PSYCHIATRY ON THE COUCH
Weber, Carlo A.
BOOKS PSYCHIATRY ON THE COUGH Caring WILLARD GAYLIN Knopf, $7.95 Don't Shrink to Fit EILEEN WALKENSTEIN Grove, $7.95 It was a warm afternoon; my patient's story was a familiar one....
...There could be some question, however, whether it is nobler to refer to someone as a "zombie" or a "limp penis" (Walkenstein's metaphors) than to call them neurasthenic...
...Walkenstein, incidentally, because despite her attack on organized psychiatry, Walkenstein's name never appears without the M.D...
...As rid he was cast en overrun by 1 the whole of sly...
...The book is marred by some literary peccadillos, a tendency to be pedantic —surely these are notes from his Columbia lectures—some forced wordconstructions, like "automaticity," some rather facile comparisons of the New and Old Testaments which might make some exegetes shudder...
...My God," I thought, "Right now I must look like every-, one's stereotype of the shrink...
...Psychiatry as Business...
...Hers is a sprightly, witty, insightful, sometimes angry, sometimes shrill indictment of a psychiatric establishment that continues to diagnose, label and fit unique people into Procrustean beds...
...Against a background of Rousseauv.ian and Scholastic philosophy, Willard Gaylin offers an outline of development psychology, and thus copiously armed, sounds a noble, if at times homiletic, call for a return to love and concern for our fellow man...
...Walkenstein espouses the contemporary movement away from the "yes-saying" need-tobe-approved mode to "no-saying" assertiveness...
...It always feels good to know that I'm not a lone voice in the world, and that other voices reflect my own" is a truly awful remark, involving a game she would never tolerate in one of her clients...
...I can imagine a bright psychiatrist some day writing a paper inveighing against dehumanizing people by labeling them "zombies...
...And so, with all this, it seems hardly necessary for Walkenstein to engage in some selfserving games of her own...
...tot resonate in tual contempoits in his work on lights and across the raw mous novel...
...I read Caring on a flight to Seattle to visit a dear friend, a sister whom I have known for almost twenty years, and possibly the most caring person I have ever known...
...we must however, remember that they are but pale and only convenient reflections of reality...
...My immediate office staff, in an effort to ward off the onset of additional frustrations and burnedout syndromes, has adopted an attitude of collective minor cynicism about our bureaucracies...
...I listened, nodding now and again in agreement (not dozing), and pulled at my short and scrubby beard...
...Gaylin is a caring man himself—but his message is not much assisted by insistent optimism, homilies, and a philosophy of the perfectibility of man which the current state of civilization simply does not support...
...And though she adds little substantively to the fire, I suppose that more fuel is still necessary...
...It is not a perfectly healthy attitude...
...The Rise and Fall of Growth Movements, to name a few...
...because despite heavy prosecution, my impression is that the accused is still very much at large...
...He was apparently motivated to write this book in response to all the treatises describing man as >r a manner of a prodigiously that lost kinge necromancer, language of the ist not" and in se again...
...I keep writing Dr...
...and he does allow himself more than the average number of cliches ("We are all becoming alienated from our culture...
...So, a little more demystifying is not unwelcome, especially, as in the case, if it is also accompanied by an open, creative, even poetic approach to therapy to replace what is being dislodged...
...And fatui not so much his works, for nd them out...
...So, despite some presumptions, some historical boffos perpetrated when she is walking on unfamiliar ground, and some rather cutesy playing with words ("if my eye is dis-eased"), this is a neat book...
...But the repeated emphasis upon the reciprocal swing of the dependence-independence cycling in growth is solid stuff...
...So there, standing straight for their portraits are these two very capable psychiatrists...
...It is good for all of us that Gaylin is willing to counter that...
...but somehow she leaves the impression that a yes is limp and a no is erect...
...My attention swung for a second back CARLO A. WEBER on myself...
...As someone who has always felt guilty when he said no, I can only applaud Walkenstein's emphasis...
...Out of and elaboratenovels came...
...Whenever I my no do hide, My yes gets buried deep inside...
...What may have seemed benign when originally conceived (schizophrenia is a more humane label than diabolical possession) has come in time to be, as Walkenstein says, a jail sentence...
...There are many luminous 'bits in this fascinating and sometimes irksome book: Ten Questions to Ask Your Shrink...
...But Dr...
...it is an exclamation point...
...They are both by psychiatrists, who went through the same medical training, had very similar experience in internship, residency, etc., passed the same exams, now perform similar psychotherapeutic rituals, and probably both write illegible prescriptions...
...If this were just another attack on traditional psychiatry, we could nod agreement and dismiss it...
...Into this atmosphere, we recently transferred an enthusiastic young man, whose ebullient optimism contrasted sharply with the prevailing mood...
...Well, if anyone still believes that canard, I suggest he read these two books, preferably back to back...
...And what do you know —they really don't all look alike, do they...
...In effect, the self-denigration and cynicism which Gaylin is attempting to counteract seem now so pandemic that we come to respond to the voice of simple hope and faith as almost a threat to our learned modes of coping with frustration...
...and they couldn't be further apart...
...And all the while she attacks the psychiatric labels, Walkenstein offers other individualized descriptions of behavior...
...My no is prelude to my Yes...
...but without his voice, we just slide a little further into the morass of national cynicism...
...After preaching the good news of a return to faith, hope, and love, Gaylin launches into a description of the oscillation between dependence and independence that frames human development from the helplessness of the infant to the independence of the young adult and finally to the elected dependency of the lover...
...A relationship is not over when one person says to another, "I hate you," but rather when he or she says "Frankly, I don't give a damn...
...It wasn't long before several battle-scarred veterans announced to me privately that ". . . that boy has got to go...
...And what a hell of a therapist she must be...
...Walkenstein also offers a therapeutic process of confronting and interacting, collaborating with the person-patient in a process that succeeds because it springs from the heart of a truly concerned therapist...
...If you turn a dim ear to my prelude, you could not possibly hear the whole symphony of my yes—it would deafen you altogether...
...Selfm, he writes, rk of so many the human time that we ase for caring as apparently ok in response ribing man as aggressor and destroyer...
...We simply end up with a new form of name-calling...
...He's destroying our morale...
...This description, encompassing the heart of the book, is succinct, informative and readable...
...In a somewhat fervent beginning, he states that man is biologically and culturally programed to care, and that indeed caring for others is essential to the survival of the species...
...Walkenstein offers what is now the more popular confrontational realism...
...This she answers best for herself: My no is prelude to my yes...
...Those functions have already been performed, and this book adds little to them...
...Following the iconoclastic tradition begun by Szasz and Laing, and echoed by many psychiatrists and psychologists since, Walkenstein adds some of her own faggots to the burning of the traditional witchdoctors...
...Throughout, Dr...
...The fact is, we can scarcely do without labels...
...Having said that, I need to add that such pseudo-sophisticated criticism is really irrelevant and defensive, and to share a couple of anecdotes revealing the scope of my own vacillation between faith and cynicism...
...but it's better than depression...
...For in it are the seeds of collective indifference, and as Gaylin notes so pointedly, love is not killed by hatred, but by indifference...
...The book abounds in brilliant case transcriptions, powerful anecdotes, and some rather bad poetry...
...It is neither...
...So, in many ways, this is a timely and valuable book, and I'm sure that Dr...
...and I dare say, it is needed at a time when the current trend toward independence is expressed in the extremes of "assertiveness," often reduced to courses in how to be rude, and in the inclination to relegate all forms of altruism to some manner of sickness...
...The shed all these autobiography, vised version of "is a hypertroJhood...
...prominently attached, while (isn't this interesting) Gaylin never uses the title...
...I have something to do with the management of some government-funded mental health programs, most of which have suffered considerably in the last several years because of lack of funds, of understanding, of accountability and a host of other factors too depressing to recount...
...Walkenstein intended this book to be an explanation, perhaps even an expose...
...Indeed, it does not seem to be written by the same author who allowed himself to sermonize in the early chapters...
...This sudden movement from exhortation to scientific description creates a strange sense of dualism, as though the two sections, or authors thereof, are not really connected...
...In sharp contrast to Gaylin's religious enthusiasm, Dr...
...But labels are persistent...
...This book is not a statement, either original or profound...
...So hear my no...
...Gaylin is, therefore, a bit of a threat...
...The Court Psychiatrist as Prostitute...
...The book is devoted to a defense of that thesis...
...Because, they all do look alike don't they...
...and that falls considerably short of the truth...
...tentic past, it is z, like English, ore the perfect I of Rousseauilosophy, Wiloutline of demd thus copiible, if at times rn to love and n man...
...And a powerful one...
...Selfdenigration and cynicism, he writes, have become the hallmark of so many current writings about the human situation that ". . . it is time that we begin to examine the case for caring and for love...
...I have the feeling that Dr...
...No is yes and yes is no A wise old Woman told me so...
...But the smile has not left her Irish face, and Commonweal: 21 the jokes (not always very good ones) are still quick, and her concern for others still remains...
...After many years of selfless and utterly cheerful service to others, she is now in a wheel chair and losing her sight...
...And, though there may be precious little evidence to sustain such an attitude of hope and optimism about the future of this globe, or the thesis that man is essentially a caring being, we cannot but cling to the vision of those who believe it...
Vol. 105 • January 1978 • No. 1
