I was born into a typically-dysfunctional American family that lived in a big, ugly American city. But I was born in 1949, in the early years of the Great American Celebration, when Americans were enjoying unprecedented prosperity. All the wishful thinkers attributed the prosperity to God's providence. (We were the only industrialized country lucky enough to have had two great oceans to protect us during WWII.) If their God did exist, then He had to be a sadist because those bigger houses and cars weren't making my dysfunctional family any happier. I already knew that the American Dream is a fraud and that we don't know half of what we need to know about ourselves and our ancestors when one of the periodic flights from the family problems took us to Indianapolis and landed me in Indianapolis Public School #80. Strange coincidences and a trauma of the previous spring (detailed in my memoir, "Heaven Sent") caused all of the students and most of the teachers to believe that I had been sent by God. To make a long story short, I managed -- mostly with mirrors and sleight of the hand -- to meet their wild expectations and grew to love these children that needed me therapeutically. But when the 8th grade school year was over, I wasn't allowed to go to their high school. As psychologists for the school system had anticipated, once removed from the scene where they had been traumatized, they needed to black out all memory of that scene and everyone connected with it, which included me. I realized that the whole world might be as crazy as it is due to shared traumas of our prehistoric past. I made it my goal to discover what those traumas were. It took me over 50 years. I had to major in comparative political-economic systems at college, study every social science discipline from every aspect, become part of a UN family, travel to 26 countries, live on three continents and drive a NYC taxi for many years, which kept me in touch with people from every country and walk of life -- but I did it. I figured out all the basics. I'm still not happy. Reading my books won't make you happy either. But they will inform you of what we have to do to make our world civilized and sustainable and guarantee love and happy marriages -- for all of us.
