a new jargon. Instead, The Nucleus is a concept, a suggestion of an entity, a dream. It must be approached not in the spirit of capturing it....but in the spirit of following it into whatever dark corners it may lead us.