Another story about Maggie Barnes and her family. By digging into online genealogy records and talking with their chatty Aunt Lillian, Maggie’s children discover the World War II struggles of their paternal grandparents and their silent father, Ross. It’s not a story to make kids proud. They find it easier to be critical of their flawed family and assume the next generation will do better. Like an autopsy, Phantom Fathers exposes the problems of this thinking. Soon enough these critical children will be the parents of their own adult children, and they will have their day in court. As Maggie’s children discover the trauma that tore through their father’s life and the way their grandparents dealt with it—brutal events during World War II, desperate decisions that fractured the family, and a dishonorable emigration to the United States—they wonder if they could have done better under the circumstances. Ross’s silence begins to make sense. Most surprising are events that stir the sympathy of disappointed children and open the way to admitting the truth about imperfect ancestors.
A daughter's search and recovery mission to bring home her father, 1Lt. Shannon Estill, a P-38 fighter pilot and one of the last casualties of World War II.
The author explores the many-sided legacy of his father, a man well-known in his Chicago community as the owner of an all-night liquor and drugstore next to a popular nightclub.
Dr. Sharon Estill Taylor has written a highly readable and illuminating account of her experience as a birthmother in the sixties. With a keen eye for detail and a wry sense of humor, she vividly recounts the ways the no-questions-asked cultural forces of the time swept her toward the surrender of her son. Though steamrolled by a process that gave her no say, Dr. Taylor persevered and found her voice as an early champion of sensitive search and reunion. -Jim Gritter, author of The Spirit of Open Adoption, Lifegivers, and Hospitious Adoption Praise for Phantom Son:: In Phantom Son, Dr. Sharon Estill Taylor tells her own story of being an unwed mother at age 18 in the early 1960s. It bridges a time when unwed women endured devastating discrimination and pressure to give up their parental rights to a time when searching for and finding these children was more accepted and facilitated by society. There are smaller sub-stories, including one about the author's loss of her father who was killed in World War II, and how that event affected her family over the decades; and another about her experience of sex and identity-formation in the 1960s. These sub-stories are fascinating and contribute to the gripping nature of this book. Beyond all, this is a story of grief, courage, and redemption. The lives of most people are filled with issues and complexities that only can be addressed by storytelling. Taylor does that with grace and eloquence. -John Harvey, Editor of the Journal of Loss and Trauma, and Professor of Psychology, Emeritus, University of Iowa Dr. Sharon Estill Taylor's account of her unintended pregnancy and her subsequent traumatic adoption process in the 1960s is an important reminder of how far we have come as a society in terms of the acceptance of out of wedlock births. Instead of the rampant shaming and secrecy surrounding these pregnancies, these commonplace events are now tolerated and even celebrated. This is how it should be as the impact of societal and religious silencing and shame heaped upon these mothers in the 1960s was nothing short of traumatic abuse, as Dr. Taylor tells us in her book. This is an important read for anyone, but I particularly recommend this book for those whose lives have been affected by the disenfranchised grief of coerced adoption. -Deborah Stokes, PhD, Director of The Better Brain Center, Washington, DC In Phantom Son, Dr. Sharon Estill Taylor shares her journey as an unwed mother in the 1960s and her courageous search for the son she had to give up. Her grief and loss give way to the formation of wonderful familial relationships. In the tradition of the Irish story teller, Dr. Taylor gives her readers a powerful gift that will resonate in their own lives. -Fr. Kilian J. Malvey, O.S.B., Professor of Theology, Saint Martin's University As a reunited adoptee, I never tire of reading about reunions. In Dr. Sharon Estill Taylor's Phantom Son, the reader experiences the author's journey from love-struck teenager to expectant mother to powerful advocate for other birthmothers. Dr. Taylor vividly describes how she was forced to physically separate from her son and how she kept the emotional connection alive in her soul. Dr. Taylor's writing is raw, open, and honest; important qualities when dealing with such emotional subject matter. -Christine Murphy, author of Taking Down the Wall:
The Phantom of the Ego is the first comparative study that shows how the modernist account of the unconscious anticipates contemporary discoveries about the importance of mimesis in the formation of subjectivity. Rather than beginning with Sigmund Freud as the father of modernism, Nidesh Lawtoo starts with Friedrich Nietzsche’s antimetaphysical diagnostic of the ego, his realization that mimetic reflexes—from sympathy to hypnosis, to contagion, to crowd behavior—move the soul, and his insistence that psychology informs philosophical reflection. Through a transdisciplinary, comparative reading of landmark modernist authors like Nietzsche, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, and Georges Bataille, Lawtoo shows that, before being a timely empirical discovery, the “mimetic unconscious” emerged from an untimely current in literary and philosophical modernism. This book traces the psychological, ethical, political, and cultural implications of the realization that the modern ego is born out of the spirit of imitation; it is thus, strictly speaking, not an ego, but what Nietzsche calls, “a phantom of the ego.” The Phantom of the Ego opens up a Nietzschean back door to the unconscious that has mimesis rather than dreams as its via regia, and argues that the modernist account of the “mimetic unconscious” makes our understanding of the psyche new.
