Summary:

In the fall of 1983, Treya Killam was about to be married to Ken Wilber, a prominent theorist in the field of transpersonal psychology, when she was diagnosed with a particularly virulent form of breast cancer. This is Ken Wilber's story, with much of it told through his wife Treya's journals and letters, of their five-year battle against her cancer, a long roller-coaster ride that ended in her death by euthanasia in 1988. The narrative includes details of several conventional and unconventional cancer therapies.

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Dr. Audlin is a highly successful psychoanalyst. His patient, Lord Mountdrago, is a leading member of the House of Lords and Secretary for Foreign Affairs in the British government. Mountdrago consults Audlin because of nightly vivid and threatening dreams, all of which concern Owen Griffiths, a member of the opposition in the House of Commons. Griffiths is a small, unimpressive commoner from a constituency in Wales. As Griffiths becomes progressively more the focus of his dreams, Mountdrago cannot imagine why, since to him the man is insignificant vermin.

Audlin presses his patient if there is any reason why Griffiths might actually be hostile toward the Lord, or that he (Mountdrago) might feel guilt regarding Griffiths. Eventually Mountdrago is forced to admit that on one occasion when Griffiths made a speech proposing a change in foreign policy, Mountdrago crushed him. Using his very considerable oratorical skill, Mountdrago tore Griffiths apart and held him up to ridicule. This, in turn, ruined Griffiths' career. Mountdrago hadn't initially thought of the affair since Griffiths was beneath contempt and deserved to be crushed; as such, he had no reason to hold a grudge against Mountdrago.

The psychoanalyst suggests that the only way Mountdrago can free himself from the dreams is to apologize to Griffiths. Mountdrago angrily rejects this, but then goes out and commits suicide. In the end we learn that Owen Griffiths dies the same night, presumably by suicide.

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Miracle McCloy received her name because, as she's been told many times, she was pulled from the body of her mother shortly after her mother was run over and killed by a bus. Raised largely by her grandmother with her depressed and dysfunctional father nearby, she has learned a great deal about séances, contacting the dead, reading auras, and paying attention to energy fields. But she doesn't know much about how to locate her own confused feelings about her parents, her identity, and her relationships with "normal" kids at school who see her has some kind of freak.

She perpetuates this image by casting "spells" to help fellow students connect with boyfriends. But after her father disappears, and her grandfather's house is destroyed in a tornado, she lapses into mental illness and burns herself badly trying to "melt" as she believes her father did by dancing among flaming candles. She is taken to an institution where an astute therapist and an aunt who realizes how much Miracle needed her combine their efforts to help her recover a sense of who she is--a dancer, a strongly intuitive, intelligent girl with an interesting history and a promising life to live, liberated from the obsessions of a superstitious grandmother and mentally ill father.

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This is a collection of humane and humorous stories by psychiatrist Ronald Pies. Many of them portray snippets of Jewish-American family life; others feature Pies's alter egos, young psychiatrists named Applebaum; or Ackerman, or Alterman; still others introduce a number of wonderful geriatric characters the reader is unlikely to forget.

In the title story, an elderly man lies in the hospital and remembers how he inserted snippets of pornography into his business partner's tefillin nearly 40 years earlier, just to spite his holier-than-thou partner, who had evicted his Playboy magazines from the premises. "Mandelbaum's Passion" is the story of an elderly professor whose daughter wants to put him into a nursing home. He, on the other hand, focuses his energy on anticipating the twice-weekly visits of Luz, his 26-year-old Hispanic visiting nurse.

Dr. Otto Hertzmann in "Show Us Where God Is" is a retired analytic psychiatrist who lives with his sister. When a young admirer comes to visit, the sister introduces him to Davie, Hertzmann's severely retarded son who, when asked to "show us where God is," grins widely and points to the ceiling. Max Dershman, found dead in his room "stinking of cheap cigars and surrounded by Playboy centerfolds," is another such character. He falls head over heels in love with Riva Greenberg, the nursing home social worker, and leaves her a love letter when he dies ("A Medical Diptych"). In "Sophie Fein Goldberg Stein" the title character insists on always being addressed by her full name--at least, that is, until the nursing home psychiatrist is willing to sit down and listen to the full story of her life.

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The events in Dry follow those in Burroughs's memoir of his bizarre childhood, Running with Scissors (see this database). Burroughs, at 24 years old and with no formal education beyond grade school, works in the high pressure advertising world of Manhattan. He's also an alcoholic, and his addiction definitely interferes with his work. Fortunately for Burroughs, he is not fired, but rather, his boss and co-workers set up an intervention. Burroughs--after telling his best friend, Pighead, who is HIV positive; his drinking buddy, the undertaker Jim; and his abusive, alcoholic father, of the plan--leaves for an inpatient rehabilitation program in Minnesota designed for gay people.

Thus begins Burroughs journey to sobriety. A journey that is replete with temptation, relapse (not only with alcohol, but also crack cocaine), love, success, loss, and grief. Burroughs experiences hallucinations, coma and life-threatening withdrawal. But ultimately, Burroughs achieves the title of his memoir. What he reveals is that, for an addict, remaining clean and dry is hard work. This daily, moment-by-moment work forces the addict to examine what is truly precious in life.

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Save me / from love affairs / with the pale-green neutral cast of money. / Give me the hue and cry / of words! ("Lime Green") In these poems Ron Charach's love affairs with words are warm, poignant, witty, and wise--none of them have that "neutral cast of money." The poet's topics range from childhood and adolescent experiences to poetry readings, and from "Freud's Face" to "Prostates Growing."

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Winter investigates the process by which Freudian psychoanalysis became legitimized within modern Western culture and internalized as a kind of "psychological common sense" (4). She argues that Freud's adoption of the Oedipus myth allowed him to draw on the cultural status of classical scholarship and claim the universality of the tragic theme for his own project. She traces how Freud worked to establish an institutional infrastructure for psychoanalysis, to establish it as a profession. His analysis of culture and society represents another strategy in establishing and extending the importance of psychoanalysis: the claim that psychoanalysis powerfully illuminates not only the workings of the human brain (the domain of psychiatry, psychology, and neurology) but also the functions of society (the analytic domain of anthropology and sociology).

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How JFK Killed My Father is a collection of 52 poems by psychiatrist Richard Berlin. The book is divided into five sections--"Learning the Shapes," "Role Models," "Code Blue," "What a Psychiatrist Remembers," and "What I Love"--and these subtitles guide the reader through this physician's poignant journey from medical student to accomplished, and humbled, "healer, priest, turner of textbook pages, searcher, listener, arrogant crow consumed in white" ("If You Ask Me My Name").

Berlin's poems succeed because of strong imagery and the kind of internal "knowing" that only comes when one pays attention to the sights, sounds, and emotional nuances that occur in training, in practice, and in life. A musician as well as a doctor, Berlin sometimes uses jazz as a metaphor: in "Uncle Joe" he writes about "suffering's music" and in "Learning the Shapes" medical students practice examining patients until their fingers are as sensitive as a "blind bluesman" whose fingers can sense the right note "an instant before / touching a tight steel string."

Berlin "gets" the stress of med school and residency just right in "Sunday Parade" and "January Thaw"; as his poems retrace his path from student to practicing psychiatrist, he transmits the deepening of both experience and empathy in the same right-on way: "What I Revealed," "Places We Have Met," "What a Dying Woman Saw," "Transference," "What a Psychiatrist Remembers," "What Makes a Psychiatrist Cry," "Our Medical Marriage," and "What I Love" stand out as examples. The poems in this collection are personal, eloquent, straightforward and well crafted; they move effortlessly between body, mind, and spirit.

A reader could open this collection to any poem and be captivated, but for full impact this collection is best read from beginning to end. Medical students, especially, might welcome this volume as a guide along their way.

(Some of the poems here also appear in Berlin's chapbook, Code Blue, which is annotated in this database.)

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Subtitled "The Story of a Gifted Young Obstetrician's Mistake and the Psychologist Who Helped Her," this is an absorbing account of a young female physician's torment following the difficult delivery of a baby who was soon thereafter diagnosed with cerebral palsy. "Doctor Amelia" seeks counseling after she has taken an indefinite leave of absence from her practice and faculty position. The book intertwines reconstructed counseling sessions in the voice of the doctor-patient, with the therapeutic strategy and personal reflections of her therapist, author Dan Shapiro.

The obstetrician enters therapy because she has lost confidence in her professional abilities. Once deeply engaged in her chosen profession, she has lost her enthusiasm for it and feels "numb." Her marriage is under strain. When asked if she is suicidal, she hesitates and then denies she is. Shapiro thinks there may be trouble ahead, and so does the reader. Gradually, Doctor Amelia reveals the incident that triggered her changed emotional state. She had delayed performing a cesarean section on a patient who was in extended labor and whose baby was showing deceleration of its heartbeat rate. A few weeks later, the baby's pediatrician informed Doctor Amelia that the baby had cerebral palsy and now the baby's parents are filing a lawsuit.

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Intended for both the general public and medical professionals, Reel Psychiatry is a comprehensive catalogue of mainstream films that accurately portray psychiatric conditions. Robinson combines his "two passions: teaching psychiatry and watching films" to create a classroom resource for medical educators who want to use film to teach the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric disorders and a critical compendium for anyone else who has more than a passing interest in cinematic works that dramatize the personal experience of patients and professionals grappling with mental illnesses.

The book is organized in three sections: primary psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, depression and bipolar disorder; personality disorders and mental retardation; and substance-related disorders and general medical conditions. The general symptoms and associated features of each condition are first set forth and then followed by descriptions of individual films that depict those symptoms and features.

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