Am I Crazy?

Guy (Genadi) Rosovsky had never encountered healthy relationships growing up. He came to me because, given his roller-coaster life history, he felt he could no longer trust his logical judgment. “I’m not sure I have the capacity to make normative, healthy choices anymore,” he told me.

The only child of a prominent Russian academic couple from Ramat Aviv — both of them university professors — he had big shoes to fill even at a young age. This was a child who’d inherited his grandfather’s violin on his fifth birthday and was required to play weekly recitals for the extended family every Friday evening following hours of lessons and practice during the week. The fiercely deconstructive criticism he regularly received from his uncle — a virtuoso symphonic cellist — may have been his first memory.

But this regular berating was soon outshined in his mind by his seventh birthday surprise — watching as his mother threw out his collection of children’s books and replaced them with tactical chess books and Russian-language classics. When he complained that his friends didn’t have to read thousand-page novels instead of playing soccer after school, his father’s response was, “Tolstoy is a better companion for you than Alex, Rafi, or any of the other children in your class.”

Their marriage took a nosedive when Guy’s father took a professorship in Vienna and only returned for weekends. His mother worked tirelessly for her own promotion to vice-chair of the department and he was left to choose either Dostoyevsky or the computer.