Arlene Kramer Richards, Ed.D., is a psychoanalyst and a poet. She is a Training and Supervising Analyst with the Contemporary Freudian Society and the International Psychoanalytic Association and Fellow of IPTAR. She is currently faculty at the CFS and Tongji Medical College of Huazhong University of Science and Technology at Wuhan, China. Her psychoanalytic writings have helped clarify and bring to life issues of female development, perversion, loneliness, and the internal world of artists and poets. Most recent publications include “Gambling and Death” in E. Ronis and L. Shaw (Eds.), Greed, Sex, Money, Power and Politics, (IPBooks, 2011) and Little Boy Lost. In A. Adelman and K. Malawista (Eds.), The Bereaved Therapist: From the Faraway Nearby. (Columbia University Press, 2012), “The Skin I Live In” In A.K. Richards, L. Spira and A.A. Lynch (Eds.) Encounters With Loneliness: Only the Lonely (2013) and a book of her papers, Psychoanalysis: Listening to Understand: Selected Papers of Arlene Kramer Richards (IPBooks, 2012) Myths of the Mighty Women edited by Arlene Kramer Richards and Lucille Spira (Karnac, 2015), Psychoanalysis in Fashion edited by Arlene Kramer Richards and Anita Weinreb Katz (IPBooks, 2019), and Pedro Almodovar: A Cinema of Desire, Passion and Compulsion edited by Arlene Richards and Lucile Spira (IPBooks, 2019). She also published a book of poetry The Laundryman’s Granddaughter: Poems by Arlene Kramer Richards, (IPBooks, 2011). She is a former representative from North America to the IPA. She is in Private Practice in Palm Beach, Florida. Below is her poem, Itta and Lycha
Itta and Lycha
Itta was born in Chechanow, Poland. Because her family was very poor, she was sent to live with her Aunt and Uncle and their daughter Lycha in their very comfortable Warsaw house. Lycha’s mother had been unable to have other children, so Itta was a companion for her daughter. The girls loved to ice-skate until one day Lycha taunted Itta about not being the real daughter of the family and therefore having to do whatever Lycha wanted or she would be sent back to her poor village. Itta took offense, and kicked Lycha, causing a compound fracture that never healed properly. As a result, Lycha was crippled, never left her parents’ home and died in the Holocaust. Itta kept a secret picture of them together where her children could never see it.
I know now why eggs are eaten on arriving home from the cemetery.
I see now the dirt I need to shovel in.
I stand beside the grave she made her bed, looking down into her private hell as she sees Lycha the dead cousin, dark beauty of the concentration camp.
Once they were girls skating together on an ice lake near Warsaw, quarrelling as girls will when one has the parents, the other, no orphan but taken in, lives as her companion.
Lycha teases Itta, pulls her hair.
They tumble in a ball of wool and flash of blade.
Ice trees shake, shattering silver needles from the twigs.
Their world freezes over.
Lycha, the darling only girl stares at her cracked leg. Itta screams and skates for home and help.
Swoops back to Lycha, trailing grownups in her wake.
They carry home the broken girl. The cripple who will never marry, ready for the oven.
Out of the shell, my mother is born.
Fearful, strong, fearful, weak, determined, fearful she knows she belongs to the weak.
She wants to find the evil.
She meets my father, sees in him a stronger shell, | but just as easily cracked. Just as easily cracked.
And has the babies Lycha will never.
And fearful overfeeds, fearful wraps in warm wool,
Fearful keeps indoors, fearful falls and bleeds and loses her baby,
Fearful blames me her darling only daughter, her Lycha, her demon, her avenger.
Lycha calls me. How can I avenge a crime I do not know?
Avenge. Destroy.
I run from that work.
She finds a daughter-in-law with the stomach for it. Daintily, her tiny mouth pursed, her long silver icepick poised, she strikes and cracks the shell that was my mother.