New Memoir Digs Deeply Beneath the Surface Layers of a Life

Marianne Lovink Goldsmith is a board-certified pediatrician and psychiatrist and a former psychoanalyst. The Oak Bluffs resident is also, by her own admission, a private person, which means writing a book examining her most vulnerable memories was not something she necessarily expected to do.

But this fall she published her life story, titled Fighting for Love: Journal of a Training Analysis, in which she unearths memories lost to traumatic dissociation by revisiting journal entries from her own eight-year journey as a psychoanalysis patient.

Dr. Goldsmith, 87, tells her story in two parts: a narrative of the complex trauma of her upbringing and subsequent psychoanalysis, and her annotated journal entries from her eight years of treatment. The result is an academic work that reads like a memoir — the kind of project Dr. Goldsmith would have found helpful when she was studying psychoanalysis herself.

“It’s a love letter to psychoanalysis,” she said.

Founded by the famed neurologist Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis is an intensive therapeutic process that seeks to tap into a subject’s unconscious inner life, excavating the past to get to the root of repeated behaviors. Dr. Goldsmith underwent psychoanalysis as part of her training to become an analyst herself.

“I think one thing that psychoanalysis does for you is it frees you up a lot,” she said. “Because of my life, I was very constricted. I was a very good child. I never complained.”

For Dr. Goldsmith, being a very good child was a matter of survival.

At the onset of World War II, Dr. Goldsmith and her family, originally from the Netherlands, were living in Jakarta (formerly Batavia), Indonesia, then a Dutch colony.

In 1942, just before Dr. Goldsmith turned four years old, the Japanese army invaded Jakarta. Her father, the chief of naval intelligence for the Dutch, was forced to flee, and she, her mother and older brother were imprisoned in a Japanese concentration camp.

For three years the family was held captive. They endured starvation, filth and abuse. Her mother taught them to push through the pain and hunger in a way that made the children incredibly resilient but also detached from their emotions.

“My mother [would] tell me in the concentration camp, you are not hungry,” she said. “I was able to not resent it [or] cry, because I knew as a small child that she had a lot of struggles. She just lost her husband. I wanted to support her.”

Dr. Goldsmith’s relationship with her father was marked by a series of reunions and separations, starting with his flight from the country before their imprisonment and continuing through the rest of his life. After he arranged for the family’s release from the camp, they sailed to California without him. His presence was intermittent for years thereafter as his ambassadorial work took him all over the world.

“He left a big hole in my life,” she said.

For a long time after her family’s release, Dr. Goldsmith remembered very little of her time in the camps. She had trouble, too, recalling the times she and her father spent together during her youth.

She carried on. She threw herself into her education at Harvard, Oxford and Queen’s College in Ontario, met her husband at age 20 and started a family. But deep down, she was angry and restless.

“I never had time to mourn, because children don’t mourn,” she said. “They just go ahead. Tomorrow is more important when you’re a child.”

She would eventually mourn much later, with the help of psychoanalysis.

The close bond she formed with her analyst, Dr. Malkah Notman, was foundational in helping her address what she would later see as the traumatic parental abandonments of her childhood. She cites their dynamic as an example of the Freudian concept of transference, the unconscious mapping of one’s unresolved emotions about a significant person in their life (often a parent) onto someone else.

“I think transference is such an important concept,” she said. “Every patient that walks into the therapist’s office has a transference.”

Dr. Goldsmith recalls her early sessions with Dr. Notman as tense and angry. Eventually, she realized she’d made Dr. Notman a stand-in for her parents who couldn’t fully be there for her. By directing her emotions from childhood at Dr. Notman, and by being met with compassion and patience, Dr. Goldsmith said she was able to finally understand where her anger came from.

“I never would have accused my parents of abandoning me as an adult before I had the analysis,” she said. “I just feel sorry for [my parents] now, that’s all… I don’t know if that’s forgiveness or understanding. There’s no anger.”

The human brain’s dogged repression of traumatic or painful memories, Dr. Goldsmith said, often has something to do with shame. Many abuse survivors subconsciously blame themselves for their trauma, reflexively trying to cover up any impressions it leaves.

Dr. Goldsmith discussed her own shame about her time in the camps in a November sermon at the Unitarian Universalist Society of Martha’s Vineyard, titled I Thought I Knew Myself.

Shame, she said, was something that could have stopped her from sharing her story if it weren’t for a growing feeling of necessity.

“Before I wrote my book, I would worry, what if people knew about these awful camps and wanted to know what had happened to me?” she said in her sermon. “And yet, I did want people to know.”

After all, she told the Gazette, the pain of remembering is no match for the pain of forgetting.

“Not remembering is almost worse, I would say, because you don’t know who you are,” she said. “It’s almost the loss of identity. You’ve lost your sense of self.”

Today, Dr. Goldsmith finds self-hood and belonging on the Vineyard. She lives year-round in Oak Bluffs, and two of her children, Michael and Suzanne, are Islanders, too. She’s taking bridge lessons and enjoying being a grandmother.

But in recovering the lost memories of her analysis and her childhood — by making the invisible, visible — she has grown to know herself more fully than ever before.

“For the first time, I understand my analysis,” she said.

It’s an effort she owes to the steadfast support of Dr. Notman, who died last May at 97.

“She really wanted my book to be published,” she said. “That’s why I went through with it, because it’s to honor her.”

This article appears in January 30, 2026.