STEPHEN O'CONNOR

"This story of Gunter Zeitz, a gentile psychoanalyst in Germany during the rise of Hitler, is PERFECTLY paced. O'Connor's elegant prose gives the reader a realistic and insightful narrative of Gunter's interior and exterior life from his earliest memories of his mother. This is appropriate (and necessary to the story) since Gunter is a student of Freud. Gunter's motivations, his dreams, his conscious and unconscious decisions are all critical to what happens to him and his Jewish wife and daughter as his world becomes upended by Nazi Germany...Gunther is faced with many almost impossible decisions as the Third Reich rises, and in reading about his decisions and dilemmas, we wonder ourselves: are we the person we imagine ourselves to be? In adversity would we react the way we hope? How does guilt affect us when we fail our own ideals?"--MARY LIN, GOODREADS

"As the new rise of fascism makes headlines around the world, We Want So Much to Be Ourselves tells the story of a young family pulled in by that tide in nazi Germany. Stephen O'Connor writes of a German psychoanalyst in training, his Jewish wife - a patient of Sigmund Freud. After moving to Berlin, the couple had a daughter, but their lives are then forever changed by political horror. The novel explores how the nazi regime exploited psychoanalysis and how a leader's charisma can mask even the most heinous of lies."--Eloise Budimlich, THE NIGHTLY

Read an excerpt from We Want So Much To Be Ourselves in Harper's Magazine

The Interpretation of Dreams

 
"It is 1924. Gunter Zeitz is thirty-three years old. His hair is black, unruly. And, in the manner of certain very tall men, he habitually hunches his shoulders and lets his head hang forward. He is standing on a street corner in Vienna, where he has just bid good day to Professor Freud and introduced himself...."

Interview on We Want So Much To Be Ourselves in Interlocutor Magazine

Complicity, Resistance & Love In the Face of Evil

"It was only once Trump was actually in office that I began to think about the deeply disturbing parallels between his policies and those of Hitler, although, even then, I didn't think of my story as primarily a critique of Trump's brand of fascism..."

Opening chapter from We Want So Much To Be Ourselves in Conjunctions 

Nothing Is Really What It Is

"The world makes little sense, which is to say that it constantly exceeds understanding. Günter Zeitz is two, sitting on his bedroom floor, pushing his red and yellow wooden horse across the rug. A woman steps through the door. She is his mother—although her hair is pulled back so tightly from her face it looks as if it hurts. Also, there is a ball, dark brown like her hair, stuck to the top of her head. So maybe she is not his mother. Maybe he has made a mistake..."