Apr 6, 2008 | Imaginative, Psychiatric Writings |
How I Treated The Dalai Lama Back in those days Cleveland was a steel town. It was before themills shut down. I was just starting out in private practice andI still had an office at University Hospitals. It was down in thebasement in what used to be a broom closet twenty years earlier. Even today, hospitals are busy converting broom closets intooffices. I went there every Thursday for chest clinic. I saw all kinds ofstrange cases. People with the fixed delusion that they had lungcancer. “It’s a way out, doc, ain’t it? Good as any,” said onefellow who’d been working at Jones and Laughlin for forty years. People who wouldn’t stop smoking even when they were already onoxygen. One lady actually did manage to blow herself up. A young woman who had asthma and would put herself to sleep bywrapping the belt of her bathrobe around her neck and then pullinguntil she passed out. She told this story to one of the pulmonaryguys. He took her by the hand and led her to my office. I don’tthink I’ve ever seen a more delighted look on a patient’s face. But all this is really beside the point, just background. It wasone of those cold days in November a week or so before Thanksgivingwhen the year is beginning to wind down and the clouds off the lakelooked like they were freighted with lead. Pete McCorkle said he had an interesting case for me to see. Pete had a reputation as a pretty good diagnostician. He didn’t exactly think like the rest of the guys. He was a big fellow, about six...
Mar 30, 2008 | Imaginative, Psychiatric Writings |
“It was 1973, a pretty strange time. I was young and disgruntled. I left school and was working concrete. We were using flying metalforms, pouring the walls, letting them cure and then going on tothe next wall. We were going fast. We were up on the fifteenthfloor of an apartment building in Brooklyn. There were beautifulviews of the city and the water. I also liked standing andwatching the cranes wheeling through the air and the planesoverhead. “Early one afternoon, a carpenter went over the edge of thebuilding. One step and he was gone. I’ll never forget the look onhis face. It was a mixture of rapture and terror. I was prettyupset by it. The thing I focused on was whether he knew what hewas doing. He was drunk, but I think he thought he was goingsomewhere. I don’t know where, but somewhere he wanted to go,maybe even somewhere he’d been longing to go all his life. “Maybe it was the look on his face that got me out of New York. Idrifted around the country, working when I needed the money. Ilike buildings best when you can still see the sky through them. I never have liked being shut up inside. I was working one cloudyNovember day on a new Ramada Inn on Interstate 70 just east ofColumbus, Ohio when it hit me that we were a nation of nomads. Only our tents are made of concrete. That changed how I felt. I realized I was very mad. I realized nothing in the whole worldmade me happy. Nothing “I couldn’t get the look on that guy’s face out of...
Feb 26, 2008 | Imaginative, Psychiatric Writings |
“I’ll be sixty next week,” J.C. Keena, probably the nation’sleading authority on bridges, said over a cup of China Black teathe other day. “It’s very hard to believe. One of my friends toldme last week that he never thinks about things like birthdays, sothe big decade markers don’t mean anything to him. If you’re notgoing to think about birthdays, especially the ones that mark thechange in decades, then I shudder to think of all the other thingsthat you can’t think of. “For me, the big thing about going on is that the quality of timeitself changes. It changes in ways that are so contradictory. Onthe one hand it speeds up. That’s a common¨place. Everyone talksabout how the record seems to spin faster as you get older. Sometimes it even seems the earth is spinning faster so that thedays get shorter and shorter. You can get very dizzy. “On the other hand, the viscosity of time can increase, so thatit’s slow and sticky as molasses. It acquires a beautiful amberhue. It’s the wealth of memory that can bind it together likethis, slow it down and give it a rich elegaic tinge. When memoriesinterlace their fingers, a stray second can become palatial, muchgrander even than Versailles or the Taj Mahal. We become bashfulin the face of the immensity of what we can experience.” J.C. Keena lapsed so gracefully into silence that it took us a longsecond to realize that he had stopped talking. We noticed howlarge his hands were as they lay palms down in repose across thebrown fabric of the trousers that covered his thighs. We foundourselves watching minute islands...
Feb 24, 2008 | Imaginative, Psychiatric Writings |
“The thing is, Miriam,” said Elise Notingahl, “you should nevercount.” She cocked an ear, as if she were straining to listen to a softstill voice just at the edge of hearing. “That’s it,” she said out loud again, “the problem only begins whenyou start to count. As long as you absolutely resist the urge tocount, there’s no problem. When you give in to that temptation tocount, then there’s trouble. I don’t know who invented counting inthe first place, but it’s vicious mischief. “It was so hard to believe that I had to count on my fingers. Idid it six times. When I filled the first hand, I was astonished. By the time I got to the ring finger on my left hand, it had gonebeyond astonishment. I just can’t believe that I’m actually amember of eight different car pools. I only have two kids. That’sfour car pools per kid. When I got married I wanted to have fourkids. Now I wonder if that would have meant sixteen car pools.” She looked at Miriam Farlin with troubled eyes. “I’ve never told this to anyone. I worry about having an accidentwhile I’m driving one of the car pools. No, it goes beyond that. I have nightmares about having an accident while I’m driving one ofthe car pools. There’s a screech and then a slide. I can’tcontrol anything. The slide goes on for a long time. It seemslike eternity. “Then there’s the impact. It’s a relief, as if I’d been waitingfor the worst and it finally happened. The next thing I know I’moutside of the car. It’s all twisted up. I hear...
Feb 18, 2008 | Imaginative, Psychiatric Writings |
“First, there is no such thing as normal grief. Each grief is notonly original but as much originating as commemorative. Second,grief never resolves. It simply becomes a tributary stream of themighty river of memory which is what gives presence its flavor. “Youth may be intense, but experience twines together more strandsand weaves a more complicated fabric, full of figure and groundreversals. That’s not an accidental figure, either. As we losethose we’ve truly loved, we can identify with the ground. Webecome for ourselves figures who are on the way to the ground. Wemay even find some real ground to stand on. “It’s an adventure in which pain has a leading part to play, notonly as nemesis but as guide. To grieve is not only to read thebook again knowing the ending, but to discover that the book isrewritten as we reread and that it richly repays the work ofrereading not once and for all, but over and over again. Griefmakes links of our losses. “In the intensity of our griefs we are intensely alive. Griefcomplicates us and the complexity points paths beyond what we havebeen. These paths point forward to our loss of ourselves and todegrees of healing renunciation along the way.” Benjamin Aaron Midbar stopped, arresting the torrent of words, witha movement of his whole body that culminated in a lift of hiseyebrows upwards. “What is so often forgotten is that what is helpful to the grievingperson is his grief. Efforts to forestall it, to limit it, even tochannel it, to moderate it are attacks just where the bereavedperson is most sensitive. There is no comfort. Was it real?...
Feb 10, 2008 | Imaginative, Psychiatric Writings |
A Conversation With D. V. Oistrin We talked with D. V. Oistrin in his apartment on Central Park Westoverlooking the park in the seventies. We found Oistrin, for allof his 84 years, vibrant with life. “People want to talk with me about understanding. They think thatsince I am so old, I should understand something. It is anunderstandable wish, I suppose, that someone should understandsomething. I cherished it myself for many years. The first stepin understanding is not to understand. The second step inunderstanding is also not to understand. The third step as well isnot to understand. And so on and so forth. Can we pass to a limitat some point? I’m not sure. “Thirty years ago, even twenty years ago, maybe, I used to thinkthat if you understood something, then you had a degree of controland that that was good. Now, at some level, I’m sure that is trueand all well and good. But there’s another side to it, which isthat when you understand something, then you have been possessed bya certain way of thinking. This way of thinking has control ofyou. You may not even be aware of it. You think you’re exploringwhat you can do with this way of thinking, when actually it’sexploring what it can do with you. It’s very hard to develop acritical attitude towards your own thinking, because you don’t wantsimply to be critically uncritical. This isn’t easy to express or explain. I think a person has to have made a lot of mistakesbefore all this begins to mean something.” We reminded Mr. Oistrin that J. Robert Oppenheimer had describedhim as one of the...
