Saturday, April 03, 2010

A Paradox Overlooked By Kafka

The following is something I jotted down in the late 1990s.  In 1990 my then treating psychiatrist, Stanley R. Palombo, M.D., once compared me with The Hunger Artist, a character created by Franz Kafka. 

Note that Gandhi used to engage in public hunger strikes to further the cause of Indian Independence. 

 In early childhood, at about age three, I was anorexic.  My pediatrician, Joseph Bloom, M.D., once said to my parents: "I've seen chickens fatter than him."  Perhaps, at the age of three, I was protesting some infantile injustice in the family.  ("I'll show them!  I just won't eat.") Perhaps. 

There may be a psychological link between my ascetic lifestyle and my longstanding feud with my former employer, the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld.



"Kafka's Hunger Artist: He can cure his hunger by eating; but eating will not cure his need to be a hunger artist."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hunger_Artist

2 comments:

My Daily Struggles said...

If only I had a psychiatrist I could talk to about these issues!

My Daily Struggles said...

I said basically the same thing to my former treating psychiatrist, Dr. Bash, in the year 2004. "Even if I made a friend, it would not obliterate my fantasy of an idealized friend."

Dr. Bash had said: "If you made a friend, you would forget about Brian."