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| 9780006384281
| 0006384285
| 3.90
| 81
| 1995
| Jan 01, 1996
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it was amazing
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This is not a difficult book. But it is not easy either; I’d call it un-easy. It’s a brilliant, careful, deadly, even-tempered, forensic dismantling o
This is not a difficult book. But it is not easy either; I’d call it un-easy. It’s a brilliant, careful, deadly, even-tempered, forensic dismantling of Freud and his palace of misconceptions. I was utterly impressed by Richard Webster’s huge task – all the stuff he had to read and absorb (“stuff” is a technical term), all the judicious filleting. So the short version of this review is : if you’re interested in Freud, read it now. REAL SYMPTOMS, IMAGINARY ILLNESSES Freud’s early career : patients present real symptoms which are diagnosed as imaginary illnesses to be cured, or most often, not cured, by fake procedures. In those late 19th century days doctors really didn’t know what most diseases were. So they blustered and theorised. You can’t blame them, they were doing their best. From the time of Plato onwards, physicians had frequently explained a particular set of physical sensations reported by patients by suggesting that it was caused by the womb moving upwards through the body towards the head. Imagine that! It was called, of course, hysteria. Of which Steyerthal said in 1908 “there is no such disease and there never was”. So it became a blanket term given to what we now understand as MS, syphilis and other ailments. Another “syndrome of convenience” was neurasthenia, invented in 1869. The term “neurasthenia” thus came…to function as a catch-all diagnosis which offered both physicians and patients a way of escaping from feelings of therapeutic helplessness. … It functioned both to protect physicians from having to admit the depths of their ignorance and to prevent patients from losing faith in the medical profession altogether. Freud was very big on both these syndromes. This was the diagnostic miasma from which he emerged. SOME QUOTES Walter Kendrick wondered why an egregious card-house like psychoanalysis, ready to crumble at the impact of any feather, was bought wholesale by an entire culture that still dwells in it RW adds the following remarks : Freud’s own internal and idiosyncratic logic is treated as though it were a real, external chain of causality. The most charitable observation we can make about this kind of reasoning is that it is neither odd nor abnormal. For it is exactly the kind of reasoning habitually encountered in necromancy, astrology, phrenology… As to why Freudianism was such a hit, RW answers (mildly, conventionally) that, mostly, it was because psychoanalysis so neatly replaced religious faith for generations of intellectuals. (Confession, which was ejected from the Christian faith as superstition by the Protestants, was reintroduced by Freud in the name of Science.) RICHARD WEBSTER TELLS IT LIKE IT IS Determined to categorise those who profess systematic knowledge as either scientists or charlatans, we find it difficult to believe that any thinker who makes a genuine contribution to scientific knowledge can either, simultaneously or subsequently, become the propagator of folly, error and misjudgement. In psychoanalysis human behaviour and human consciousness are treated as intrinsically misleading phenomena which are supposedly devoid of meaning until they have been illuminated by insights drawn from a secret inner realm – which is dominated by sexuality and which is supposedly accessible and intelligible only to those trained in psychoanalysis. The Unconscious is not simply an occult entity for whose real existence there is no palpable evidence. It is an illusion produced by language – a kind of intellectual hallucination. There was no method of testing out these theories or of assessing their worth which was not predicated upon the assumption of his own genius. Richard Webster's unflappable ponderous Johnsonian prose style is perfect for this kind of radical assassination. In the name of full disclosure I admit that the last section is not useful and can be skipped and the whole thing could be said to be somewhat too long. But ...... great read - 5 stars! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 04, 2024
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Feb 13, 2024
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Nov 24, 2023
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Paperback
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| 038554376X
| 9780385543767
| 038554376X
| 4.16
| 126,804
| Apr 07, 2020
| Apr 07, 2020
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really liked it
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What a subject – from 1945 to 1962 an American couple (he is a high flying kind of cultural fixer in the Air Force; they live in Colorado) produce no
What a subject – from 1945 to 1962 an American couple (he is a high flying kind of cultural fixer in the Air Force; they live in Colorado) produce no less than 12 children (not so unusual in the 19th century but eyebrowraising even in the 50s and 60s) and SIX of them develop schizophrenia. So this story is full of shattering heartbreak, and because there is never a cure found for this most intractable mental illness happy endings are few and far between; the children who escaped the illness had their lives pretty much wrecked by the “sick boys” as the author calls them. * So here we have a book with a very unusual subject (and it's recommended!). I love books about left field subjects. Here’s my current top ten Books About Odd Subjects. Some are hugely funny and some are grim and serious. 1. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: Anne Fadiman (1997) [image] Defeated by the Communists, a remote people called the Hmong decide to leave Laos and relocate to California. Total cultural misunderstanding and medical chaos occurs. 2. Wisconsin Death Trip : Michael Lesy (1973) [image] Lots of bizarre photos such as dead babies in their coffins – old time Wisconsin people liked to have a few of them for the family album. Even aside from the gruesome pix, this is a deranged book. 3. My Friend Dahmer : Derf Backderf (2012) [image] Derf switched on the tv one day in 1991 and watched the latest lurid serial killer news story then realised in shock that he used to go to school with that guy – it was Jeff! So naturally he wrote a strange graphic novel about his school days. 4. The Ten Cent Plague : David Hadju (2008) [image] In the 50s comix flew under the radar of polite society until some upstanding citizens realised their kids were being sold a whole torrential outpouring of filth, horror and nauseating violence in titles like Beyond, tales from the Crypt, Weird Ghastly Horror, Vault of Horror and so forth. 5. The Deadly Ethnic Riot : Donald L Horowitz (2000) [image] Brilliant analysis of something that mostly gets zero attention because it’s deeply uncomfortable – outbursts of rioting by civilians fuelled by hatred inflicting death and mutilation on other citizens of a different ethnic group . 6. The History of Hell : Alice K Turner (1993) [image] This one is hilarious – I particularly liked the bit about the blessed in Heaven – allegedly one of their pleasures is the contemplation of the pains and torments of the sinners in Hell. I expect they are issued special telescopes for the purpose. Or maybe these days there are just an infinite number of videos available, like Youtube. 7. The Honor Code : Kwame Anthony Appiah (2010) [image] Another serious one – asks and answers the question how do societies make any moral progress? Several examples examined, such as how China abandoned foot-binding for women. Really fascinating. 8. Performance Art : Roselee Goldberg (1979) [image] More fun – the performance artists of the 60s and 70s were so funny. Chris Burdon has also been crucified on the back of a Volkswagen, briefly taken the hostess of a tv chat show hostage and spent five days jammed into a two feet by two feet by three feet locker at UCLA. In 1974 he sat on an upright chair on a sculpture pedestal for 48 hours until he fell off from exhaustion (piece entitled "Sculpture in Three Parts"). 9. Chasing Lolita : Graham Vickers (2008) [image] A great polemic about how Nabokov’s Lolita was disastrously transformed from a victim of child sexual abuse into “a fast little article”, and how people fell over themselves in describing the novel as a love story and Humbert as tragic. 10. The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste : Jane Stern (1990) [image] Well okay this is like shooting fish in a barrel but again, so funny – subjects include Mood rings Perky nuns Pet clothing Reclining chairs Waltzing waters Tammy Faye Bakker Baton twirling Cool Whip Dinosaur Parks Lawn ornaments Panty-hose Crafts Shag Rugs Sno-Globes Unicorns and rainbows Velvet paintings White lipstick * Five runners-up that have less unusual subjects but are nevertheless freaky head-banging books : 1. Caligula Volume 1 : David Lapham (2012) [image] 2. American Heiress : Jeffrey Toobin (2016) [image] 3. Spell It Out : David Crystal (2012) [image] 4. Out of Sheer Rage : Geoff Dyer (1997) [image] 5. The Pursuit of the Millennium : Norman Cohn (1957) [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 03, 2023
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Oct 09, 2023
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Oct 03, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 0330352776
| 9780330352772
| 0330352776
| 4.24
| 117
| Jun 04, 2001
| Jun 01, 2002
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really liked it
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THE GOTHIC HORROR OF JANET FRAME’S FIRST THIRTY YEARS ON EARTH 1924. Janet born to a poor family. There were four girls and one boy. 1932. Her 9 year ol THE GOTHIC HORROR OF JANET FRAME’S FIRST THIRTY YEARS ON EARTH 1924. Janet born to a poor family. There were four girls and one boy. 1932. Her 9 year old brother has his first epileptic fit. 1936. Her 16 year old sister Myrtle drowns while swimming. Turns out she had a heart defect. 1945. Janet’s first suicide attempt and admission to a mental hospital. 1947. Her 21 year old sister Isabel drowns while swimming. Turns out she also had a heart defect. Hamlet : I perchance hereafter shall think meet to put an antic disposition on. In An Angel at her Table Janet Frame tells us she was misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic. For eight years between age 21 and 29 she was in (a lot) and out (not a lot) of mental hospitals and no one figured out that she wasn’t schizophrenic. Wait! What was going on? How could they not realise they’d made a mistake? Janet herself does not get into those details. According to her, what happened was that she attempted suicide by swallowing a packet of aspirin, then told her psychology teacher (she was doing a course) Mr Money, and then, that very evening her landlady called up and said "There are three men to see you. From the University." I went to the door and there were Mr Money, Mr Prince and the Head of the Department who spoke first. “Mr Money tells me you haven’t been feeling very well. We thought you might like to have a little rest… we thought you might like to come with us down to the hospital…just for a few days’ rest.” …And so I was admitted to the Dunedin hospital, to Colquhon ward, which, I was shocked to find, was a psychiatric ward. It all sounds heartless, almost brutal, and you think yeah, they would do that, it was the 1940s. But Michael King explains that it just wasn’t like that. In fact, this guy Money was like a one man Janet Frame Rescue Service, finding people to help, organising family members to visit her, and Janet was lying on his couch saying that her happiness was so acute and her misery was so unbearable that she had to die. After a week of this, finally he concluded she did need a short stay in a psychiatric ward. And he was kind and sweet and talked her into it. And then came the tragic comedy. When doctors attempted to interview her she became inhibited, elusive, sometimes overly dramatic, and subject to fits of nervous giggling. This behaviour, in conjunction with her suicide attempt and her interest in psychology, was subject to far more sinister interpretation than Frame could have known Meaning that they concluded she was schizophrenic. But wait! On that flimsy basis? JF explains in Angel that in fact she had read schizophrenic case histories and was able to put together a “repertoire” of symptoms which she would display for the doctors. In this way she was the main contributor herself towards her misdiagnosis. Why she would think that would be a good idea is left open. That is the heart of the mystery. She did have some type of mental illness, that is undeniable. She wrote I was growing increasingly fearful of the likeness between some of my true feelings and those thought of as belonging to sufferers from schizophrenia. Anyways, help was at hand. When she was 24 they decided that the new (for New Zealand) treatment called electro-convulsive therapy would be of great benefit to Janet, so she got many doses of that (two zaps, twice a week, for twelve weeks) , which in those days was administered without anaesthetic. You know what ECT is? Sure. But just to remind us all, Michael King explains It involved attaching electrodes to the scalp and passing an electric current through the brain of sufficient strength to cause convulsions and a short term coma. A couple of years later, back in the hospital, MK says Because of what her hospital notes describe as a “strong resentment” of ECT, medical staff attempted to reduce the severity of her symptoms by the prolonged use of insulin shock therapy. This treatment produced comas and convulsions, accompanied by writhings and moanings, and was believed to have beneficial effects for schizophrenics. But this new shock therapy didn’t work very well. So by December 1952 the doctors were brought to the conclusion that there was nothing left for her but a lobotomy. She was told “it would be good for me, that, following it, I would be 'out if the hospital in no time'”. She received this news with “a swamping wave of horror”. I am not surprised. She wrote about it to her old mentor John Money. He was working in another mental hospital. He replied At this hospital it is generally felt that lobotomy has not lived up to expectations : they do not perform it here. So if you have any choice in the matter… I would say no. Imagine that conversation – doctor, I’ve been mulling it over, and I don’t think, on balance, that I should have a lobotomy. Then came the couldn’t-make-it-up-twist. Days away from the operation the hospital superintendent Dr Blake-Palmer was reading his newspaper and saw The Hubert Church Memorial award for prose has been won by Miss Janet Frame for her book "The Lagoon and Other Stories". This was the country’s major literary award. Janet had no idea she had won the award, no one could contact her. Dr Blake-Palmer had no idea her writings were considered quite so highly. So made a decision. In view of the surprising evidence that his patient was actually a literary star, he took her off the list of lobotomies and said I’ve decided that you should stay as you are. MY FAVOURITE JANET FRAME PHOTOGRAPH In 1990 Jane Camion filmed An Angel at her Table, and Janet was played by three different actresses. Here she is with all three Janets. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 06, 2022
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Apr 09, 2022
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Apr 06, 2022
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Paperback
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| 1844084574
| 9781844084579
| 1844084574
| 4.22
| 464
| 1984
| Jan 17, 2008
|
liked it
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I wonder if Stephen King read this book – see if this reminds you of a famous chilling scene. A well-known writer has given Janet a little shed to do
I wonder if Stephen King read this book – see if this reminds you of a famous chilling scene. A well-known writer has given Janet a little shed to do her writing in : I was amazed and grateful at his acceptance of me as a writer doing daily work, particularly as I had not yet begun to write the novel I planned, and on some mornings I was so anxious to appear to be working that I typed The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog and Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party. [image] * Autobiographies are claustrophobic books, you only get this one single perspective, that of the author about herself, and maybe you aren’t getting the full picture. There were several nagging things that Janet Frame was not telling me about how she ended up spending eight years in a New Zealand mental hospital and how she came very close to getting a lobotomy. It seems at certain moments of maximum stress she would like Hamlet pretend to be mad but she doesn’t describe exactly how. Once labelled as a schizophrenic it seems nobody, no doctor or nurse, ever noticed that she wasn’t actually schizophrenic, for eight long years! That is some remarkably indifferent lazy nasty medical staff. If you think of other autobiographies of psychologically damaged people, like Girl Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen or God Head by Scott Zwiren, you’ll see a similar thing : the patient always think the doctors and staff are either uncaring or actually hostile to them. The movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is the same. Psychiatric staff get this truly bad rap from all these books and films. The patients never think that the staff want to help them. They are always seen as malevolent. Surely they can’t all have been this bad? I’ve ordered the biography of Janet Frame called Wresting with the Angel by Michael King in the hope that this will throw some light on the strange sad history of her terrible misdiagnosis. Meanwhile – this is a very poignant book which I rattled through in two days. It reveals in gruesome detail the chasms of ignorance a workingclass person has to cope with as they try to find their way up the educational ladder. This isn't the cheeriest book, but it's strange and hypnotic and unique. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 2022
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Apr 03, 2022
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Apr 01, 2022
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Paperback
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| 1784163309
| 9781784163303
| 1784163309
| 3.64
| 359
| May 17, 2018
| Jan 10, 2019
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did not like it
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Damn, I should have read some more reviews of this thing before reading it. My fellow goodreaders were quite correct, this is a very annoying, egocent
Damn, I should have read some more reviews of this thing before reading it. My fellow goodreaders were quite correct, this is a very annoying, egocentric, maundering, treacly, sentimentalised wallow and it goes on and on and on about family history and stuff like teapots, photo albums, vacuum cleaners, photo albums, family history, spoons, napkin rings, furniture, photo albums and photo albums. Why I thought of reading this : we have a friend who we have gradually realised over the past year is a hoarder. There’s a point where collecting a lot of stuff tips over into actual hoarding, and it’s hard to admit. I have watched the youtube documentaries on the subject and seen at least one tv series but on the tv they always want to turn this decades-long gradual mental deterioration into a story with a happy ending : look! Here is your house after our cleanup crew and interior decorator and gardener fixed it up! What about that! See how it sparkles! No more rat droppings in the kitchen! A brand new life! Cue tears and hugs for the family members and high fives amongst the jolly helpers. Life isn’t like that. I wanted more insight, how it goes when your own mother (as in this book) is a hoarder. So that’s why I thought it would be good, but it really wasn’t. Avoid. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 27, 2022
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Apr 27, 2022
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Mar 27, 2022
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Paperback
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| 1564781305
| 9781564781307
| 1564781305
| 3.52
| 93
| Nov 1996
| Nov 01, 1996
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liked it
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An electrifying memoir/novel about what is now called bi-polar disorder but in the 1980s was called manic depression. The first half of this excruciat
An electrifying memoir/novel about what is now called bi-polar disorder but in the 1980s was called manic depression. The first half of this excruciating account of the author’s own tribulations gave me a brilliant picture of a man in the grip of the manic upswing of this disorder. He thinks he’s God, maybe Christ, and there are all these codes and secret messages embedded into the banalities of everyday life – colours, shapes, what is in a junk shop window, the first word a person says to him – all these things take on enormous meaning. He has to immediately see an old friend NOW even though it’s two in the morning because now he knows that guy will have a very important message to give to him – so off he goes. That kind of thing. Totally exhausting. The second half of the book is a bit of a rinse repeat experience, except for the failed suicide attempt. The way he failed was that he lost an arm and a leg by jumping in front of a train. Companion books (from ones I've read, there will be jazillions of others) Henry’s Demons by Patrick Cockburn – the book that give me a similarly gripping account of schizophrenia. Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen – an interesting but flawed memoir The Room by Hubert Selby Jr – a disastrous unreadable novel about insanity by the author of the brilliant Last Exit to Brooklyn And let’s not forget the grand-daddy of all “trapped in the head of a madman” novels : Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 05, 2021
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Oct 11, 2021
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Oct 05, 2021
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Paperback
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| 1627797173
| 9781627797177
| 1627797173
| 3.90
| 294
| 2017
| Aug 22, 2017
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really liked it
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There are several great reviews of this book by proper grown-up reviewers in the New York Times, Washington Post and so forth. They relish every page
There are several great reviews of this book by proper grown-up reviewers in the New York Times, Washington Post and so forth. They relish every page of this ferocious forensic filleting of Freud’s fanciful foolishness. The subtitle of this huge book lays it on the line, and it’s serious – Prof Crews is out to prove that everything Freud said and did was wrong, every treatment only damaged his patients further, and if by some fluke he got something right, he misunderstood it. Professor Crews is way over on the extreme end of anti-Freud but it seems most of the reviewers are pretty much in agreement with him. Here’s the Washington Post : Even as he treated his patients as guinea pigs, manipulating their dreams and symptoms to fit into his theories of the moment, he also fed on their dependency, keeping the meter running for endless lucrative sessions with well-heeled patrons to support a lavish lifestyle. [Freud was] a proto L. Ron Hubbard with a bigger audience and a broader intellect, a cult leader whose mumbo-jumbo message is still taken seriously by a lot of troubled souls today. And the website Science Based Medicine puts the boot in like this Psychiatry is arguably the least science-based of all the medical specialties, and Freudian psychoanalysis is arguably the least science-based psychotherapy He made things up as he went along, constantly changing his theories and methods but not making any actual progress towards a successful treatment. There are still Freudians around, it seems, but they seems like a bunch of hopeless old prospectors still panning for gold in the Klondike long after the gold rush has been and gone. This massive book takes us through Freud’s early career (this was fascinating) and then spends the last half carefully sifting through all Freud’s famous case studies. This part is probably more for the specialist. After you read these careful demolitions of the case studies which made his name, it’s clear that if only half of what Professor Crews tells us about the bogus nature of Freud’s treatments and concepts are correct it’s astonishing that he ever got taken seriously at all. I had hoped I would find out how Freud’s ideas went on to conquer the world of the shrink but there was just no space for that. This is CSI : Vienna. But I did find out how peculiar Freud’s pre-Freudian adventures were. So, for instance, he trained as a doctor but found he couldn’t stand either the sight of blood or ill people in general (haha, oops!). He became a lowly lab assistant analysing slides of brain material from dead people (not living people). Then he discovered : COCAINE. We get a hundred pages about the intimate relationship between Freud and cocaine. At the time, it was touted as “the cure for almost every conceivable disorder, from prostate enlargement to nymphomania”. And Freud thought it would cure his friend from his morphine addiction. Alas, it just made his friend addicted to cocaine too. In Freud’s career, after (and alongside) cocaine came hysteria, hypnotism and high class patients. There is so much stuff in this book – that’s a technical term : stuff. I could bang on for hours. But I will leave you now with a handful of Crewsisms. SOME ZINGERS The most fundamental defect in Freud’s ministrations, however, wasn’t his choice of questionable remedies; it was his inaptitude for reaching correct diagnosis. His unchecked inclination was to find that the patient suffered from whatever ailment was preoccupying Freud at that moment. As is well known, Freud would remain puzzled by women but would cover his ignorance with dogma about a biological inferiority that causes all of them to remain childish, envious and devious. Every stage magician hopes that his audience will consist of precisely such eyewitnesses as Freud. For the kind of involvement, lasting months and years without arriving at a point of resolution, that some affluent clients demanded, he was more than willing to be of service. He had been obliged to conclude that saddling neurotics with financial hardship was therapeutically efficacious; so he resigned himself to the necessity of making psychoanalysis burdensome on the wallet. SOUNDTRACK https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWt8K... Cocaine Habit Blues : Memphis Jug Band https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZgIu... Honey, Take a Whiff on Me : Merle Travis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xVp1... Cocaine in my Brain : Dillinger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJw5W... Cocaine : Bob Dylan ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 13, 2020
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Jun 28, 2020
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May 13, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 1250101204
| 9781250101204
| 1250101204
| 3.90
| 27,821
| Oct 02, 2017
| Apr 10, 2018
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liked it
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This book was discombobulating. But I like to be discombobulated. I practically live for it. It’s like the author decided to press everyone’s red butt This book was discombobulating. But I like to be discombobulated. I practically live for it. It’s like the author decided to press everyone’s red buttons one after another like a kid running along a street pressing everyone’s front doorbell – parental abuse and neglect! transgender! transgender rape! Drag acts! Prostitution! Life in a brothel! Serious sexual assault! male violence leading to murder! mental collapse! and piles of filth. Sandra, our heroine, runs a company which clears up after traumatic incidents like murder and suicide, or hard-core hoarders with 20 cats, and 20 years of cat shit, and 20 years of rats, and 20 years of hoarding crap. This book is as crammed with piles and piles of stuff as the houses of the hoarders Sandra cleans out. The title has a double meaning. Sandra repairs houses and (to some extent, we hope) lives after trauma but at the same time the author Sarah Krasnostein is gingerly repairing Sandra’s own traumatic memories. There are two trauma cleaners here. Really it’s only a little bit about the gruesome cleaning. We get a few chapters on hoarders and how Sandra deals with their obvious distress when she and her team come to finally get rid of the mountains of rotting rubbish jammed into every corner of every room to the point where they only have a tiny patch of a mattress left to sleep on (but only in the fetal position). It’s often sick making, be warned that some of these hoarders have had broken overflowing toilets that they haven’t had fixed for years, that’s called wet squalor, as oppose to dry squalor. It is a real test for your imagination. We don’t really get any insight into why hoarders hoard, how they get in to such dire conditions without any intervention by family members or friends or neighbours, but it does seem that they have a lot in common – few or no family left, no friends left except the bottle, and they’ve never let anyone in their house for years. I was interested in all of that, it’s why I picked this up, but I found out that Sarah’s real interest is not in the cleaning or the clients but the cleaner, Sandra. This is really a sort-of biography of Sandra, who started out as Peter, got married, had two kids, then transitioned to being a (sex-working) female, then ended up running a most peculiar business. Sarah met Sandra, fell in love more than a little bit with this much-older woman, and tried hard to make sense of her life. Nobody, including Sandra, had ever tried to do that before. But : Many of the facts of Sandra’s past are either entirely forgotten, endlessly interchangeable, neurotically ordered, conflicting or loosely tethered to reality. She is open about the fact that drugs may have impacted her memory … No matter how many times we go over the first three decades of her life, the timeline of dates and place is never clear. Alas for me, I was never as fascinated by Sandra as Sarah thought I ought to be. It seemed all the time as if she could have done without Sarah’s endless attempts to reconstruct her many adventures. You can almost hear her saying “But darl, that’s all a long time ago, and who gives a rat’s ass for it, I sure don’t.” This isn’t a bad book, you know its heart is in the right place, but Sarah does not do herself any favours with her real florid prose. At the drop of a hat she will rhapsodise about Sandra For one heartbeat she says nothing. Just holds her head very still and looks at me through sea-blue irises under the high blonde bridges of her eyebrows. Great eyes, Sandra’s. Huge, strangely healthy-looking luminous spheres moving in their sockets like the wet blue earth on its axis. Or try this introduction to one of the hoarders called Dorothy : As the heartwood of a tree sings to you of thousands of sunlit days and rainy hours – specific symphonies of soil and the seasons of weathering and revival that will grant you the structural strength to reach for your share of the light – the rotten core of Dorothy’s house is a whispered scream that hurtles you backwards through decades of pitch darkness. Still, The Trauma Cleaner has won more awards – strangely healthy looking luminous awards – than I’ve had hot chicken tikka masalas, so what the hell do I know, right, darls? FURTHER READING/WATCHING The Naked Civil Servant by Quentin Crisp - the autobiography of a defiantly effeminate gay man with perfect recall Stuart - A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters - a biography of another extremely marginalised person pieced together with great difficulty by the author Sunshine Cleaning - a 2008 Amy Adams film that's also about trauma cleaning ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 03, 2020
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Feb 05, 2020
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Feb 03, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 0316278866
| 9780316278867
| 0316278866
| 4.10
| 3,741
| Mar 10, 2015
| Mar 10, 2015
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it was amazing
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I have been waiting for this book for years : an honest account of the history of psychiatry, and for this subject, when you say warts and all, you ha
I have been waiting for this book for years : an honest account of the history of psychiatry, and for this subject, when you say warts and all, you have to be prepared for warts to be pretty much all there are until the 1970s. What a horror story! Here is Dr Lieberman’s mission statement: There’s a good reason that so many people will do everything they can to avoid seeing a psychiatrist. I believe that the only way psychiatrists can demonstrate how far we have hoisted ourselves from the murk is first to own up to our long history of missteps and share the uncensored story of how we overcame our dubious past. Why do psychiatrists get hated on by so many of us? - They overmedicate - they pathologise ordinary human behavior - They forever spout psychobabble (That’s according to Jeffrey.) But that ain’t nothing compared to what they used to do. ) In Shrinks we are on a giant slalom from Franz Mesmer (he was mesmerizing in the 1770s) all the way up to Silver Linings Playbook (2012). Dr L does finally leave us on a highly optimistic note – more of a full chord – explaining how practitioners have ditched the loony stuff, thrown Freud under the bus, and armed with the new hot psycho drugs will confidently and successfully manage all but the most profoundly ill schizophrenic and depressive. Say 98% of everyone. So put a smile on your face for the whole human race. It’s almost like being in love. But only almost – he still can say Even now, charlatans drawn from the ranks of professional psychiatry continue to dupe desperate and unsuspecting patients as the institutions of psychiatry stand passively by. *** The problem for the would be doctors of mental ailments is simply put – they could not agree for the first 200 years what mental illness was nor how to treat it. Was there a biological origin? Or did it originate in that ghost we call mind? Because of that Unable to find a biological basis for the illnesses within its province, psychiatry became ever more scientifically estranged. and Psychiatry has trumpeted more illegitimate treatments than any other field of medicine As for instance The Rotational Chair : a psychotic patient would be strapped snugly into the chair and then spun around and around like an amusement park Tilt-a-Whirl until his psychotic symptoms were blotted out by dizziness, disorientation and vomiting. (There’s worse, much worse to come.) ENTER THE VIENNESE DOCTOR Freud stands in a class of his own, simultaneously psychiatry’s greatest hero and its most calamitous rogue At first a minority European sect, the Freudians relocated en masse to America in the early 1940s, fleeing from Hitler, most of them being Jewish. They set up shop in the New World and found rich pickings. The worried well became the primary market for psychoanalysis… instead of wearing white coats and shouldering through a daily grind of raving and catatonic inmates, psychiatrists could chat with well-heeled businessmen about their childhood memories and gently guide well-coiffed matrons through their free association. What the Freudians did was locate the origin of the mental illness in an unconscious conflict between the patient and in 99% of cases the parents. (I’m generalizing here.) Autism? Caused by the “refrigerator mother”. Homosexuality? (But yes, this was considered to be a mental illness until the 15th of December 1973. Before that, it was diagnosis 302.0. Hey, the World Health Organisation retained their classification “Homosexuality Disorder” until 1990.) Anyway, homosexuality was “induced by domineering mothers who instilled a fear of castration in their sons along with a deep seated rejection of women”. (The mothers got put through the Freudian wringer.) But the Freudians also tried to give the talking cure to the severely ill, so you got “a psychiatrist urging a psychotic person to talk about his sexual fantasies” or “a psychiatrist encouraging a suicidal person to accept that her parents never loved her”. Dr J’s head is in his hands here. By the 60s “the psychoanalytic movement had assumed the trappings of a religion”. The Freudians believed everyone was slightly mentally ill. Being “shrunk” had become the ne plus ultra of upper-middle-class American life. *** Meanwhile, outside the bubble, other medical disciplines considered psychiatry as a racket populated by hucksters selling invisible snake oil. Vladimir Nabokov : Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. ASYLUMS The fate of the seriously ill was gruesome. A quote from 1917 : We can rarely alter the course of mental illness. We must openly admit that the vast majority of the patients placed in our institutions are forever lost. In 1904 there were 150,000 Americans in asylums, and by 1955 that had increased to 550,000. And there they stayed. Now comes the horrendous part. Driven by compassion and desperation, asylum-era physicians devised a succession of audacious treatments that today elicit feelings of revulsion or even outrage at their apparent barbarism. Unfortunately, many of these early treatments have become forever linked with the public’s dismal image of psychiatry. [But] the simple fact is that the alternative to these crude methods was interminable misery, as there was nothing that worked. What were these audacious treatments? - Giving patients malaria to cure or abate their psychosis caused by advanced syphilis - Overdosing schizophrenics with insulin to put them in a coma for maybe six days in a row (one side effect was that patients invariably became grossly obese, another side effect for some patients was death). Coma therapy “was used at almost every major mental hospital in the US and Europe in the 1940s and 50s”. - And the big one, the leucotomy aka lobotomy, which is where you either drill in to the patient’s skull above each eye, or if you don’t fancy that, there is an alternative method : First the patient’s eyelid was lifted up. Next a surgical instrument that closely resembled an ice pick was slid under the eyelid until it came into contact with the thin bone at the back of the eye socket. Next, a small mallet was used to hammer…. Anyway, Dr J describes the process as similar to coring an apple. The effect on the patient was (maybe not surprisingly) dramatic. Patients who had previously hurled food, smacked the walls and shouted at invisible specters now sat placidly, disturbing no one. Among the more notable people subjected to this dreadful treatment were Tennessee Williams’ sister Rose and Rosemary Kennedy, the sister of President Kennedy. Finally – the other famous shocking treatment given to patients was shock treatment, also known as electro-convulsive therapy or ECT. This one is different from the comas and the lobotomies, because, everyone is agreed, it works. That is, it works in the case of severely depressed people. A blast of volts through the brain will get them back to a functioning state where they can once again converse and smile and live their life. And they still don’t really understand why. So ECT is still routinely practiced. Please note : the guy who invented the lobotomy was given a Nobel prize in 1949 "for his discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses." So you got these barbarities dished out to the severely ill, and the quack talking cures of the Freudians dished out to the well-heeled worried well, and no wonder that in the late 60s/early 70s you got an Anti-Psychiatry movement. Which I do not have space to go into, but that’s fascinating too. *** As you can see this is a hell of a story, which has affected most of us in one way or another, and this book is a practically perfect account of it all, written with heart and soul and with all the technicalities explained for us general dogsbodies. Totally recommended. SONG LIST Cracking : Suzanne Vega Like The Weather : 10,000 Maniacs Boys Of Bedlam : Steeleye Span Twisted : Joni Mitchell Sleepy Man Blues : Bukka White 19th Nervous Breakdown : Rolling Stones Love In A Faithless Country : Richard Thompson Like A Monkey In A Zoo : Daniel Johnson Feel : Syd Barrett Black Eyed Dog : Nick Drake ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 03, 2016
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Sep 09, 2016
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Aug 22, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 0224093606
| 9780224093606
| 0224093606
| 4.00
| 1,045
| Jan 05, 2012
| Jan 01, 2012
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it was ok
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I got this because I thought it would be the British equivalent of Behind the Gates of Gomorrah: A Year with the Criminally Insane by Stephen Seager w
I got this because I thought it would be the British equivalent of Behind the Gates of Gomorrah: A Year with the Criminally Insane by Stephen Seager which is a Good Read. But it wasn’t because Stephen Seager can write plain English and Dennis O’Donnell can’t. If he's not doing his infodumps, Dennis thinks he has to be performing in every sentence, he can’t say a single thing without it has to be in this blokey, slangy, self-regardingly comical voice which grated so badly I thought I would rather be watching a boxed set of Everybody Loves Raymond and at that point I pressed the EJECT button. I hate Everybody Loves Raymond. This is what I mean : During the course of this ten-bob hour, some patients paid as little attention to me as if I’d been a snatch of music or a smell of Bisto And then the door opened and my arse fell off and rattled on the floor like a hubcap In the middle of his towering rage the big fella had thought better of giving Humphrey a tanking and had lamped the door instead. I found that really impressive. It was just as well for Dr Humphrey , too. That punch might well have severed his head from his body. He’d have had to pick it up and do his entire ward round carrying it under his arm, like the Green Knight. And another thing is that because the author doesn’t want to betray any patient confidentiality, all these patients are composites; and yet, we have pages of dialogue with them. It’s an uneasy stew with dubious ingredients and a jolly, gurning, sniggering chef stirring away. But one thing did strike me as worth mentioning : the curious psychological condition of Erotomania, which pops up on p154. I quote from one of Dennis’s non-jovial infodumps : Called “unrequited love” for centuries, and often confused with nymphomania or satyriasis, this is a condition whereby the sufferer believes that another person is in love with them. But not someone who actually is in love with them… rather, a total stranger. Sometimes a celebrity the sufferer has developed a fixation on. It is a psychotic symptom since it is completely delusional… The sufferer remains convinced that the object of his or her affections returns the feeling and communicates the regard in covert ways, such as secret signals, meaningful glances and other forms of coded behavior. These might be increasingly baroque and detached from reality, such as the clothes he or she wears on a particular day. The sufferer, however, demonstrates his or her love by overt means. What a wonderful way of describing how the atheist perceives religious believers. The atheist says well, sorry and all that, but a) God does not exist, and b) if he does, he doesn't love you, for sure - but no no no, says the believer, look – we can read these covert signs which only us believers can spot – see this statue of Mary actually wept on a certain day in 1953; see, this lady went to Lourdes and her migraines ceased. And anyway, who needs such signs – we know in our hearts he loves us. Dennis gives us the case history of Cordelia ("a delightful young woman who spoke with the clipped vowels of the city’s educated middle class"). She has conceived this almighty passion for her local doctor, an older married man. She invents a thousand fake illnesses so she can make appointments with him. Once when he asked her to remove her blouse, he twigged something was wrong, and made an excuse, and left and came back with a nurse to find she was completely naked. Another time, she made up a story about being the daughter of one of his colleagues and visited his house and met his wife. At that point the cops and the psychiatrists were involved. In conversation, she said well, the doctor would certainly have made love to her if the nurse hadn’t have been there. And he had to call the police, because his wife was there. "How do you know he loves you?" "Little things, that only a lover would pick up on. When the lounge light is on it means she’s at home and he has to go through the motions of being a husband and a father. But when the top window is open at night, with the curtains down, that means he wants to see me in the near future." "Right – it couldn’t just be that they want some fresh air in the bedroom at night?" "Don’t be so prosaic, Dennis." This is precisely the conversation between the atheist and the believer. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 11, 2016
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Jun 12, 2016
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Jun 11, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 158898608X
| 9781588986085
| 158898608X
| 2.40
| 5
| Apr 05, 2002
| Apr 05, 2002
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liked it
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The self-flagellating confessional autobiography has a long and distinguished history in Western literature, commencing with St Augustine and continui
The self-flagellating confessional autobiography has a long and distinguished history in Western literature, commencing with St Augustine and continuing with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Burroughs, Henry Miller, Pamela des Barres and Drew Barrymore. [image] (St Augustine of Hippo) [image] (The GTOs, with Pamela Des Barres centre) The whole bloody miserable genre has recently been turned into a Lord-of-the-Rings-and-then-some epic by Karl Ove Knausgård under his provocative title Min Kamp. So here is Tommy Walker (a pseudonym for very understandable reasons) and his (most handsomely) self-published 500 pages of mostly rancid nasty horrible memories. I almost gave up on this because the first 200 pages or so are intolerable. People who write memoirs think their readers will be goggling at every last possible eency weency detail. When the bell rang to signify the end of one class before the start of another, most kids were quick to go to their lockers, mill around and chat, for five short minutes having reprieve from the regimen of the classroom. For humans as a species I’m sure this is very important, but it’s something I never got into. I often arrived at class first and left last to bypass any awkwardness in the halls. and In the wintertime when it snowed we’d go sledding down Dead Man’s Hill, so named for its treacherous steepness. Danger, to a certain extent, only added to the thrills. So Tommy trudges dully through every usual introverted-kid phase – obsession with sport, with one particular girl, with insects – and we crawl along with him, stabbing ourselves with pencils and groaning aloud with boredom. The humdrum blatherings are slightly enlivened when Tommy discovers masturbation and decides that his sexual identity is actually “male lesbian”. Self-abuse begins to take over – we get pages about the strange places he found to strum his dingle dangle. He attempts to find a girlfriend but the only one he locates – for some curious unstated reason – decides to dump him after the first date. We just can’t fathom out why, and neither can Tommy. It drives him crazy. Many many pages are spent contemplating First Girlfriend. He leaves school without any qualifications. He tries work, gets sick of menial disgusting jobs, tries college gets sick of that, then has a kind of spiritual breakthrough – the problem with human life is possessions. He must get rid of everything, starting with his family and his home. So he wanders off to become a homeless wanderer, like some kind of Indian sadhu. He doesn’t cut his hair or shave for a year. This is the 80s not the 60s when all this kind of thing was normal. He forms a strange non-sexual relationship with an older woman Sophia who is a lesbian but who lets him stay at her place, but then she chucks him out. He tries college again, then drops out, then tries homelessness again, all right, clearly this guy is mentally unwell. I notice I am still reading this stuff. Why? I have gradually become hypnotized by Tommy’s horrible life. Unceasing ghastliness. It’s page 300 and Tommy is not yet 18 years old. I did not know that he’s only 21 when the book ends. By now he is definitely becoming a Jeffrey Dahmer type, with flat-out bonkers fantasies and wanking procedures, all laconically detailed for our delight. While resting on the swings at a certain beach resort, I watched a teenaged girl. She was writing something, probably a letter, while sitting at a picnic table as the waves rolled in and out. Probably watched her for plural hours before summoning the strength that I did. I approached her and asked her if she would mind some company. “Yes, actually, I would. You see, I’m writing a letter.” Later, bush tired as I tended to get walking all day long, I nonetheless took up a physical chase of a woman who had jogged on past me. I in my battle-worn jeans caught up to her in her aerodynamic shorts and asked her “Wanna race?” She shook her head no so I detoured from her route. He contemplates walking about with a sandwich-board sign: MAN WANTS WOMAN I AM DEPERATELY LONELY AND CAN’T SAY HELLO Just as you might be dredging up the adumbration of a vestige of a trace of sympathy for Tommy the Wretched, he tells you about his attempt to have sex with the family cat: Dixie started making very strange sounds of protest obviously, terrible sounds the likes of which I’d never heard before. You’ll be relieved to know that Tommy does not pursue this line of inquiry any further. So, Tommy winds up back home and finally gets a job as a dishwasher at a restaurant, and discovers to his surprise that he’s finally found something he’s good at – washing dishes. He gets himself a little apartment, and everything is rolling along okay, except that alas he still can’t communicate with other human beings. It’s like they’re all on Planet Earth in a giant jacuzzi having a whale of a time and he’s on Planet Pluto watching them through a telescope. . . As a virtually friendless shadow man without access to societal keys, all doors seemingly closed and labelled “For Members Only”, all I saw of life was people running their grooves on the sidewalk. So naturally he begins to think about killing people. Preferably girls. But not in a cruel way. It was like this – women, clearly, are the life-creating sex. Men, alas, are the destructive sex. Whilst Tommy thought he might be a lesbian, he had to acknowledge that he was a man and therefore destructive. However, on the bright side: I didn’t have to actually kill anybody so long as I believed myself to possess the psychological power to do so. On the other hand, he dreams of success and forms ambitions to compete at the very top of his chosen field: The bench-mark is thirty-six for Ted Bundy, a conservative forty-three or so for the Green River Killer, and you want to reach that upper echelon, rub shoulders and hobnob with the greatest in your field. It’s only natural. But you’ll be happy to know that the nearest he gets is to buy a blow up doll and beat her up (“you like that, doncha!”) Then it all goes away – the murderous maundering meditations fade out and are replaced by a new obsession -placing ads in the Singles sections of various newspapers. We get pages of his bizarre appeals for a woman of post-menopausal age (in order to avoid children) : With an appeal to a much older woman, I am numerically a very young man, but being so securely grounded to nature, to the, and my origin, I am able to state from the vantage point of a man who has never fragmented, that I am a very, very old little boy. Mostly – no surprise - he gets no responses. Now and again he gets a response, calls her up, arranges a date and gets stood up. In the middle of this he goes to see Ken Russell’s movie of Tommy and this blows his mind – Tommy is me!! Hence the pseudonym of this book. [image] Meanwhile, he rekindles his friendship with Sophie, the older lesbian, who’s also a hoarder, and begins filling up Tommy’s apartment with dumpster junk, as her own place, and all her rented storage spaces, are already full. Anyways, finally after spending more than 700 bucks on these singles ads, he connects with a nice 48 year old lady called Hannah who accepts Tommy for what he is, an androgynous 6 foot three male lesbian, and what do you know, it’s a happy ending, which in this particular book was pretty unexpected. Is any of this actually true? Who knows. But it’s bizarre enough to be. In the end this is an unsparing but weirdly touching portrait of youthful male loneliness. ...more |
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Jan 22, 2017
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Jan 24, 2017
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Jan 21, 2016
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Paperback
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| 1476774498
| 9781476774497
| 1476774498
| 3.71
| 2,013
| Sep 16, 2014
| Sep 16, 2014
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liked it
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All in a day’s work for Dr Seager at Napa State Hospital in California: I’d just made it back to my office door when an alarm rang. I joined Cohen and All in a day’s work for Dr Seager at Napa State Hospital in California: I’d just made it back to my office door when an alarm rang. I joined Cohen and a crowd that surged toward Unit C, where another battle had begun. “Stupid bitch!” Mathews yelled as three staff members hustled him toward the restraint room. Luella sat on the floor, forehead resting on bent knees, blood dripping. p47 And a week after that I pushed my alarm. Sirens erupted. A brief melee ensued. The staff broke it up and , surprisingly, tempers quickly cooled. Carver limped to the seclusion room; Xiang followed, a syringe ready. p76 And a week or so after that I leaned back in my office chair. Then an alarm went off. I ran ahead of Cohen, unlocked the door to Unit C, and followed a crowd to the nurses’ station. “I warned you,” yelled Xiang, and kicked at Gomez, who lay on the ground covered by staff. Cohen restrained Xiang but only just. p171 Dr Stephen Seager replaced Dr Tom at Unit C. Dr Tom was involuntarily retired by a patient, Mr Mathews, who beat him and kicked him into a coma. After a few months Dr Tom died. But his murderer faced no consequences. Mr Mathews was in Unit C having committed various homicides and having been found to be chronically insane. There was no other place for Mr Mathews to be. Unit C was the end point. This meant that the staff had to deal every day with a person who murdered their colleague and who could, if he got lucky again, murder them, and who would never suffer any consequences. Would Mathews be prosecuted for the murder of Dr Tom? No. What would be the point? Just money wasted on a meaningless court proceeding. THANKSGIVING The staff organise a Thanksgiving dinner for the patients, whose families are invited. Some families don’t attend, because the patient has no family, because the patient killed all their family. The ones who do come bring their children. ”Let me get this straight,” I said. “The hospital is going to invite a bunch of children to have lunch in a room into which they’ve also invited the state’s most notorious child molesters?” “Not to worry,” Cohen said. “They’re going to keep an eye on them.” THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE PSYCHOTIC The majority of this book deals with the day to day barely-controlled-violence and the regular shakedowns to find shanks and stills. It’s never less than compelling, although the author will be winning no prizes for his prose style, which has a tendency to spray clichés around in a curt style of journalese which can grate (“Facing shared adversity, we’d bonded.” “Lost in thought, I felt a tug on my sleeve.”) But heck, what a story. And also, on occasion Dr Seager bursts into a different mode, where he lets rip with some strong personal views about the whole psychiatric/legal morass, and these parts were great and all too few. In one section he outlines how America has got to its present unhappy situation (and truly America is not alone in this). SHORT HISTORY OF THE CHRONICALLY MENTALLY UNWELL IN AMERICA For the best part of a century, the criminally insane were warehoused in distant state hospitals. In 1963, the Community Mental Health Act, promoted by John Kennedy, established community mental health centres. These would be much more humane. The state hospitals were emptied. Local communities, however, had not been consulted and they showed no interest whatever in a massive influx of psychotic individuals. Also, Congress never funded most community mental health centres, so they weren’t built. The newly-released state hospital patients, with nowhere to live and nowhere to receive treatment, took up residence on city streets and became the homeless mentally ill. 70% of those guys eventually end up in jail. So jails started to fill up with mentally ill people. The really violent perpetrators, the ones unfit to plead or not guilty by reason of insanity, were sent back to re-tooled state hospitals like Napa. SANDY HOOK, VIRGINIA TECH, RED LAKE Towards the end of the book, one subject begins to take over : gun rampages. It’s not clear if any of Dr Seager’s Unit C patients ever committed any of these offences, he never says so. His guys are in there for normal family massacres, serial rapes and murders, and child murders. But he quotes an outburst from his wife who sees a newspaper account about the Adam Lanza’s school shooting in which 21 children and 6 adults died. Christ, there’s a new one every week. And the same crap happens each time. A morbid picture of the shooter appears on the news – never the victims, always the shooter – followed by an emotional call for gun control, then a plea for better mental health treatment, and finally an article explaining the insanity defense. Then nothing. Nothing ever happens. At the end of his book, Dr Seager offers a wants list which he believes would begin to tackle these random massacre guys. He says that none of these shootings come out of a clear blue sky – when it turns out that the shooter was Adam Lanza or Elliot Rodger or Seung-Hui Cho no one who knew them is surprised. These people all have shown signs of particular types of behaviour. What Dr Seager says is that they all are suffering from one specific form of mental illness, paranoid schizophrenia, which means they can function at a high level (fill out forms, pass tests, etc) and yet have a grotesquely distorted view of reality in which usually there’s a giant conspiracy and they are its principal victim. (He points out that the homeless schizophrenic on the street will never commit a rampage, they’re never organised enough.) Another crucial fact about paranoid schizophrenia is that the sufferers do not have any insight, i.e. they never realise they are ill or even that they are wrong and the children or their family or that audience of moviegoers did not actually deserve to be killed. Which means that they will always refuse any offered treatment. Dr Seager is therefore suggesting that the state should intervene before the rampage occurs. But I do not see how any kind of intervention into their lives before they erupt can be done unless we grant the state powers over the individual which we used to denounce in the USSR. In Britain we don’t have school shootings. We have very strong gun control laws, so we’ve only had three crazed gun rampages. But only yesterday a 16 year old kid was sent to the British equivalent of Napa for stabbing a 62 year old teacher to death and returning to his chair where he announced “Good times!” and waited for the cops. He never apologised, he told police he was proud of what he’d done. You can organise your society any old how, but these things are going to happen now and then. This book does what it says on the tin. If you want a fast account of what it’s like working with the most deranged, violent, psychotic people in America, and be made to think about what we’re supposed to do with them, here it is. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 02, 2014
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Nov 05, 2014
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Jun 20, 2014
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Hardcover
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| 0679746048
| 9780679746041
| 0679746048
| 3.93
| 249,966
| 1993
| Apr 19, 1994
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liked it
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Everything is made of language. In the morning you hear those damned birdies tweedlydee tweedlydoo to each other or some damned cats meowing but that’
Everything is made of language. In the morning you hear those damned birdies tweedlydee tweedlydoo to each other or some damned cats meowing but that’s not language. It may be communication but it has no grammar and it can only describe the here and now (the hear and know). The birdies are tweebing about the cats, “look there’s a kitty cat watch out” and the cats are meowing about the birdies (“I see a lot of edible things in trees”) and it doesn’t get much more interesting than that. They will never write a novel. Whereas humans are the opposite, they almost never talk about the here and now. It’s always “I’m sure this wasn’t as expensive as last time we were here” or “you have to get your suit cleaned for next week”. Human language is a really dangerous device, it’s explosive, because not only can you talk about things that aren’t in the here and now, you can with very little effort talk about things that couldn’t possibly exist ever. The owl and the pussycat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat. They took some honey and plenty of money wrapped up in a five pound note. Well, it’s just nonsense, because you wouldn’t wrap up honey in a five pound note, it would gunge up the five pound note, no retailer would accept it, and anyway, an owl and a pussycat would never be able to hire a boat. They wouldn’t have a clue about navigation – how could they use oars? Is this a motorised boat? Was it a tidal estuary? Anyway, I’m getting distracted – by language. And this proves my point. Language means that hardly anything we say is true. I wish I was dead. My mother’s going to kill me. The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. I am no longer in control of my own brain, something else is. All commonly used phrases, a million of them, none of them literally true. Well, we hope not. We hope there are very few mothers who will kill their children, actually kill them, if they’re an hour late. The metaphorical aspect of language, which is its limitless joy and psychedelic legerdemain that we all are in love with, or why would we be readers, leads us humanish beings into some unhappy dark places. All that beating of heads against walls about the Trinity in Christianity for instance. It’s a metaphor – three aspects of God – not three Gods – it’s a poetic way of expressing an ineffable reality (if you’re a Christian) - but the metaphor escaped and took on a life of its own and became a source of much befuddlement. Susanna Kaysen artfully informs us how the madness gets in. It’s when you can’t tell what is language describing something that is from language describing something that might be or could be or never could be. She gives an example – that bureau in the corner looks like a tiger (simile). No – that bureau in the corner IS a tiger! This whole book is about whether we are brains or minds. Brains are very very very very very very very complex machines. But minds are something else. Drugs can fix brains like oil can fix an engine. But drugs can’t fix minds. The only power they had was to dope us up. Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, Librium, Valium : the therapists’ friends. Once we were on it, it was hard to get off. A bit like heroin, except it was the staff who got addicted to our taking it. This is a gigantic debate and may, of course, be another metaphor that has taken on an undeserved life of its own. (Is there a ghost in the machine? Well, I don’t believe in ghosts. But if a thing walks like a ghost and quacks like a ghost, then maybe.) Language leads this memoir astray. Susanna’s account of her 18 month stay in the loony bin (her jocular term, don’t look at me like that) is so wry, “cool, elegant and unexpectedly funny” (Sunday Times), “triumphantly funny” (NYT), “darkly comic” (Newsweek), so mordant, so witty, that it without meaning to verges on presenting hospitalization for mental illness as a hip alternative to college. The tag line on the back of my copy is : “Sometimes the only way to stay sane is to go a little crazy”. Hmmph, I should say not. Like it’s some kind of choice. Like you’re aligning mentally ill people with hipsters, beatniks, drop-outs, Left Bank artistic sufferers, hey, Van Gogh, Sylvia Plath – all those cool types. That’s the blurb writer getting carried away. Like all of us. Carried away by the onrushing ever tumbling surge of human language which is the ruin and the salvation of us all. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 19, 2014
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Apr 20, 2014
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Apr 19, 2014
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Paperback
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| 0007491433
| 9780007491438
| 0007491433
| 3.76
| 47,982
| 2013
| May 09, 2013
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it was ok
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Another novel to prove, if proof was needed, how utterly heartless and without pity I am becoming. Sorry, Nathan Filer, I come to rain all over your p
Another novel to prove, if proof was needed, how utterly heartless and without pity I am becoming. Sorry, Nathan Filer, I come to rain all over your parade. Well, quite a lot of it. The blurb has these three little sentences: There are books you can’t stop reading, which keep you up all night (Well, I actually was reading this most of last night, but that’s because I had insomnia.) There are books which let us into the hidden parts of life and make them vividly real. (Referring to the world of the schizophrenic, since that’s what this novel is all about. But I wouldn’t call mentally ill young people and their lives in and out of institutions a hidden part of life , there are movies (Broken, Silver Linings Playbook, etc etc) and books ( Henry’s Demons – recommended - and lots of others), it’s not terra incognita. There are books which, because of the sheer skill with which every word is chosen, linger in your mind for days. (Wow, fire that blurb writer! For days you say?! Sheer skill? I suppose with not so much skill a book will only linger for minutes. So yeah, they still crank out this silly OTT hypegloop.) THE BIG BLACK PLOT DEVICE This book won the Costa first novel award, so what do I know. I was almost completely unthrilled. It was tiresome. I mean to say, there’s this big thing which is hinted at in the first few pages and which hangs over the rest of novel like a Big Black Cloud About to Burst Forth With Torrential Rain. The schizophrenic brother whose impressionistic memoir/confession we are reading has in some way caused the death of his Down Syndrome brother (yes, this is a blighted family). Cornily, the Big Reveal of What Really Happened That Fateful Day is coughed up only on page 247. The fake suspense of waiting to find out what you figure out roughly from page 5 does not kill you. It just makes you think oh are they still using this plot device? They should really stop. I thought I would only write a three line bah-humbug review, but the sheer skill with which every single word was chosen has made the crabbiness I felt linger in my mind for… hours. I’D LIKE TO TEACH THE WORLD TO SING IN PERFECT HARMONY (BUT I DON’T THINK I’LL GET ROUND TO IT) It says here - The comedian Jo Brand has called The Shock of the Fall "one of the best books about mental illness" and judges for the Costa book awards said it was a novel "so good it will make you feel a better person". Maybe it is, maybe it will. But I thought the bleak realism and painful memories of Matt’s story did not then mean it was okay to ladle dollops of sentimental goop into the mix. It’s strange how wildly different reactions to novels can be – look at the love-gush that puthered all over Donna Tartt’s latest whopper, and look at this rather good review here. SOMETHING I DID LIKE You do get a very strong sense of the mental bind that some patients (or : “service users”!) get into once they’re sucked into the mental health biz. The regime is almost designed to engender fear and distrust. They’re confined to a facility. And drugs are administered to them, all of which have horrible side effects (even the drugs they give you to combat the side effects of the first drugs). And there’s no choice in any of this. They have proved they’re incapable of existing in the outside world in one way or another, so there they are, here’s their diagnosis, there’s the drugs (if you don’t take those 6 pills we’ll inject you) and there’s your room. So, the patients become locked into a low-level interior guerrilla war against the people who are trying to help them. Inside their heads – as well as fighting their illness - every mental patient is either consciously or unconsciously Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. The staff are their enemies (even the nice ones). (Matt : I don’t hate these people. I just hate not having the choice to get rid of them.) The terminology is dehumanising. Their lives are deserts of idle hours spent smoking with a guy who talks to his tattoos. Or daytime tv, your choice. Last time I went into the office to borrow the Nursing Dictionary, I counted three mugs, a mouse mat, a bunch of pens, two Post-It note booklets and the wall clock – all sporting the brands of different medicines. It's like being in prison and having to look at adverts for fucking locks. SOMETHING ELSE I LIKED Matt is haunted by his dead brother If the tap choked and spluttered before the water came, he was saying I’m lonely. When I opened a bottle of Dr Pepper and the caramel bubbles fizzed over the rim, he was asking me to come out and play. He could speak through an itch, the certainty of a sneeze, the after-taste of tablets, or the way sugar fell from a spoon. No doubt at all, this book has its heart in the right place, unlike mine, which was abandoned a long time ago in a left luggage locker in a train station in a town whose name I no longer recall. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 18, 2014
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Jan 20, 2014
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Jan 18, 2014
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0345301110
| 9780345301116
| 0345301110
| 3.30
| 20,805
| 1954
| Jan 01, 1992
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did not like it
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I did read this some years ago so honesty compels me to list it here. For those of you who haven't yet had the pleasure, I can save you some time. All
I did read this some years ago so honesty compels me to list it here. For those of you who haven't yet had the pleasure, I can save you some time. All you need are these few verses from Tom Lehrer - the book itself is much less amusing. I quote them here because it's just possible some of you will not know this lovely ballad. I ache for the touch of your lips, dear, But much more for the touch of your whips, dear. You can raise welts like nobody elts, As we dance to the masochism tango. Say our love be a flame, not an ember, Say it's me that you want to dismember. Blacken my eye, Set fire to my tie, As we dance to the masochism tango. Your eyes cast a spell that bewitches The last time I needed twenty stitches To sew up the gash That you made with your lash, As we danced to the masochism tango. Bash in my brain, And make me scream with pain, Then kick me once again, And say we'll never part. Take your cigarette from it's holder, And burn your initials in my shoulder. Fracture my spine, And swear that you're mine, As we dance to the masochism tango ...more |
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1
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not set
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not set
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Jan 11, 2014
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 1852427507
| 9781852427504
| 1852427507
| 3.59
| 13,408
| 1983
| Jul 01, 2002
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did not like it
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A bit like the moment in The Gold Rush where Charlie Chaplin opens his cabin door and the howling gale blasts him across the room and he spends the ne
A bit like the moment in The Gold Rush where Charlie Chaplin opens his cabin door and the howling gale blasts him across the room and he spends the next five minutes trying to shut the door again – so many raging roaring ideas came hurtling out of these pages that I struggled to close the book at all. Actually, that’s not the right image! Too healthy! It was more like one of those exhibitions of biological curiosities you got in some old teaching hospitals, somewhat frowned upon now, I imagine. Something in a huge murky jar which you flinch from and turn away, sickened. Well, it was a combination of insane howling tempest and formaldehyded grotesquerie. It was both at the same time. SOMETIMES IT SEEMS THAT WOMEN DON’T MAKE IT EASY FOR THEMSELVES That’s a bit of a sexist generalisation, maybe, but I give you The Story of O by Pauline Reage American Psycho directed by Mary Harron 50 Shades of Gray by E L James Topping from Below by Laura Reese And now The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek These women should be busted for aiding and abetting the enemy. (Story of O, for instance, was written by a woman to rekindle the waning interest of her lover – how gross is that?). Men are quite capable, indeed very eager, to create books and movies portraying women as secretly desiring abusive violent behaviour due to their strong innate masochistic tendencies (Blue Velvet, Lust Caution, Bitter Moon, Secretary) without women helping the men by handing them live ammunition. Intellectual men will read stuff like The Piano Teacher and Story of O; and although they won’t read 50 Shades they will note the amazing success of that book, and that its readers are 99% female; so these things become the cultural background radiation of our times; and the idea gets around that on some level maybe women actually want to be dominated and mistreated, whatever they might say with their feminist voices. Treat em mean and keep em keen. So you get a situation where the grisly Robin Thicke gets caned up and down the land for his dreadful song Blurred Lines (and the video) You the hottest bitch in this place I feel so lucky you're an animal, baby it's in your nature Just let me liberate you I'll give you something big enough to tear your ass in two Swag on, even when you dress casual I mean it's almost unbearable Nothing like your last guy, he too square for you He don't smack that ass and pull your hair like that I know you want it Etc etc Whilst at the same time these high culture depictions of female masochism like Story of O and The Piano Teacher (not to mention the writings of de Sade) are strongly defended, and Mary Harron’s film of American Psycho is parlayed into some kind of feminist statement. (Non-intellectual men won’t be reading any of this stuff, they’ll be playing Grand Theft Auto and pretending to kill hookers they’ve taken hostage.) So that’s the case for the prosecution. The Piano Teacher, whatever it may be, is not helping. CASE FOR THE DEFENCE The introduction says This book does not set out to please or entertain the reader. It does, though set out to reveal all kinds of uncomfortable truths A NYT critic wrote Many, particularly in academic circles, believe she has achieved a triumphant combination of avant-garde technique and progressive social criticism. The Nobel prize committee wrote : for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power (Wiki adds : However one member of the Nobel Committee resigned over this decision, describing Jelinek’s work as “whining, unenjoyable public pornography” and “a mass of text shoveled together without artistic structure.” ) In some way this 300 page descent into extreme female masochism is supposed to be a protest against patriarchy, or fascism, or Austria, or male sexuality. This reading would set The Piano Teacher next to Ariel by Sylvia Plath, and would note her suicide – examples of male oppression being internalised to the extent that women become self-haters. Myself I think a healthier response to male oppression was provided by Aileen Wuornos. I THINK IT’S TRUE TO SAY THAT EVERY SENTENCE IN THIS NOVEL IS UNPLEASANT TO READ. There may be two or three exceptions. Our author’s voice is present-tense horrified-repulsed-lascivious-demented-sneery commentary. The author’s voice is as horrible as the main character is crazy. For pages at a time it’s only possible to glean a general sense of what’s happening. It often gets very close to complete gibberish. Most of the time you get a ranting commentary on Erica which is made up of an unceasing flood of metaphors which change or get dropped mid-paragraph and never quite make sense. Here are some of my favourite DAFT SENTENCES. Because of the style, it’s sometimes hard to tell if this stuff is supposed to be a reflection of the character’s diseased brains or is a comment by the author. Also, it is impossible for me to say if this translation is by someone who was unable to write a non-contorted straightforward sentence in English; or if Elfriede Jelinek wanted to sound like an earnest Martian who has not quite mastered Earth languages yet. So with those caveats, I give you my top thirteen. THE FEEDBAGS OF MATERNAL DETRITUS Striding along, Erica hates that porous, rancid fruit that marks the bottom of her abdomen. Simply by living his own life, he has created his own sperm, arduously and tediously. Her body is one big refrigerator, where Art is stored. Erika distrusts young girls; she tries to gauge their clothing and physical dimensions, hoping to ridicule them. Turkish men don’t like women; they never suffer their company willingly. Mother smacks away at the loosened hairdo of the late-season fruit of her womb. Erika’s will shall be the lamb that nestles down with the lion of maternal will. This gesture of humility will prevent the maternal will from shredding the soft, unformed filial will and munching on its bloody limbs. She stands on the floor like a much-used flute that has to deny itself, because otherwise it could not endure the many dilettantish lips that keep wanting to take it in. You can capture any woman if you exploit her awareness of her own physical inadequacies. A man who meticulously slices up his wife and children and then stores them in the refrigerator in order to eat them later on is no more barbaric than the newspaper that runs the item. She yearns for a man who knows a lot and can play the violin. Once she bags him, he’ll caress her. That mountain goat, ready to flee, is already clambering through the detritus, but he doesn’t have the strength to track down her femininity, which lies buried in the detritus. She is one of those people who lead and guide most people. Sucked into the vacuum of the absolute inertia of her body, she shoots out of the bottle when it opens, and she is then flung into a previously selected or unexpected alien existence. [After a performance of Bach] Both performers rise from their stools and bow their heads. They are patient horses sticking their noses into the feedbags of everyday life, which has reawakened. GIVE ME A BREAK The Piano Teacher, then, is the rancid fruit in the feedbag at the bottom of my abdomen. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 30, 2013
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Jan 06, 2014
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Dec 30, 2013
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Paperback
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| 1592407323
| 9781592407323
| 1592407323
| 4.01
| 16,138
| Nov 06, 2012
| Nov 06, 2012
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liked it
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If you’re bi-polar, don’t look for much friendly banter with your psychiatrist. ELLEN : I don’t want to take lots of heavy meds like Lithium. SHRINK : If you’re bi-polar, don’t look for much friendly banter with your psychiatrist. ELLEN : I don’t want to take lots of heavy meds like Lithium. SHRINK : Well, for untreated bi-polar, there’s a high suicide rate and an increased chance of hospitalization. (This is as chummy as Ellen's shrink ever gets.) The following week SHRINK : How’s your sleep? ELLEN : All over the place. SHRINK : Are you taking the Klonopin? ELLEN : Yeah. SHRINK : Let’s raise it to 2mg. The following week SHRINK : I’m concerned about how your platelet level is dropping on the Depakote but let’s stick with that and add some Celexa. (I imagine this is intoned in a monotone like a chant). ELLEN : I’m worried that all these meds will make me lose my creative energy. SHRINK : Well, maybe they will and maybe they won’t. We’ll have to wait and observe. ELLEN : Gee, well, I guess you’re right about that. The following week ELLEN : I’m so sensitive and weepy all the time! Is this mixed states or rapid cycling? (Getting into the jargon.) SHRINK : Well, rapid cycling means four or more episodes in a year and mixed states means symptoms of both mania and depression. Maybe we just need to adjust your meds. Urrrrghhhh. So shrinks either state the blindingly obvious (“You seem to be a little bit down” when the client is bawling her head off) or chant the mantra “we need to adjust your meds”. And I don't know if Ellen is libelling her shrink, but the way she adjusts her meds is to flick through a text book and say "Here's one we haven't tried before, let's try that one." THE SUB-TEXT OF THIS BOOK It’s an investigation into the distressing question : are humans just soft machines? We’re all very happy with the idea that our bodies are machines – cut that bit off and transplant a new one in, and I’ll be right as rain! - or even replacing limbs with actual machinery! – that’s no problem. But we get more ticklish when we think of our brains in the same way. In this book, Ellen is forever struggling with not wanting her creative self which is uniquely her to be crushed by Lithium and other heavy stabilisers. We’ve all seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, so we know what she means – the fear of the chemical cosh. Her worries aren’t misplaced. The psychiatric industry says that if we shove a drug in your brain you will feel whatever the drug programs you to feel. Your mind is just a lot of complex chemical reactions. If we get the meds right, you’ll feel okay. But right now, the science is in its infancy. Come back in a while – when we've done all the research there’ll be no bipolar people, no schizophrenics, no mental illness at all. This is something we can figure out. So I think I would say two things – yes, we are all soft machines, I think it’s obvious, no souls, nothing like that, from nowheresville camest we, and back to nowheresville wilt we goeth; and, all bipolar sufferers should maybe come back in a hundred years or so. Everything will be fine then, if we have still got a functioning planet, of course. Between then and now, you're stuck with the chanting shrinks : "I think we should adjust your meds, I think we should adjust your meds, I think we should adjust your meds...." I should add that this candid book is way more optimistic than I am! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 29, 2013
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Dec 31, 2013
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Dec 29, 2013
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1608192784
| 9781608192786
| 1608192784
| 3.61
| 2,131
| Jan 01, 2010
| Feb 19, 2011
|
liked it
| This book is tiny. 175 pages, read it in one hour. It’s like a beginner’s guide to the most common mental illnesses and even though it’s on lots of be This book is tiny. 175 pages, read it in one hour. It’s like a beginner’s guide to the most common mental illnesses and even though it’s on lots of best-graphic-novelly-things which is why I got it, since I’m an ignorant blunderer in the garden of comix, I wasn't knocked out. We get chapters on dementia, self-harming, depression, personality disorder, schizophrenia and bipolar. A definition, the currently recommended treatment, a quick character sketch of a patient encountered by the author, and on to the next. GO VASCULAR A very close relative of mine had vascular dementia so that ailment is one I know about. It was quite a kindly dementia, there was no hostility, no distress, it was just like a long fade-out on a favourite record. She gradually lost the ability to form words but she was quite happy to chat away in approximate sounds, to which we had to nod along and smile. The incomprehensible vocalising had the exact same timbre as a real conversation, her voice rising and falling and emphasising some sounds – somewhere in her mind she was making perfect sense, and – strangely – so were we when we talked to her about the weather or ourselves. If it wasn’t so peculiar and distressing it would have been poignant and almost funny, like something out of Gormenghast. She never noticed that anything was amiss. It went on for months like until eventually the strange non-conversations petered out and she lapsed into silence. And soon after that the kindly gentlemen with the black cloak gathered her up. So if you’re going to get dementia, go with vascular, that’s my tip. STIGMA Mr Cunningham’s book is mostly a polemic against stigmatising mental health sufferers, and this is of course a very good thing, but it shirks confronting a very real problem. He says : We don’t tolerate racism and sexism these days, but people with mental health problems are still fair game. Mockery, discrimination and stigma persist, despite research showing mental illness to be as real as any other illness. I thought that was a strange thing to say. Who doesn’t think that mental illness is “as real as any other illness”? Who needs any research to prove that? Is he talking about a coven of Szasz and R D Laing followers who deny that there is such a thing as insanity? No, I think he means the regular public, who sometimes aren’t sympathetic. Many people still believe mental illness to be a failure of character and self-discipline he complains. What he doesn’t address is that mental illness is not black and white, it’s the ten thousand shades between, and it’s hard for many people to spot that this person is a wild and fun-loving type who sometimes burns out and gets depressed, but that person has bi-polar; this person is a self-indulgent whiner who everyone tiptoes around, but that person is suffering from depression. It’s hard enough for the professionals to give a definite diagnosis sometimes, so the general public may be forgiven for not immediately medicalising their fellows. So yes, sometimes people are still told to snap out of it when they can't. As opposed to people stigmatising mental health, in some sections of society many people are very keen to pathologise their own behaviour, such as those involved in the addiction industry. And check this quote from an essay by the prison doctor Theodore Dalrymple – it’s from one of his essays : Another burglar demanded to know from me why he repeatedly broke into houses and stole VCRs. He asked the question aggressively as if "the system" had so far let him down in not supplying him with the answer, as if it were my duty as a doctor to provide him with the buried psychological secret that, once revealed, would in and of itself lead him unfailingly on the path of virtue. Until then he would continue to break into houses and the blame would be mine. THE LAST CHAPTER Is called How I Lived Again and recounts DC’s own painful struggles with anxiety and depression, which ended his career as a psychiatric nurse. When I read that, I thought – you know, I really shouldn’t be saying such critical things about this book – look at what this poor guy went through. But … in an unexpected way, the new Goodreads rules came to my rescue. I have to put all thoughts about the author out of my mind and just, you know, concentrate on the book. Thanks for the reminder, Goodreads. If it wasn’t for you I would be feeling like a right bastard. TEN GREAT SONGS ABOUT MENTAL ILLNESS Cracking : Suzanne Vega https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r99jp... Like the Weather : 10,000 Maniacs (sorry, that’s the name of the band) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=624gY... Boys of Bedlam : Steeleye Span https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZwVE... Sleepy man Blues : Bukka White https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqnU-... 19th nervous breakdown : stones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU1kT... Love in a faithless country : Richard Thompson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-htvF... Like a monkey in a zoo : Vic Chestnutt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVMJO... Feel : syd barrett https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjIHF... Thank You : Brian Wilson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPbpk... Cloud my sunny mood : Dan Hicks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LMvI... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Oct 15, 2013
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Oct 15, 2013
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0230252036
| 9780230252035
| 0230252036
| 3.99
| 1,422
| 2010
| Jan 01, 2010
|
it was ok
|
Psychotherapy gives me the creeps. But – wait a moment – why did I say CREEPS? Was it because I was going to write that it gives me the WILLIES but I
Psychotherapy gives me the creeps. But – wait a moment – why did I say CREEPS? Was it because I was going to write that it gives me the WILLIES but I didn't want to write the word WILLY because I don't want to draw attention to my WILLY which as you see I have now done? How rancidly ironic. I see I have subverted myself – again. You can't win with psychotherapists. But wait – who said there was anything to "win"? is that how I look at life? As an eternal struggle of winning and losing? Aaargh. I prefer Motown to psychotherapy. On balance I think when all is said and done Motown has saved more lives and given meaning to more people than psychotherapy. I don't have the figures right now, but if you check into it, I think you'll find I'm right about that. It's on the internet somewhere. This is a graphic novella about one particular psychotherapy experience from the point of view of both parties. This rich English barrister is a secret kleptomaniac (nothing serious, just a little light shoplifting). It turns out that.. er.. it was because he wasn't telling people what he was feeling. As soon as he did so, and it took him a year, his Spanish girlfriend married him and he never stole anything again. The End. Sound like a pile of poo to you? Or is that another wretched reference to my private parts? There are so many problems I have with psychotherapy but like religion it's because I never "got" it. I've never experienced it, only been around people who have. I've seen how it can become a destructive habit in itself. But if, as Freud said, it can turn hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness, as he thought was its raison d'etre, then fair dinkum. And I suppose, grudgingly, I have to acknowledge that when the princess could not get a wink of sleep on her fifteen mattresses because of the pea hidden under the first mattress, it was real discomfort she was feeling. This little book does give some insight into the therapeutic thing but if it's free and candid expression of feelings which is going to make me feel better about my life, then I'd like to say that I wanted to pour a bucket of icy water over the irritating upper class client and hide the therapist's glasses. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Nov 24, 2011
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Nov 24, 2011
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0553103075
| 9780553103076
| 0553103075
| 3.64
| 39
| Apr 1976
| Apr 1976
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liked it
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 2011
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Jul 11, 2011
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Paperback
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 3.90
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it was amazing
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Feb 13, 2024
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Nov 24, 2023
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| 4.16
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really liked it
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Oct 09, 2023
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Oct 03, 2023
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| 4.24
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really liked it
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Apr 09, 2022
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Apr 06, 2022
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| 4.22
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liked it
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Apr 03, 2022
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Apr 01, 2022
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| 3.64
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did not like it
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Apr 27, 2022
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Mar 27, 2022
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| 3.52
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liked it
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Oct 11, 2021
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Oct 05, 2021
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| 3.90
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really liked it
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Jun 28, 2020
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May 13, 2020
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| 3.90
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liked it
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Feb 05, 2020
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Feb 03, 2020
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| 4.10
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it was amazing
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Sep 09, 2016
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Aug 22, 2016
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| 4.00
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it was ok
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Jun 12, 2016
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Jun 11, 2016
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| 2.40
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liked it
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Jan 24, 2017
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Jan 21, 2016
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| 3.71
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liked it
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Nov 05, 2014
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Jun 20, 2014
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| 3.93
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liked it
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Apr 20, 2014
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Apr 19, 2014
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| 3.76
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it was ok
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Jan 20, 2014
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Jan 18, 2014
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| 3.30
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did not like it
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not set
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Jan 11, 2014
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| 3.59
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did not like it
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Jan 06, 2014
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Dec 30, 2013
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|||||
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| 4.01
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liked it
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Dec 31, 2013
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Dec 29, 2013
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| 3.61
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liked it
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Oct 15, 2013
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Oct 15, 2013
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| 3.99
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it was ok
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Nov 24, 2011
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Nov 24, 2011
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| 3.64
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liked it
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Jul 2011
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Jul 11, 2011
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