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.¿


¿Broken Fathers/Broken Sons is a rare combination of memoir and musing. Playful and wise, it is an ode to what is broken inside all of us, as well as to what seeks healing....it allows us to put back together both questions and quests, as we journey out of a decade of looking for a better father in God in a Carmelite monastery, into psychoanalytic practice. Out of one man¿s coming to terms with the damage of a painful father/son relationship, comes a poignant and fierce cry against inequality, be it between parent and child, or analyst and patient.¿

Erika Duncan, Novelist
Founder of Herstory Writers Workshop


¿In this intensely personal and humane memoir Dr. Gargiulo plumbs the depths of relationships between a father and a son. Not since Turgenev¿s ¿Fathers and Sons¿ have these issues been so keenly examined and so directly held up to scrutiny. The precepts of psychoanalytic thought brought forward by Gargiulo speak to everyman in this book that merits a place on one¿s bookshelf next to the work of the great Russian novelist.¿

Norman Itzkowitz, Professor Emeritus, Princeton University.