That a young man’s hopes for the future were repeatedly, devastatingly shot down, and not just by circumstance but by his own father—whose actions are experienced by the child as an abandonment on the level of that suffered by Oedipus at the hands of his parents, or of Khaldun’s by his—this was an essential wound that, once recognized, ruptures all harmony between the mind and the social world (or exposes their disjunction) and forces a reevaluation of both past and present reality. In other words, it was the revealing fiction. It allowed me to create my own moment of anagnorisis—centered,
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