I was terminated from my job as a legal assistant at the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld on October 29, 1991 by an attorney named Dennis M. Race, Esq. At the conclusion of the termination meeting, Mr. Race said he would serve as a job reference for me.
Beginning about October 30, 1991, I started to visit the Cleveland Park Neighborhood Library just about every day. The branch manager at that time was an individual named Brian P. Brown. I suspected very early on that Brian Brown was in communication with some person or persons at Akin Gump. I noticed that when Brian saw me enter the library he routinely engaged in lewd sexual gestures. The gestures were identical to those used by Akin Gump legal assistant administrator Maggie Sinnott and legal assistant coordinator J.D. Neary. See Record on Appeal at 336, Freedman v. D.C. Dept. of Human Rights. I noted the fact that Brown, Sinnott, and Neary were Irish Catholics. I think the word on the street was that I had a grudge against Irish Catholics; I think that was a defensive response to my implication that I was a victim of anti-Semitism at the firm. In any event, I found Brian Brown's behavior peculiar.
In about late 1991, I started to fax communications to my sister (via my brother-in-law's business, Meredith Financial Services). I noticed that in the afternoons at the library, Brian Brown, sometimes in concert with the circulation desk manager, Debra, used to act out and use double-entendres that seemed to correspond to issues and words and phrases I talked about in my faxes to my sister.
In the summer of 1992, a notable event occurred. I qualifed for extended unemployment benefits. Under the law, I was required to send out six job applications per week to prospective employers. In my cover letter to prospective employers I included the name and telephone number of Dennis M. Race, Esq. at Akin Gump, who had told me he would serve as a job reference. After a few weeks of sending out letters, Brian Brown and Debra started acting out wildly. Brian Brown said "I want my name taken off that letter!" It was a really wild scene at the library and it took place a few weeks in succession when employers would be receiving my letters and possibly telephoning Dennis Race. I formed the (paranoid) impression that Dennis Race was being hounded with telephone calls from prospective employers inquiring about me, and that Dennis Race was having violent temper tantrums in which he said: "I want my name taken off that letter."
My paranoid impression is memorialized in the following contemporaneous fax I sent to my sister in the summer of 1992. The French have a saying, "Qui s'excuse, s'accuse." "He who excuses himself, accuses himself." The fax to my sister serves as an excuse, or legal rationalization, for me to include Dennis Race's name on the cover letters to prospective employers. In doing so, I am accusing myself of having knowledge of something that could only arise out of a sensitivity to the goings on in my environment. Dennis Race (or anyone at Akin Gump) did not contact me to direct me to take Dennis Race's name off of letters I was sending out.
FAX NO. 609 235 5569 MEREDITH FINANCIAL SERVICES
transmittal for Mrs. Edward Jacobson c/o Mr. Edward Jacobson
_____________________________
Dear Stell,
I have been sending out resumes to prospective employers.
My last place of employment was Akin Gump. There's always a chance that a prospective employer will, on his own initiative, contact Akin Gimp. In all likelihood, the prospective employer would wish to speak to the legal assistant administrator or another supervisory employee.
My termination from Akin Gump was unlawful, and resulted in part from the knowingly false and malicious statements made by the legal assistant administrator and other supervisory employees to management. Further, there is reason to believe that it was supervisory employees who, for three and one-half years helped to instigate a course of harassment and helped to instigate malicious and defamatory rumors. Further there is evidence that this harassing conduct by supervisory employees did not end with the termination of my employment with Akin Gump, but continued on for months afterwards by use of the telephone for harassment purposes and not for legitimate business purposes.
In order to protect the firm and in mitigation of my own damages I have indicated on the cover letter that if there are to be any contacts they are to be with Dennis Race. (I know that Dennis Race will act responsibly in relation to third parties.) This may help prevent any further unlawful behavior by the legal assistant administrator or other supervisory employees, which would only compound the firm's legal liability.
I hope Dennis Race and the management of the firm understand and appreciate this course of action, which, unfortunately, is unavoidable in a case such as this. What do you do in a case like this, do you have any suggestions?
GF
page 17 of document submission to the U.S. Social Security Administration
June 14, 1993
3801 Connecticut Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20008
Paul G. Yessler, MD
2501 Calvert Street, NW
Suite 101
Washington, DC 20008
RE: Social Security Disability Psychiatric Evaluation
[social security number redacted]
Dear Dr. Yessler:
Enclosed with respect to the above-referenced matter is a collection of letters I wrote and sent (by mail or fax) to my sister after my job termination on October 29, 1991 and before the filing of a disability claim with the Social Security Administration. Most of the letters were in fact written and sent in the year 1992.
I wrote the letters under the influence of my belief that my sister was in communication with my former employer, Akin Gump, and that my sister, upon receipt of the letters, would transmit the letters by fax communication back to managers of Akin Gump.
Both the writing and sending of the letters together with the content of the letters establish the persistence of seemingly paranoid ideation throughout the period beginning October 29, 1991. The letters deal, among other issues, with my concerns regarding harassment by Akin Gump co-workers; harassing (and anti-Semitic) telephone calls I received during 1991 and 1992; my belief that various of my treating psychiatrists were in communication with my former employer; the belief that librarians at the Cleveland Park Public Library (referred to as "the Club") harassed me; my belief that a clerk at a Giant Supermarket in my neighborhood (Adam [Skillings]) harassed me concerning my friendship with Craig Dye; my belief that a specialist at the Brookings Institution (Stephen Hess) was in communication with my former employer; the belief that it was not a mere accident that my former supervisor, Christine Robertson, had me touch her breasts, etc.
Please forward these materials to:
Ms. Fay Peterson
District of Columbia
Rehabilitation Services Administration
Disability Determination Division
P.O. Box 37608
Washington, DC 20013
If you have any questions, you may contact me at (202) 362-7064 (or leave messages at 202 363-3800). Might I suggest a follow-up evaluation consult?
You may contact my sister, Mrs. Estelle Jacobson, at (609) 727-3295.
Thank you very much.
Sincerely ,
Gary Freedman
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
On The Criminalization of Intellectuals
Although Boris Pasternak hoped for the best when he submitted Doctor Zhivago to a leading Moscow monthly in 1956, it was rejected with the accusation that "it represented in a libelous manner the October Revolution, the people who made it, and social construction in the Soviet Union." The book reached the West in 1957 through an Italian publishing house that had bought rights to it from Pasternak and refused to return it "for revisions." By 1958, the year of its English edition, the book had been translated into 18 languages.
In the Soviet Union, the Nobel Prize brought a campaign of abuse. Pasternak was ejected from the Union of Soviet Writers and thus deprived of his livelihood. Public meetings called for his deportation; he wrote Premier Nikita Khrushchev, "Leaving the motherland will equal death for me." Although none of his Soviet critics had the chance to read the proscribed novel, some of them publicly demanded, "kick the pig out of our kitchen-garden," i.e., expel Pasternak from the USSR. This led to a jocular Russian saying used to poke fun at illiterate criticism, "I did not read Pasternak, but I condemn him". A famous Bill Mauldin cartoon at the time showed Pasternak and another prisoner in Siberia, splitting trees in the snow. In the caption, Pasternak says, "I won the Nobel Prize for literature. What was your crime?"
Suffering from cancer and heart trouble, he spent his last years in his home at Peredelkino.
In the Soviet Union, the Nobel Prize brought a campaign of abuse. Pasternak was ejected from the Union of Soviet Writers and thus deprived of his livelihood. Public meetings called for his deportation; he wrote Premier Nikita Khrushchev, "Leaving the motherland will equal death for me." Although none of his Soviet critics had the chance to read the proscribed novel, some of them publicly demanded, "kick the pig out of our kitchen-garden," i.e., expel Pasternak from the USSR. This led to a jocular Russian saying used to poke fun at illiterate criticism, "I did not read Pasternak, but I condemn him". A famous Bill Mauldin cartoon at the time showed Pasternak and another prisoner in Siberia, splitting trees in the snow. In the caption, Pasternak says, "I won the Nobel Prize for literature. What was your crime?"
Suffering from cancer and heart trouble, he spent his last years in his home at Peredelkino.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
The Blum Delicatessen
When I was growing up, our family used to go to Atlantic City every summer, the first two weeks of July. We stayed with old friends of my father. The family with whom we stayed lived at Vermont and Oriental Avenues in the inlet in Atlantic City. (Ask Jerry Shestack where that is!)
The matriarch of the family was Ethel Blum, who opened a grocery store on the first floor of her home, The Blum Delicatessen. Ethel Blum had a number of children, including Sheldon Blum and Sylvia Blum Lischin. Sheldon and Sylvia worked in the store. Coincidentally, Sheryl Dyner, with whom I worked at the Franklin Institute Research Laboratories in the late 1970s, used to stay with her family at a home in the inlet. Sheryl Dyner used to shop at The Blum Delicatessen and, when I knew her, remembered Sheldon Blum.
Sylvia Lischin had four sons. Two of the sons, Roy and Eddie Lischin, were my sister's age. My sister is six years older than I am. Eddie Lischin now lives in Santa Cruz, California. I sent him some emails a while back, but he ignored me. I think Roy Lischin lives at the Jersey shore. He served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War.
I always had the idea that my old employer talked to Roy Lischin. But then, I'm paranoid!
http://www.iloveac.com/memory.php?Action=Search&Count=4873&GroupNumber=&Increment=&SearchKey=eddie+lischin&SearchIn=All&SearchFor=Go
The matriarch of the family was Ethel Blum, who opened a grocery store on the first floor of her home, The Blum Delicatessen. Ethel Blum had a number of children, including Sheldon Blum and Sylvia Blum Lischin. Sheldon and Sylvia worked in the store. Coincidentally, Sheryl Dyner, with whom I worked at the Franklin Institute Research Laboratories in the late 1970s, used to stay with her family at a home in the inlet. Sheryl Dyner used to shop at The Blum Delicatessen and, when I knew her, remembered Sheldon Blum.
Sylvia Lischin had four sons. Two of the sons, Roy and Eddie Lischin, were my sister's age. My sister is six years older than I am. Eddie Lischin now lives in Santa Cruz, California. I sent him some emails a while back, but he ignored me. I think Roy Lischin lives at the Jersey shore. He served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War.
I always had the idea that my old employer talked to Roy Lischin. But then, I'm paranoid!
http://www.iloveac.com/memory.php?Action=Search&Count=4873&GroupNumber=&Increment=&SearchKey=eddie+lischin&SearchIn=All&SearchFor=Go
Ideas of Reference: Apparently, That's What They Always Say!
The following is a case study from the DSM-III-R Casebook published by the American Psychiatric Association. The lead author is Robert Spitzer, M.D., Columbia University Medical School Department of Psychiatry. The case is titled "Crimes Against the State." It concerns the case of a political dissident in the former Soviet Union who was detained in a psychiatric hospital because his writings were critical of the Soviet regime. The Soviet psychiatrist notes that the dissident exhibited "ideas of reference." My former employer, the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld justified its job termination decision in my case in October 1991 on the grounds that I exhibited "ideas of reference."
Crimes Against the State
Gregor, a 40-year-old economist, is brought to the maximum security ward of the Moscow Central Institute for Forensic Psychiatry from the KGB prison. Four months earlier, while searching the house of a friend, the KGB agents discovered a book, written by Gregor, that was critical of the Soviet economic system. In this book Gregor defined himself as a "Marxist economist" and a patriot of his country. He used language indistinguishable from that of the "official" and "approved" concepts current in Soviet economic and political thought. However the book is an impassioned argument for reform of the state economy in order to bring about greater prosperity and economic stability in the country.
Gregor was arrested and charged with "antigovernment propaganda and agitation harmful to the interests of the Socialist state." Because he was uncooperative during his detention, he has now been referred for a psychiatric evaluation by a KGB investigator, who writes in the referring document that "There are strong reasons to suspect that this detainee suffers from chronic mental illness, which is responsible for his behavior and has resulted in serious crimes against the state, with which he is charged."
The prisoner arrives in handcuffs, looking anxious and fearful. At the beginning of his admission report, the forensic psychiatrist takes note of "burning and penetrating eyes, and a Christlike beard."
During the interview the prisoner insists on his right to take notes and to write down the questions asked of him; when this is denied, he refuses to participate in the evaluation interview. On the ward, surrounded by seriously ill offenders, he keeps to himself and is described as "withdrawn, with long staring spells, and persistent refusal to discuss his thoughts and feelings." The ward staff is puzzled by his "excessive attention" to food served in the hospital, and his concern that medication has been put into his food is described in ward notes as "paranoid."
By the end of the first week, the prisoner is demanding to see the medical director of the hospital. When the director obliges, the prisoner confronts him with an accusation of "collaborating in crimes against humanity." The doctor is reminded of the fate of the Nazi doctors during the Nuremberg Trials. The prisoner categorically denies the criminal nature of his activity and claims that he pursued his chosen profession in writing a book about the state economy.
From the information provided by the secret police investigator and summaries of treatment obtained from the local health center and the district mental health clinic, the forensic psychiatrist learns that the patient had a "stormy adolescence," during which he pursued, with abandon, the study of his country's history, literature, and art. He was described by his teachers as "stubborn, oppositional, and obsessed with his ideas." His principal wrote: "This young man is far too sensitive and intense for his age. He is negative about everything our country stands for, and his tastes in art and music are bizarre. However, he is a great mathematician, and with proper guidance and education, he can be an asset to our country."
The records of the local draft board revealed that the prisoner was relieved from compulsory military duty because of a diagnosis of "psychoneurosis" established by a psychiatrist at the district mental health clinic. The records from the clinic described a young man who was "moody, preoccupied with his interest in history and mathematics, precise and compulsive in his habits, with some excessive concern about his health." Apparently, the prisoner was seen at the mental health clinic only three times, and never requested any treatment.
The forensic psychiatrist makes no attempt to contact or interview by telephone, Gregor's wife, parents, or friends and colleagues (he is under strict orders not to reveal the prisoner's whereabouts because of the KGB's insistence on keeping Gregor incommunicado before the trial). Failing to do that, the forensic psychiatrist never learns that the prisoner was a "star student" in the department of economics of a leading state university, or that he was universally admired by his peers and faculty. Most of his professors later became his colleagues, when Gregor was invited to remain in the department to continue his research. The forensic psychiatrist also never learns that the prisoner has written several articles approved for publication in respected professional journals, that he has been married for 18 years, maintains numerous close and enduring friendships, and has adopted two children, after having been approved as an adoptive parent. Finally, the forensic psychiatrist was also denied an opportunity to read Gregor's book, which presumably was a product of a disturbed mind.
By the end of the third week, the prisoner was forcibly given small doses of a neuroleptic. He became weak and apathetic, complained of dryness of the mouth, increased appetite and grogginess throughout the day, and an increasingly troublesome tremor. Each time the prisoner was given medication, he offered resistance. This was described in the record as "paranoid refusal to believe in the good intentions of the medical personnel, and inability to develop insight into his condition and his own needs."
When medication produces no change in the prisoner's attitude except for obvious side effects, it is discontinued. One week after this, the prisoner is looking more cheerful, and finally agrees to cooperate with the expert committee consisting of three forensic psychiatrists. When the committee sees the prisoner, none of its members has a chance to read the manuscript that brought the man to the attention of the authorities. During the interview, the prisoner is attentive and guarded, and later is described by one of the members as "hypervigilant, with obvious ideas of reference." The committee unanimously agrees on the diagnosis offered by the forensic psychiatrist, Sluggish Schizophrenia. (Sluggish Schizophrenia is considered by Soviet authorities to be the mildest form of the continuous subtype of Schizophrenia. It is roughly equivalent to the concepts of "pseudoneurotic" and "pseudopsychopathic" Schizophrenias that were used by clinicians in the United States in previous decades. It is presumed to have a more favorable course than the other types of Schizophrenia.) The committee recommends compulsory psychiatric treatment for Gregor "because of his inability to have a critical attitude toward his own condition and circumstances and failure to cooperate with necessary medical treatment."
Discusssion of "Crimes Against the State"
The Soviet psychiatrist (now living in the United States) who provided this case suggests that the KGB investigator knew that the state would have considerable difficulty in prosecuting Gregor since it would have had to prove that he had a malicious intent to "undermine and harm the interests of the Socialist State." Because Gregor is articulate and persuasive, a public trial would have been an embarrassment to the government. Knowing that Gregor had been given a psychiatric diagnosis that exempted him from the draft, the KGB investigator reasoned that a trial would be unnecessary and that the credibility of Gregor's ideas would be undermined if his behavior could be attributed to a mental disorder.
The forensic psychiatrist was given inadequate and biased information, had no access to his "patient's" family or colleagues, and had to deal with a frightened and unwilling man. Practicing within a social system with an extremely narrow range of "permissible" behavior and within a profession that uses an extraordinarily broad concept of Schizophrenia, the forensic psychiatrist could very well have been sincere in considering Gregor mentally ill. It is also possible that the psychiatrist was cynically using his power to make diagnoses, hospitalize, and treat in order to satisfy an implicit request from the KGB to take this "troublesome man" off their hands.
Whether or not the forensic psychiatrist actually believed that Gregor was ill, he probably justified his diagnosis as follows: The onset of Gregor's Schizophrenia was, as is usual in this illness, at the time of adolescent transition to adult life. He exhibited overvalued ideas, instability of mood, inappropriately intense and single-minded pursuit of interests unusual for boys of his age, and obsessive compulsive personality traits. He developed a system of rationalized obsessive preoccupations with seeking reforms in Soviet society His tragic world view is evidence of chronic dysphoria and anhedonia. His belief that he can make a contribution to the economic theory and well-being of his country is evidence of an overvalued idea that has progressed into a fantastic delusion of reform. His cautious attitude toward authorities and state-appointed physicians is an expression of paranoid and self-referential perception.
In contrast to the Soviet forensic psychiatrist, we see absolutely no justification for making a psychiatric diagnosis in Gregor's case. His difficulties are certainly a result of the interaction between his personality traits and an oppressive society. However, in a freer society these personality traits might not cause any particular difficulties--indeed, might even be rewarded.
DSM-III-R Diagnosis:
Axis I: V71.09 No Diagnosis or Condition
Axis II: V71.09 No Diagnosis or Condition
Crimes Against the State
Gregor, a 40-year-old economist, is brought to the maximum security ward of the Moscow Central Institute for Forensic Psychiatry from the KGB prison. Four months earlier, while searching the house of a friend, the KGB agents discovered a book, written by Gregor, that was critical of the Soviet economic system. In this book Gregor defined himself as a "Marxist economist" and a patriot of his country. He used language indistinguishable from that of the "official" and "approved" concepts current in Soviet economic and political thought. However the book is an impassioned argument for reform of the state economy in order to bring about greater prosperity and economic stability in the country.
Gregor was arrested and charged with "antigovernment propaganda and agitation harmful to the interests of the Socialist state." Because he was uncooperative during his detention, he has now been referred for a psychiatric evaluation by a KGB investigator, who writes in the referring document that "There are strong reasons to suspect that this detainee suffers from chronic mental illness, which is responsible for his behavior and has resulted in serious crimes against the state, with which he is charged."
The prisoner arrives in handcuffs, looking anxious and fearful. At the beginning of his admission report, the forensic psychiatrist takes note of "burning and penetrating eyes, and a Christlike beard."
During the interview the prisoner insists on his right to take notes and to write down the questions asked of him; when this is denied, he refuses to participate in the evaluation interview. On the ward, surrounded by seriously ill offenders, he keeps to himself and is described as "withdrawn, with long staring spells, and persistent refusal to discuss his thoughts and feelings." The ward staff is puzzled by his "excessive attention" to food served in the hospital, and his concern that medication has been put into his food is described in ward notes as "paranoid."
By the end of the first week, the prisoner is demanding to see the medical director of the hospital. When the director obliges, the prisoner confronts him with an accusation of "collaborating in crimes against humanity." The doctor is reminded of the fate of the Nazi doctors during the Nuremberg Trials. The prisoner categorically denies the criminal nature of his activity and claims that he pursued his chosen profession in writing a book about the state economy.
From the information provided by the secret police investigator and summaries of treatment obtained from the local health center and the district mental health clinic, the forensic psychiatrist learns that the patient had a "stormy adolescence," during which he pursued, with abandon, the study of his country's history, literature, and art. He was described by his teachers as "stubborn, oppositional, and obsessed with his ideas." His principal wrote: "This young man is far too sensitive and intense for his age. He is negative about everything our country stands for, and his tastes in art and music are bizarre. However, he is a great mathematician, and with proper guidance and education, he can be an asset to our country."
The records of the local draft board revealed that the prisoner was relieved from compulsory military duty because of a diagnosis of "psychoneurosis" established by a psychiatrist at the district mental health clinic. The records from the clinic described a young man who was "moody, preoccupied with his interest in history and mathematics, precise and compulsive in his habits, with some excessive concern about his health." Apparently, the prisoner was seen at the mental health clinic only three times, and never requested any treatment.
The forensic psychiatrist makes no attempt to contact or interview by telephone, Gregor's wife, parents, or friends and colleagues (he is under strict orders not to reveal the prisoner's whereabouts because of the KGB's insistence on keeping Gregor incommunicado before the trial). Failing to do that, the forensic psychiatrist never learns that the prisoner was a "star student" in the department of economics of a leading state university, or that he was universally admired by his peers and faculty. Most of his professors later became his colleagues, when Gregor was invited to remain in the department to continue his research. The forensic psychiatrist also never learns that the prisoner has written several articles approved for publication in respected professional journals, that he has been married for 18 years, maintains numerous close and enduring friendships, and has adopted two children, after having been approved as an adoptive parent. Finally, the forensic psychiatrist was also denied an opportunity to read Gregor's book, which presumably was a product of a disturbed mind.
By the end of the third week, the prisoner was forcibly given small doses of a neuroleptic. He became weak and apathetic, complained of dryness of the mouth, increased appetite and grogginess throughout the day, and an increasingly troublesome tremor. Each time the prisoner was given medication, he offered resistance. This was described in the record as "paranoid refusal to believe in the good intentions of the medical personnel, and inability to develop insight into his condition and his own needs."
When medication produces no change in the prisoner's attitude except for obvious side effects, it is discontinued. One week after this, the prisoner is looking more cheerful, and finally agrees to cooperate with the expert committee consisting of three forensic psychiatrists. When the committee sees the prisoner, none of its members has a chance to read the manuscript that brought the man to the attention of the authorities. During the interview, the prisoner is attentive and guarded, and later is described by one of the members as "hypervigilant, with obvious ideas of reference." The committee unanimously agrees on the diagnosis offered by the forensic psychiatrist, Sluggish Schizophrenia. (Sluggish Schizophrenia is considered by Soviet authorities to be the mildest form of the continuous subtype of Schizophrenia. It is roughly equivalent to the concepts of "pseudoneurotic" and "pseudopsychopathic" Schizophrenias that were used by clinicians in the United States in previous decades. It is presumed to have a more favorable course than the other types of Schizophrenia.) The committee recommends compulsory psychiatric treatment for Gregor "because of his inability to have a critical attitude toward his own condition and circumstances and failure to cooperate with necessary medical treatment."
Discusssion of "Crimes Against the State"
The Soviet psychiatrist (now living in the United States) who provided this case suggests that the KGB investigator knew that the state would have considerable difficulty in prosecuting Gregor since it would have had to prove that he had a malicious intent to "undermine and harm the interests of the Socialist State." Because Gregor is articulate and persuasive, a public trial would have been an embarrassment to the government. Knowing that Gregor had been given a psychiatric diagnosis that exempted him from the draft, the KGB investigator reasoned that a trial would be unnecessary and that the credibility of Gregor's ideas would be undermined if his behavior could be attributed to a mental disorder.
The forensic psychiatrist was given inadequate and biased information, had no access to his "patient's" family or colleagues, and had to deal with a frightened and unwilling man. Practicing within a social system with an extremely narrow range of "permissible" behavior and within a profession that uses an extraordinarily broad concept of Schizophrenia, the forensic psychiatrist could very well have been sincere in considering Gregor mentally ill. It is also possible that the psychiatrist was cynically using his power to make diagnoses, hospitalize, and treat in order to satisfy an implicit request from the KGB to take this "troublesome man" off their hands.
Whether or not the forensic psychiatrist actually believed that Gregor was ill, he probably justified his diagnosis as follows: The onset of Gregor's Schizophrenia was, as is usual in this illness, at the time of adolescent transition to adult life. He exhibited overvalued ideas, instability of mood, inappropriately intense and single-minded pursuit of interests unusual for boys of his age, and obsessive compulsive personality traits. He developed a system of rationalized obsessive preoccupations with seeking reforms in Soviet society His tragic world view is evidence of chronic dysphoria and anhedonia. His belief that he can make a contribution to the economic theory and well-being of his country is evidence of an overvalued idea that has progressed into a fantastic delusion of reform. His cautious attitude toward authorities and state-appointed physicians is an expression of paranoid and self-referential perception.
In contrast to the Soviet forensic psychiatrist, we see absolutely no justification for making a psychiatric diagnosis in Gregor's case. His difficulties are certainly a result of the interaction between his personality traits and an oppressive society. However, in a freer society these personality traits might not cause any particular difficulties--indeed, might even be rewarded.
DSM-III-R Diagnosis:
Axis I: V71.09 No Diagnosis or Condition
Axis II: V71.09 No Diagnosis or Condition
Monday, January 25, 2010
Frank Ford: More Connections
In the late 1970s till about the fall of 1982, Frank Ford (Edward Felbin) had a radio call-in show on WWDB-FM, a talk station in Philadelphia. During that time period, the person in charge of the news for the show was an individual named Betty Burnaman. Betty Burnaman was a friend and roommate of Sheryl Dyner (B.S., Biology, The Pennsylvania State University, May 1975), with whom I worked at the Franklin Institute Research Laboratories in Philadelphia from 1975 to 1979.
Betty Burnaman and Sheryl Dyner lived in a garden-style apartment complex where another WWDB radio personality lived. That would be the famous Bob Grant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Grant_(radio)
Burnaman's mother was a Holocaust survivor.
Betty Burnaman and Sheryl Dyner lived in a garden-style apartment complex where another WWDB radio personality lived. That would be the famous Bob Grant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Grant_(radio)
Burnaman's mother was a Holocaust survivor.
Crimes Against The State: The Fictional Account
To begin with I wish to disclaim the possession of those high gifts of imagination and expression which would have enabled my pen to create for the reader the personality of the man who called himself Gary Freedman.
If I have ever had these gifts in any sort of living form they have been smothered out of existence a long time ago under a wilderness of words. Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. I have been for many years a librarian. It is an occupation which at length becomes fatal to whatever share of imagination, observation, and insight an ordinary person may be heir to. To a librarian there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.
This being so, I could not have observed Mr. Freedman or guessed at his reality by the force of insight, much less have imagined him as he was. Even to invent the mere bald facts of his life would have been utterly beyond my powers. But I think that without this declaration the readers of these pages will be able to detect in the story the marks of documentary evidence. And that is perfectly correct. It is based on a document, or more precisely, those portions of a document of which I have a certain knowledge: all I have brought to it is my knowledge of the human species, which is sufficient for what is attempted here.
"Words, words, words," so Hamlet said.
Mr. Freedman was a lover of words, a lover of language. We spoke to each other infrequently. But those few exchanges we had were enough to convince me that he was always happy to talk; he was a "word-child," hyperarticulate. Fully formed paragraphs issued forth in conversation with a hypnotic, limpid ease. Sooner or later, his would-be debater would be charmed and silenced.
There was an element of the demoniacal in his tireless search for just the right word to round a sentence into its proper unity, for the exact juxtaposition of words and movement that would slyly lead the reader or listener along the periphery of a story to its turning point and then propel them effortlessly to its climax. . . . No moment, however small, seemed unimportant enough to escape his almost fierce attention, and his grasp of a social situation's latent values was immediate and complete. My eyes and ears were opened anew each day to the thousand-and-one endless details that go to make up the subtle and infinitely fragile clockwork of an anecdote's interior mechanism, and to the slow cultivation of its subsoil that gradually makes it blossom into something vital and alive. I watched and listened with the consecration of a yogi.
Early in our relationship I sensed that Mr. Freedman was a lonely man, an isolated man. He seemed desperate for a kind of friendliness that he could not achieve naturally and spontaneously and he found that closeness -- or at least he imagined that he found that closeness -- in the person of his local librarian. On occasion he shared with me his views on the world: he talked about politics, literature, the arts, and science. It was his gift for language that held my interest, no matter what the topic. His knowledge of these various fields was not remarkable. Yet with his gift for words he could turn the most commonplace observations into arresting remarks.
I can give you an example. "Every man is born a Faust," he said, "a Faust with a longing to grasp and experience and express everything in the world. Faust became a scientist thanks to the mistakes of his predecessors and contemporaries. Progress in science is governed by the laws of repulsion, every step forward is made by refutation of prevalent errors and false theories. Faust was an artist thanks to the inspiring example of his teachers. Forward steps in art are governed by the law of attraction, are the result of the imitation of an admiration for beloved predecessors." Well, I ask you: is there anything novel in that observation? Not in the least. But what Mr. Freedman managed to do was to get to the core of the matter: the structural dialectic inherent in the Faust story was laid bare by Mr. Freedman's use of an appealing, aphoristic turn of phrase.
Mr. Freedman was an eccentric (I don't think he'd mind my saying so) and a self-styled genius.
He spent much of the day, every day, at the library. I didn't know how he subsisted, and I never inquired.
Mr. Freedman used to sit in the reading room of the library, where he perused newly-arrived books and magazines. He read the newspaper everyday. The reading room had several windows and could seat about a hundred people. Long tables stood in rows that ended by the windows. The library closed at sunset; in the spring Moscow had no lighting. Mr. Freedman left before dark. Of his life before he began visiting the library I know nothing.
I wish to state quite definitely that it is by no means out of any wish to bring my own personality into the foreground that I preface with a few words about myself and my own affairs this report on Mr. Freedman. What I here set down are my impressions of Mr. Freedman. I intrude myself, of course, only in order that the reader -- I might better say the future reader, for at this moment there exists not the smallest prospect that my manuscript will ever see the light of day unless, by some miracle, it were to escape the scrutiny of the party and bring to those without some breath of the secrets of our prison-house (for has not our entire country become a kind of prison?) -- to resume: only because I consider that future readers will wish to know who and what the author is do I preface these disclosures with a few notes about myself.
I have been employed, since the Revolution, as head librarian of Public Library no. 18. The work has been agreeable. From time to time party functionaries visit to inquire about a specific patron. "What does he read?" "Does he follow a set routine of arrival and departure?" "Does the patron speak to you?" "What about?" I never fail to provide information that might be useful to the party. It has not been an infrequent occurrence that after speaking with a party official about a patron, I would never see that individual again at the library. Yes, I have been useful to the party and to the work of social reconstruction that the party has been carrying out.
God Bless the Communist Party of the Soviet Union!
I and my two assistants sit on a dais in a recess in the wall opposite the window, separated from the rest of the room by a high counter. From this vantage point little that goes on in the reading room escapes our attention.
From the outset, Mr. Freedman's demeanor set him apart from other patrons of Public Library no. 18. During the early years of his daily visits he read quietly, and but for the fact that he took a seat adjacent to my post -- which occasioned a good many chance encounters, we should have remained practically unacquainted. For he was not a sociable man. Indeed, he was unsociable to a degree I had never before experienced in anybody. He was, in fact, as he called himself, a real wolf of the Steppes, a strange, wild, shy -- very shy -- being from another world than mine. How deep the loneliness into which his life had drifted on account of his disposition and destiny and how consciously he accepted this loneliness as his destiny, I certainly did not know until I read the records he left behind him (that is, the documentary evidence to which I referred above). Yet, before that, from our occasional talks and encounters, I became gradually acquainted with him, and I found that the portrait in his records was in substantial agreement with the paler and less complete one that our personal acquaintance had given me.
He gave at the very first glance the impression of a significant, an uncommon, and unusually gifted man. His face was intellectual, and the abnormally delicate and mobile play of his features reflected a soul of extremely emotional and unusually delicate sensitivity. When one spoke to him and he, as was not always the case, dropped conventionalities, and said personal and individual things that came out of his own alien world, then a man like myself came under his spell on the spot. He had thought more than other men, and in matters of the intellect he had that calm objectivity, that certainty of thought and knowledge, such as only really intellectual men have, who have no axe to grind, who never wish to shine, or to
talk others down, or to appear always in the right.
What I know of him is little enough. Indeed, of his past life and origins I know nothing at all. Yet the impression left by his personality has remained, in spite of all, a deep and sympathetic one.
I mentioned that Mr. Freedman's conduct in the library set him apart from other patrons. For years I had observed him retrieving books from the shelves. He read these books, or passages from them, with a special intensity of expression. In truth the intensity of his emotions while occupied in this fashion, the exquisite sensitivity of his face, far exceed what I had ever experienced while talking to him. He appeared to reserve his deepest emotions for books, ideas, and the act of writing. Mr. Freedman took copious notes as he read. He appeared to be working on a kind of manifesto -- well, that's what I imagined. At times I feared for his personal safety. I knew many intellectuals. I knew how easily it was for intellectuals, for writers, to fail to heed the boundaries of conformity set by the party. As a class, intellectuals tended to be rebellious nonconformists who, not infrequently, seemed oblivious of the consequences of their independent spirit. After all, there exists a certain Communist style. Few people measure up to it. But no one seems to flout that way of life and thought as openly as do intellectuals. Why they have to flirt with danger, I can't imagine. The free thinker is a mockery of the whole world of conformity, a walking insult to it. If at least one's past is one's own secret -- but, as is often the case, there are people in the party who know such renegades inside out.
For many months, Mr. Freedman had been working ferociously on the manuscript that he hoped would finally make his literary reputation, or so I imagined. From what I could gather, both in my brief conversations with him and from my first-hand observation of him at work, he appeared to have grand visions for his manifesto. But I must say, I never really became acquainted with the content of the document in its entirety. My knowledge of the text was limited to what I gleaned from occasional scraps of notes that he discarded, from chance comments Mr. Freedman made, and from the books he borrowed from the library.
I got on well with Mr. Freedman. As is sometimes the way with men whose natures are really quite opposed, we got on very well. During our brief exchanges I would hold forth gregariously on topics that interested me: German Romanticism, the state of the poor, the struggle to find one's own private truth consistent with the common good, and so forth. Mr. Freedman, thin, angular, and restrained, listened more than he spoke, and when he talked -- of contemporary politics, or social reform, or the importance of education -- he did so with Euclidean clarity and a modesty that tended to obscure the firmness of his convictions.
As I say, I knew little of the content of Mr. Freedman's manifesto, and it was not in my power to verify the truth of the experiences related in his manuscript. I have no doubt that they are for the most part fictitious, not, however, in the sense of arbitrary invention. They are rather the deeply lived spiritual events which he has attempted to express by giving them the form of tangible experiences. The partly fantastic occurrences in Mr. Freedman's fiction come presumably from the later period of his patronage of the library, and I have no doubt that even they have some basis in real occurrence. At that time Mr. Freedman did not in fact change very much in behavior and in appearance.
Overall I had a favorable impression of Mr. Freedman. Many held contrary views. Mr. Freedman was not universally loved. In truth, Mr. Freedman presented layer upon layer of difficulty to disentangle. His neighbors said of him that after an hour you love him, after a week you hate him, and after ten years you start to understand him. One of the local shopkeepers said that if you didn't have a personality conflict with Mr. Freedman, you didn't have a personality. Those who had known of Mr. Freedman's past said that he was a combination of Machiavelli and Mr. Rogers: "The conventional image of an engaging man is one who is hard on the outside and soft on the inside. Mr. Freedman is just the opposite." Part of his mystique for some was his careful and successful positioning as someone "above the fray." He gave off an air that he was too good for others, or certainly better than the rest of his peers.
According to some he was a maddeningly-contradictory figure. An avatar of morality and truthfulness, Mr. Freedman bent the truth and had a singularly nasty side to his character that ultimately contributed to his difficulties with other people. One patron warned me: "Despite his intelligence, he has a vindictive streak, a mean streak, that surfaced frequently and antagonized people." Another patron said that Mr. Freedman liked to carve up an opponent, make others laugh at him, and then call it a joke. He stretched the truth to the point where it became dishonest to call it exaggeration." I heard someone say that Mr. Freedman was "a hyperbole addict." I must confess that generally not a week would go by when I didn't hear some criticism of Mr. Freedman. "He usually claimed the moral and ethical high ground" but "practiced an interpersonal style based on exaggeration, disingenuousness, and at times outright deception." It was said of Mr. Freedman that he seldom, if ever, repented of his nastiness or asked forgiveness. Instead, when called out for an egregious personal attack, he displayed the advanced skills of evasion that made him such an effective manipulator. All in all the picture that emerged was one of "narcissistic loner." Mr. Freedman was never a regular guy, the sum of his parts never quite added up to that. He talked his way through life, yet in some profound way he never learned the language of men.
Small wonder that friendship -- lasting and meaningful friendship -- eluded Mr. Freedman. He seemed, as I've already said, desperate for a kind of friendliness that he could not achieve spontaneously and naturally. He once asked me: "Are you familiar, Comrade Brown, with the small German ceremony called 'Duzen'? The ritual calls for two friends, each holding a glass of wine or beer, to entwine arms, thus bringing each other physically close, and to drink up after making a promise of eternal brotherhood with the word Bruderschaft. When it's over, the friends will have passed from a relationship that requires the formal 'Sie' mode of address to the
familiar 'Du.'"
I recoiled at Mr. Freedman's remarks. It was as if Mr. Freedman were making a personal proposal of some kind to me. I must admit I found Mr. Freedman's innuendo revolting. That degree of closeness between two men seemed to me unnatural. I ended the conversation abruptly.
My impression of Mr. Freedman was that of a man who was desperately lonely, who lived in deep emotional pain, and who lacked the means or motivation to change his life.
I often wondered: "What must the sleepless nights of such a man be like? What occupied his thoughts?"
Be that as it may.
I will now tell you about the significant and fantastic events that transpired on an early spring day in the year 19--. Mr. Freedman -- or Comrade Freedman, as he had been known (as we all had been known) officially since the Revolution -- had set out alone from his house in Prince Alexei Street, Moscow, for an extended walk. It was a spring afternoon in that year of 19--, when Russia was just beginning to emerge from the ravages of the Great War and the Revolution and its aftermath. He was overwrought by a morning of hard, nerve-taxing work, work which had not ceased to exact its uttermost in the way of sustained concentration, conscientiousness, and tact; and after the noon meal found himself powerless to check the onward sweep of the productive mechanism within him, that motus animi continuus in which, according to Cicero, eloquence resides. He had sought but not found relaxation in sleep -- though the wear and tear upon his system had come to make a daily nap more and more imperative -- and now undertook a walk, in the hope that air and exercise might send him back refreshed to a good evening's work.
April had passed its midpoint, and after weeks of cold and wet a mock summer had set in. Mr. Freedman had barely begun his walk when he was accosted by two uniformed men. The two men stopped Mr. Freedman and inquired of his identity. It was a mere formality; they knew it was Mr. Freedman. The two men were party functionaries: pallid and plump bureaucrats in the employ of the governing regime.
"Tenth-rate old actors they send for me," said Mr. Freedman, glancing round again to confirm the impression. "They want to finish me off cheaply." He turned abruptly toward the men and asked: "What theater are you playing at?" "Theater?" said one, the corners of his mouth twitching as he looked for advice to the other, who acted as if he were a dumb man struggling to overcome a stubborn disability. "They're not prepared to answer questions," said Mr. Freedman to himself and walked on with the men. "Just follow us," said one officer. "And remain quiet," said the other. "Nothing will happen to you if you cooperate with us. No harm will come to you if you follow orders." Mr. Freedman accompanied his two warders in
silence.
Someone must have traduced Mr. Freedman, for without having done anything wrong -- as he saw it -- he was arrested on that fine morning in April 19--, as the noon hour approached.
Mr. Freedman, a 50-year-old unemployed attorney, was eventually brought to the maximum security ward of the Moscow Central Institute for Forensic Psychiatry. I later learned through my contacts in the party that four months earlier, while searching the house of an acquaintance, the KGB agents discovered a book -- or rough draft of a book -- written by Mr. Freedman, that was critical of the Soviet social system. In this book Mr. Freedman defined himself as a "Marxist partisan" and a patriot of his country. He used language indistinguishable from that of the "official" and "approved" concepts current in Soviet social and political thought. However, the book was an impassioned argument for reform of the state in order to bring about greater prosperity and free expression in the country.
Mr. Freedman was arrested and charged with "antigovernment propaganda and agitation harmful to the interests of the Socialist state." Because he was uncooperative during his detention, he was referred for a psychiatric evaluation by a KGB investigator, who wrote in the referring document that "There are strong reasons to suspect that this detainee suffers from chronic mental illness, which is responsible for his behavior and has resulted in serious crimes against the state, with which he is charged."
The prisoner arrived in handcuffs, looking anxious and fearful. At the beginning of his admission report, the forensic psychiatrist, Comrade Dr. Martin, took note of "burning and penetrating eyes and an unearthly calm."
During the interview the prisoner insisted on his right to take notes and to write down the questions asked him; when this was denied, he refused to participate in the evaluation interview. On the ward, surrounded by seriously ill offenders, he kept to himself, and was described as "withdrawn, with long staring spells, and persistent refusal to discuss his thoughts and feelings." The ward staff was puzzled by his "excessive wariness, and his belief that something had been put into his food was described in ward notes as 'paranoid.'"
By the end of the first week, the prisoner was demanding to see the medical director of the hospital; when the director obliged, the prisoner confronted him with an accusation of "collaborating in crimes against humanity." The prisoner categorically denied the criminal nature of his activity and claimed that he pursued his chosen profession in writing a book about legal guarantees for freedom of expression.
From the information provided by the secret police investigator and summaries of treatment obtained from the local health center and the district mental health clinic, the forensic psychiatrist learned that the patient had "a stormy adolescence," during which he pursued, with abandon, the study of his country's history, literature, and art. He was described by his teachers as "stubborn, oppositional, and obsessed with his ideas." His principal wrote: "This young man is far too sensitive and intense for his age. He is negative about everything our country stands for and his tastes in art and music are bizarre. However, he is a highly intelligent young man, and with proper guidance and education, can be an asset to our country."
The records of the local employment board revealed that the prisoner was relieved from compulsory employment because of a diagnosis of "psychoneurosis" established by a psychiatrist at the district mental health clinic. The records from the clinic described a man who was "moody, preoccupied with his interest in history, precise and compulsive in his habits with some excessive concern about his health."
By the end of the third week, the prisoner was forcibly given small doses of a medication. He became weak and apathetic, complained of dryness of the mouth, increased appetite, and grogginess throughout the day, and an increasingly troublesome tremor. This was described in the record as "paranoid refusal to believe in the good intentions of the medical personnel, and inability to develop insight into his condition and his own needs."
When medication produced no change in the prisoner's attitude except for obvious side effects, it was discontinued. One week after this, the prisoner was looking more cheerful, and finally agreed to cooperate with the expert committee, consisting of three forensic psychiatrists. When the committee saw the prisoner, none of its members had had a chance to read the manuscript that brought the man to the attention of the authorities. During the interview, the prisoner was attentive and guarded, and later was described by one of the members as "hypervigilant" with obvious "ideas of reference." The committee unanimously agreed on the diagnosis offered by the forensic psychiatrist: schizophrenia. The committee recommended compulsive psychiatric treatment for Mr. Freedman "because of his inability to have a critical attitude toward his own condition and circumstances and failure to cooperate with necessary medical treatment."
The KGB investigator knew that the state world have considerable difficulty in prosecuting Mr. Freedman since it would have had to prove that he had a malicious intent to "undermine and harm the interests of the Socialist State." Because Mr. Freedman is articulate and persuasive, a public trial would have been embarrassing to the government. Knowing that Mr. Freedman had been given a psychiatric diagnosis that exempted him from compulsory employment, the KGB investigator reasoned that a trial would be unnecessary and that the credibility of Mr. Freedman's ideas would be undermined if his behavior could be attributed to a mental disorder.
The forensic psychiatrist was given inadequate and biased information, had no access to his "patient's" family or former colleagues, and had to deal with a frightened and unwilling man. Practicing within a social system with an extremely narrow range of "permissible" behavior and within a profession that uses an extraordinarily broad concept of schizophrenia, the forensic psychiatrist could very well have been sincere in considering Mr. Freedman mentally ill. It is also possible that the psychiatrist was cynically using his power to make diagnoses, hospitalize, and treat in order to satisfy an implicit request from the KGB to take this "troublesome" man off their hands.
Whether or not the forensic psychiatrist actually believed that Mr. Freedman was ill, he probably justified his diagnoses as follows: The onset of Mr. Freedman's schizophrenia was, as is usual in this illness, at the time of adolescent transition to adult life. He exhibited overvalued ideas, instability of mood, inappropriately intense and single minded pursuit of interests unusual for boys of his age, and obsessive compulsive personality traits. He developed a system of rationalized obsessive preoccupations with seeking reforms in Soviet society. His tragic world view is evidence of chronic dysphoria and anhedonia. His belief that he can make a contribution to the social theory and well-being of his country is evidence of an overvalued idea that has progressed into a fantastic delusion of reform. His cautious attitude toward authorities and state-appointed physicians is an expression of paranoid and self-referential perceptions.
In any event, we heard about Mr. Freedman's arrest at the Public Library. I, for one, was not surprised. For years I had feared for Mr. Freedman's safety, given the unusual nature of his ideas and his passionate investment in the act of putting his ideas in writing. But was Mr. Freedman truly mentally ill? Is it possible that the decision to arrest Mr. Freedman was unjustified? Is it not possible to view his difficulties as the result of the interaction between his personality traits and the prevailing political and social norms? Perhaps in another society Mr. Freedman's personality traits might not cause any particular difficulties -- indeed, might even be rewarded. Of course, I dare not make these sentiments public knowledge. The party deals harshly with those who question the correctness of its actions. Still, one wonders.
I have not seen Mr. Freedman since the day of his arrest. No, I am sure he has not taken his life. If he has been discharged from the hospital I am sure he still goes wearily up and down the streets somewhere in Moscow, sits for days in libraries, or lies on a hired sofa, listens to the world beneath his window and the hum of human life from which he knows that he is excluded. But he has not killed himself, for a glimmer of belief still tells him that he is to drink this frightful suffering in his heart to the dregs and that it is of this suffering he must die. I think of him often. He has not made life lighter for me. He had not the gift of fostering strength and joy in me. On the contrary! But I am not he, and I live my own life, a narrow middle-class life, but a solid one, filled with duties. And so we can think of Mr. Freedman peacefully and affectionately, William and I.
Mr. Freedman belongs to those who have been caught between two ages, who are outside of all security and simple acquiescence. He belongs to those whose fate it is to live the whole riddle of human destiny heightened to the pitch of a personal torture, a personal hell.
I neither approve nor condemn Mr. Freedman. Let every reader of these notes do as his conscience bids him.
/s/ A Loyal Party Member
If I have ever had these gifts in any sort of living form they have been smothered out of existence a long time ago under a wilderness of words. Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. I have been for many years a librarian. It is an occupation which at length becomes fatal to whatever share of imagination, observation, and insight an ordinary person may be heir to. To a librarian there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.
This being so, I could not have observed Mr. Freedman or guessed at his reality by the force of insight, much less have imagined him as he was. Even to invent the mere bald facts of his life would have been utterly beyond my powers. But I think that without this declaration the readers of these pages will be able to detect in the story the marks of documentary evidence. And that is perfectly correct. It is based on a document, or more precisely, those portions of a document of which I have a certain knowledge: all I have brought to it is my knowledge of the human species, which is sufficient for what is attempted here.
"Words, words, words," so Hamlet said.
Mr. Freedman was a lover of words, a lover of language. We spoke to each other infrequently. But those few exchanges we had were enough to convince me that he was always happy to talk; he was a "word-child," hyperarticulate. Fully formed paragraphs issued forth in conversation with a hypnotic, limpid ease. Sooner or later, his would-be debater would be charmed and silenced.
There was an element of the demoniacal in his tireless search for just the right word to round a sentence into its proper unity, for the exact juxtaposition of words and movement that would slyly lead the reader or listener along the periphery of a story to its turning point and then propel them effortlessly to its climax. . . . No moment, however small, seemed unimportant enough to escape his almost fierce attention, and his grasp of a social situation's latent values was immediate and complete. My eyes and ears were opened anew each day to the thousand-and-one endless details that go to make up the subtle and infinitely fragile clockwork of an anecdote's interior mechanism, and to the slow cultivation of its subsoil that gradually makes it blossom into something vital and alive. I watched and listened with the consecration of a yogi.
Early in our relationship I sensed that Mr. Freedman was a lonely man, an isolated man. He seemed desperate for a kind of friendliness that he could not achieve naturally and spontaneously and he found that closeness -- or at least he imagined that he found that closeness -- in the person of his local librarian. On occasion he shared with me his views on the world: he talked about politics, literature, the arts, and science. It was his gift for language that held my interest, no matter what the topic. His knowledge of these various fields was not remarkable. Yet with his gift for words he could turn the most commonplace observations into arresting remarks.
I can give you an example. "Every man is born a Faust," he said, "a Faust with a longing to grasp and experience and express everything in the world. Faust became a scientist thanks to the mistakes of his predecessors and contemporaries. Progress in science is governed by the laws of repulsion, every step forward is made by refutation of prevalent errors and false theories. Faust was an artist thanks to the inspiring example of his teachers. Forward steps in art are governed by the law of attraction, are the result of the imitation of an admiration for beloved predecessors." Well, I ask you: is there anything novel in that observation? Not in the least. But what Mr. Freedman managed to do was to get to the core of the matter: the structural dialectic inherent in the Faust story was laid bare by Mr. Freedman's use of an appealing, aphoristic turn of phrase.
Mr. Freedman was an eccentric (I don't think he'd mind my saying so) and a self-styled genius.
He spent much of the day, every day, at the library. I didn't know how he subsisted, and I never inquired.
Mr. Freedman used to sit in the reading room of the library, where he perused newly-arrived books and magazines. He read the newspaper everyday. The reading room had several windows and could seat about a hundred people. Long tables stood in rows that ended by the windows. The library closed at sunset; in the spring Moscow had no lighting. Mr. Freedman left before dark. Of his life before he began visiting the library I know nothing.
I wish to state quite definitely that it is by no means out of any wish to bring my own personality into the foreground that I preface with a few words about myself and my own affairs this report on Mr. Freedman. What I here set down are my impressions of Mr. Freedman. I intrude myself, of course, only in order that the reader -- I might better say the future reader, for at this moment there exists not the smallest prospect that my manuscript will ever see the light of day unless, by some miracle, it were to escape the scrutiny of the party and bring to those without some breath of the secrets of our prison-house (for has not our entire country become a kind of prison?) -- to resume: only because I consider that future readers will wish to know who and what the author is do I preface these disclosures with a few notes about myself.
I have been employed, since the Revolution, as head librarian of Public Library no. 18. The work has been agreeable. From time to time party functionaries visit to inquire about a specific patron. "What does he read?" "Does he follow a set routine of arrival and departure?" "Does the patron speak to you?" "What about?" I never fail to provide information that might be useful to the party. It has not been an infrequent occurrence that after speaking with a party official about a patron, I would never see that individual again at the library. Yes, I have been useful to the party and to the work of social reconstruction that the party has been carrying out.
God Bless the Communist Party of the Soviet Union!
I and my two assistants sit on a dais in a recess in the wall opposite the window, separated from the rest of the room by a high counter. From this vantage point little that goes on in the reading room escapes our attention.
From the outset, Mr. Freedman's demeanor set him apart from other patrons of Public Library no. 18. During the early years of his daily visits he read quietly, and but for the fact that he took a seat adjacent to my post -- which occasioned a good many chance encounters, we should have remained practically unacquainted. For he was not a sociable man. Indeed, he was unsociable to a degree I had never before experienced in anybody. He was, in fact, as he called himself, a real wolf of the Steppes, a strange, wild, shy -- very shy -- being from another world than mine. How deep the loneliness into which his life had drifted on account of his disposition and destiny and how consciously he accepted this loneliness as his destiny, I certainly did not know until I read the records he left behind him (that is, the documentary evidence to which I referred above). Yet, before that, from our occasional talks and encounters, I became gradually acquainted with him, and I found that the portrait in his records was in substantial agreement with the paler and less complete one that our personal acquaintance had given me.
He gave at the very first glance the impression of a significant, an uncommon, and unusually gifted man. His face was intellectual, and the abnormally delicate and mobile play of his features reflected a soul of extremely emotional and unusually delicate sensitivity. When one spoke to him and he, as was not always the case, dropped conventionalities, and said personal and individual things that came out of his own alien world, then a man like myself came under his spell on the spot. He had thought more than other men, and in matters of the intellect he had that calm objectivity, that certainty of thought and knowledge, such as only really intellectual men have, who have no axe to grind, who never wish to shine, or to
talk others down, or to appear always in the right.
What I know of him is little enough. Indeed, of his past life and origins I know nothing at all. Yet the impression left by his personality has remained, in spite of all, a deep and sympathetic one.
I mentioned that Mr. Freedman's conduct in the library set him apart from other patrons. For years I had observed him retrieving books from the shelves. He read these books, or passages from them, with a special intensity of expression. In truth the intensity of his emotions while occupied in this fashion, the exquisite sensitivity of his face, far exceed what I had ever experienced while talking to him. He appeared to reserve his deepest emotions for books, ideas, and the act of writing. Mr. Freedman took copious notes as he read. He appeared to be working on a kind of manifesto -- well, that's what I imagined. At times I feared for his personal safety. I knew many intellectuals. I knew how easily it was for intellectuals, for writers, to fail to heed the boundaries of conformity set by the party. As a class, intellectuals tended to be rebellious nonconformists who, not infrequently, seemed oblivious of the consequences of their independent spirit. After all, there exists a certain Communist style. Few people measure up to it. But no one seems to flout that way of life and thought as openly as do intellectuals. Why they have to flirt with danger, I can't imagine. The free thinker is a mockery of the whole world of conformity, a walking insult to it. If at least one's past is one's own secret -- but, as is often the case, there are people in the party who know such renegades inside out.
For many months, Mr. Freedman had been working ferociously on the manuscript that he hoped would finally make his literary reputation, or so I imagined. From what I could gather, both in my brief conversations with him and from my first-hand observation of him at work, he appeared to have grand visions for his manifesto. But I must say, I never really became acquainted with the content of the document in its entirety. My knowledge of the text was limited to what I gleaned from occasional scraps of notes that he discarded, from chance comments Mr. Freedman made, and from the books he borrowed from the library.
I got on well with Mr. Freedman. As is sometimes the way with men whose natures are really quite opposed, we got on very well. During our brief exchanges I would hold forth gregariously on topics that interested me: German Romanticism, the state of the poor, the struggle to find one's own private truth consistent with the common good, and so forth. Mr. Freedman, thin, angular, and restrained, listened more than he spoke, and when he talked -- of contemporary politics, or social reform, or the importance of education -- he did so with Euclidean clarity and a modesty that tended to obscure the firmness of his convictions.
As I say, I knew little of the content of Mr. Freedman's manifesto, and it was not in my power to verify the truth of the experiences related in his manuscript. I have no doubt that they are for the most part fictitious, not, however, in the sense of arbitrary invention. They are rather the deeply lived spiritual events which he has attempted to express by giving them the form of tangible experiences. The partly fantastic occurrences in Mr. Freedman's fiction come presumably from the later period of his patronage of the library, and I have no doubt that even they have some basis in real occurrence. At that time Mr. Freedman did not in fact change very much in behavior and in appearance.
Overall I had a favorable impression of Mr. Freedman. Many held contrary views. Mr. Freedman was not universally loved. In truth, Mr. Freedman presented layer upon layer of difficulty to disentangle. His neighbors said of him that after an hour you love him, after a week you hate him, and after ten years you start to understand him. One of the local shopkeepers said that if you didn't have a personality conflict with Mr. Freedman, you didn't have a personality. Those who had known of Mr. Freedman's past said that he was a combination of Machiavelli and Mr. Rogers: "The conventional image of an engaging man is one who is hard on the outside and soft on the inside. Mr. Freedman is just the opposite." Part of his mystique for some was his careful and successful positioning as someone "above the fray." He gave off an air that he was too good for others, or certainly better than the rest of his peers.
According to some he was a maddeningly-contradictory figure. An avatar of morality and truthfulness, Mr. Freedman bent the truth and had a singularly nasty side to his character that ultimately contributed to his difficulties with other people. One patron warned me: "Despite his intelligence, he has a vindictive streak, a mean streak, that surfaced frequently and antagonized people." Another patron said that Mr. Freedman liked to carve up an opponent, make others laugh at him, and then call it a joke. He stretched the truth to the point where it became dishonest to call it exaggeration." I heard someone say that Mr. Freedman was "a hyperbole addict." I must confess that generally not a week would go by when I didn't hear some criticism of Mr. Freedman. "He usually claimed the moral and ethical high ground" but "practiced an interpersonal style based on exaggeration, disingenuousness, and at times outright deception." It was said of Mr. Freedman that he seldom, if ever, repented of his nastiness or asked forgiveness. Instead, when called out for an egregious personal attack, he displayed the advanced skills of evasion that made him such an effective manipulator. All in all the picture that emerged was one of "narcissistic loner." Mr. Freedman was never a regular guy, the sum of his parts never quite added up to that. He talked his way through life, yet in some profound way he never learned the language of men.
Small wonder that friendship -- lasting and meaningful friendship -- eluded Mr. Freedman. He seemed, as I've already said, desperate for a kind of friendliness that he could not achieve spontaneously and naturally. He once asked me: "Are you familiar, Comrade Brown, with the small German ceremony called 'Duzen'? The ritual calls for two friends, each holding a glass of wine or beer, to entwine arms, thus bringing each other physically close, and to drink up after making a promise of eternal brotherhood with the word Bruderschaft. When it's over, the friends will have passed from a relationship that requires the formal 'Sie' mode of address to the
familiar 'Du.'"
I recoiled at Mr. Freedman's remarks. It was as if Mr. Freedman were making a personal proposal of some kind to me. I must admit I found Mr. Freedman's innuendo revolting. That degree of closeness between two men seemed to me unnatural. I ended the conversation abruptly.
My impression of Mr. Freedman was that of a man who was desperately lonely, who lived in deep emotional pain, and who lacked the means or motivation to change his life.
I often wondered: "What must the sleepless nights of such a man be like? What occupied his thoughts?"
Be that as it may.
I will now tell you about the significant and fantastic events that transpired on an early spring day in the year 19--. Mr. Freedman -- or Comrade Freedman, as he had been known (as we all had been known) officially since the Revolution -- had set out alone from his house in Prince Alexei Street, Moscow, for an extended walk. It was a spring afternoon in that year of 19--, when Russia was just beginning to emerge from the ravages of the Great War and the Revolution and its aftermath. He was overwrought by a morning of hard, nerve-taxing work, work which had not ceased to exact its uttermost in the way of sustained concentration, conscientiousness, and tact; and after the noon meal found himself powerless to check the onward sweep of the productive mechanism within him, that motus animi continuus in which, according to Cicero, eloquence resides. He had sought but not found relaxation in sleep -- though the wear and tear upon his system had come to make a daily nap more and more imperative -- and now undertook a walk, in the hope that air and exercise might send him back refreshed to a good evening's work.
April had passed its midpoint, and after weeks of cold and wet a mock summer had set in. Mr. Freedman had barely begun his walk when he was accosted by two uniformed men. The two men stopped Mr. Freedman and inquired of his identity. It was a mere formality; they knew it was Mr. Freedman. The two men were party functionaries: pallid and plump bureaucrats in the employ of the governing regime.
"Tenth-rate old actors they send for me," said Mr. Freedman, glancing round again to confirm the impression. "They want to finish me off cheaply." He turned abruptly toward the men and asked: "What theater are you playing at?" "Theater?" said one, the corners of his mouth twitching as he looked for advice to the other, who acted as if he were a dumb man struggling to overcome a stubborn disability. "They're not prepared to answer questions," said Mr. Freedman to himself and walked on with the men. "Just follow us," said one officer. "And remain quiet," said the other. "Nothing will happen to you if you cooperate with us. No harm will come to you if you follow orders." Mr. Freedman accompanied his two warders in
silence.
Someone must have traduced Mr. Freedman, for without having done anything wrong -- as he saw it -- he was arrested on that fine morning in April 19--, as the noon hour approached.
Mr. Freedman, a 50-year-old unemployed attorney, was eventually brought to the maximum security ward of the Moscow Central Institute for Forensic Psychiatry. I later learned through my contacts in the party that four months earlier, while searching the house of an acquaintance, the KGB agents discovered a book -- or rough draft of a book -- written by Mr. Freedman, that was critical of the Soviet social system. In this book Mr. Freedman defined himself as a "Marxist partisan" and a patriot of his country. He used language indistinguishable from that of the "official" and "approved" concepts current in Soviet social and political thought. However, the book was an impassioned argument for reform of the state in order to bring about greater prosperity and free expression in the country.
Mr. Freedman was arrested and charged with "antigovernment propaganda and agitation harmful to the interests of the Socialist state." Because he was uncooperative during his detention, he was referred for a psychiatric evaluation by a KGB investigator, who wrote in the referring document that "There are strong reasons to suspect that this detainee suffers from chronic mental illness, which is responsible for his behavior and has resulted in serious crimes against the state, with which he is charged."
The prisoner arrived in handcuffs, looking anxious and fearful. At the beginning of his admission report, the forensic psychiatrist, Comrade Dr. Martin, took note of "burning and penetrating eyes and an unearthly calm."
During the interview the prisoner insisted on his right to take notes and to write down the questions asked him; when this was denied, he refused to participate in the evaluation interview. On the ward, surrounded by seriously ill offenders, he kept to himself, and was described as "withdrawn, with long staring spells, and persistent refusal to discuss his thoughts and feelings." The ward staff was puzzled by his "excessive wariness, and his belief that something had been put into his food was described in ward notes as 'paranoid.'"
By the end of the first week, the prisoner was demanding to see the medical director of the hospital; when the director obliged, the prisoner confronted him with an accusation of "collaborating in crimes against humanity." The prisoner categorically denied the criminal nature of his activity and claimed that he pursued his chosen profession in writing a book about legal guarantees for freedom of expression.
From the information provided by the secret police investigator and summaries of treatment obtained from the local health center and the district mental health clinic, the forensic psychiatrist learned that the patient had "a stormy adolescence," during which he pursued, with abandon, the study of his country's history, literature, and art. He was described by his teachers as "stubborn, oppositional, and obsessed with his ideas." His principal wrote: "This young man is far too sensitive and intense for his age. He is negative about everything our country stands for and his tastes in art and music are bizarre. However, he is a highly intelligent young man, and with proper guidance and education, can be an asset to our country."
The records of the local employment board revealed that the prisoner was relieved from compulsory employment because of a diagnosis of "psychoneurosis" established by a psychiatrist at the district mental health clinic. The records from the clinic described a man who was "moody, preoccupied with his interest in history, precise and compulsive in his habits with some excessive concern about his health."
By the end of the third week, the prisoner was forcibly given small doses of a medication. He became weak and apathetic, complained of dryness of the mouth, increased appetite, and grogginess throughout the day, and an increasingly troublesome tremor. This was described in the record as "paranoid refusal to believe in the good intentions of the medical personnel, and inability to develop insight into his condition and his own needs."
When medication produced no change in the prisoner's attitude except for obvious side effects, it was discontinued. One week after this, the prisoner was looking more cheerful, and finally agreed to cooperate with the expert committee, consisting of three forensic psychiatrists. When the committee saw the prisoner, none of its members had had a chance to read the manuscript that brought the man to the attention of the authorities. During the interview, the prisoner was attentive and guarded, and later was described by one of the members as "hypervigilant" with obvious "ideas of reference." The committee unanimously agreed on the diagnosis offered by the forensic psychiatrist: schizophrenia. The committee recommended compulsive psychiatric treatment for Mr. Freedman "because of his inability to have a critical attitude toward his own condition and circumstances and failure to cooperate with necessary medical treatment."
The KGB investigator knew that the state world have considerable difficulty in prosecuting Mr. Freedman since it would have had to prove that he had a malicious intent to "undermine and harm the interests of the Socialist State." Because Mr. Freedman is articulate and persuasive, a public trial would have been embarrassing to the government. Knowing that Mr. Freedman had been given a psychiatric diagnosis that exempted him from compulsory employment, the KGB investigator reasoned that a trial would be unnecessary and that the credibility of Mr. Freedman's ideas would be undermined if his behavior could be attributed to a mental disorder.
The forensic psychiatrist was given inadequate and biased information, had no access to his "patient's" family or former colleagues, and had to deal with a frightened and unwilling man. Practicing within a social system with an extremely narrow range of "permissible" behavior and within a profession that uses an extraordinarily broad concept of schizophrenia, the forensic psychiatrist could very well have been sincere in considering Mr. Freedman mentally ill. It is also possible that the psychiatrist was cynically using his power to make diagnoses, hospitalize, and treat in order to satisfy an implicit request from the KGB to take this "troublesome" man off their hands.
Whether or not the forensic psychiatrist actually believed that Mr. Freedman was ill, he probably justified his diagnoses as follows: The onset of Mr. Freedman's schizophrenia was, as is usual in this illness, at the time of adolescent transition to adult life. He exhibited overvalued ideas, instability of mood, inappropriately intense and single minded pursuit of interests unusual for boys of his age, and obsessive compulsive personality traits. He developed a system of rationalized obsessive preoccupations with seeking reforms in Soviet society. His tragic world view is evidence of chronic dysphoria and anhedonia. His belief that he can make a contribution to the social theory and well-being of his country is evidence of an overvalued idea that has progressed into a fantastic delusion of reform. His cautious attitude toward authorities and state-appointed physicians is an expression of paranoid and self-referential perceptions.
In any event, we heard about Mr. Freedman's arrest at the Public Library. I, for one, was not surprised. For years I had feared for Mr. Freedman's safety, given the unusual nature of his ideas and his passionate investment in the act of putting his ideas in writing. But was Mr. Freedman truly mentally ill? Is it possible that the decision to arrest Mr. Freedman was unjustified? Is it not possible to view his difficulties as the result of the interaction between his personality traits and the prevailing political and social norms? Perhaps in another society Mr. Freedman's personality traits might not cause any particular difficulties -- indeed, might even be rewarded. Of course, I dare not make these sentiments public knowledge. The party deals harshly with those who question the correctness of its actions. Still, one wonders.
I have not seen Mr. Freedman since the day of his arrest. No, I am sure he has not taken his life. If he has been discharged from the hospital I am sure he still goes wearily up and down the streets somewhere in Moscow, sits for days in libraries, or lies on a hired sofa, listens to the world beneath his window and the hum of human life from which he knows that he is excluded. But he has not killed himself, for a glimmer of belief still tells him that he is to drink this frightful suffering in his heart to the dregs and that it is of this suffering he must die. I think of him often. He has not made life lighter for me. He had not the gift of fostering strength and joy in me. On the contrary! But I am not he, and I live my own life, a narrow middle-class life, but a solid one, filled with duties. And so we can think of Mr. Freedman peacefully and affectionately, William and I.
Mr. Freedman belongs to those who have been caught between two ages, who are outside of all security and simple acquiescence. He belongs to those whose fate it is to live the whole riddle of human destiny heightened to the pitch of a personal torture, a personal hell.
I neither approve nor condemn Mr. Freedman. Let every reader of these notes do as his conscience bids him.
/s/ A Loyal Party Member
Idealization and Guilt -- Two Sides of the Same Coin
In my blog I have talked about the many people I have idealized: Leonard Bernstein, Robert S. Strauss, Esq., Sigmund Freud, Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler -- the list is virtually endless.
I have also talked about the fact that I struggle with intense unconscious guilt feelings.
http://dailstrug.blogspot.com/2010/01/object-relations-secret-and.html
Idealization and guilt. I suppose to most laymen the two psychological qualities seem unrelated. To the astute psychoanalyst, however, it will be clear that idealization and guilt can be inextricably linked in an individual. Idealization can be seen as a derivative of the infant's earliest pleasurable sensations in relation to the mother; whereas guilt can be a derivative of the infant's earliest feelings of coercion and frustration in relation to the mother. The late Gertrude R. Ticho, M.D., a renowned psychoanalyst, and a psychiatric consultatant for the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, would have been aware of the relationship between idealization and guilt.
________________________________
[I]ntrojection of and identification with aspects of the parent occur as part of the process of separation. At each point where the child relinquishes ties to the object and takes a further step in separation and differentiation, he seeks to hold onto the parent by taking an image of her inside. Normally, at rapprochement, there is a gradual process of introjection that extends over a considerable period of time. At first, very ambivalent feelings are still present toward the object (though these are less intense than in the previous period when "good" and "bad" images and feelings could not be tolerated in juxtaposition at all). It is only gradually, by a continuing process of bringing together the two sides of the ambivalent feelings, that an emotionally stable intrapsychic representation of the object is achieved. The internalizations of the parent contribute to the establishment of impulse control mechanisms. The two sets of feelings toward the introject become the source of two parallel lines of development of superego precursors. The loved and loving aspect of the object is idealized and combined with ideal self-images to form the "ego-ideal." The precipitates of coercive interactions become the nucleus for the authoritative and punishing side of the introject, known as the "superego precursor."
Where a separation is sudden . . . an abrupt defensive internalization occurs prematurely, without the gradual process of bringing together and neutralization of the two sides of the ambivalent feelings.
The two sides of the introject thus internalized (ego-ideal and superego precursor) had not been adequately moderated through gradual rapprochement cycles. The result was an ego-ideal with excessive primitive idealization and a superego precursor with excessive sadistic harshness.
Freeman, D.M.A., Foulks, E.F., Freeman, P.A. "Ghost Sickness and Superego Development in the Kiowa Apache Male," at 134-135. In: The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, vol. 7, Gertrude R. Ticho, M.D., contributing editor (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1976).
I have also talked about the fact that I struggle with intense unconscious guilt feelings.
http://dailstrug.blogspot.com/2010/01/object-relations-secret-and.html
Idealization and guilt. I suppose to most laymen the two psychological qualities seem unrelated. To the astute psychoanalyst, however, it will be clear that idealization and guilt can be inextricably linked in an individual. Idealization can be seen as a derivative of the infant's earliest pleasurable sensations in relation to the mother; whereas guilt can be a derivative of the infant's earliest feelings of coercion and frustration in relation to the mother. The late Gertrude R. Ticho, M.D., a renowned psychoanalyst, and a psychiatric consultatant for the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, would have been aware of the relationship between idealization and guilt.
________________________________
[I]ntrojection of and identification with aspects of the parent occur as part of the process of separation. At each point where the child relinquishes ties to the object and takes a further step in separation and differentiation, he seeks to hold onto the parent by taking an image of her inside. Normally, at rapprochement, there is a gradual process of introjection that extends over a considerable period of time. At first, very ambivalent feelings are still present toward the object (though these are less intense than in the previous period when "good" and "bad" images and feelings could not be tolerated in juxtaposition at all). It is only gradually, by a continuing process of bringing together the two sides of the ambivalent feelings, that an emotionally stable intrapsychic representation of the object is achieved. The internalizations of the parent contribute to the establishment of impulse control mechanisms. The two sets of feelings toward the introject become the source of two parallel lines of development of superego precursors. The loved and loving aspect of the object is idealized and combined with ideal self-images to form the "ego-ideal." The precipitates of coercive interactions become the nucleus for the authoritative and punishing side of the introject, known as the "superego precursor."
Where a separation is sudden . . . an abrupt defensive internalization occurs prematurely, without the gradual process of bringing together and neutralization of the two sides of the ambivalent feelings.
The two sides of the introject thus internalized (ego-ideal and superego precursor) had not been adequately moderated through gradual rapprochement cycles. The result was an ego-ideal with excessive primitive idealization and a superego precursor with excessive sadistic harshness.
Freeman, D.M.A., Foulks, E.F., Freeman, P.A. "Ghost Sickness and Superego Development in the Kiowa Apache Male," at 134-135. In: The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, vol. 7, Gertrude R. Ticho, M.D., contributing editor (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1976).
Me and Freud: Notable Parallels
The following is an excerpt from E. James Lieberman, M.D., Acts of Will: The Life and Work of Otto Rank at 65 (New York: The Free Press, 1985). Dr. Lieberman is a retired Washington, D.C. psychiatrist, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the George Washington University Medical Center Department of Psychiatry. In about the year 1990, I sent Dr. Lieberman a copy of my self-analysis, "The Caliban Complex," which he acknowledged with a humorous letter. I wonder if Dr. Lieberman remembers me or my writing?
Incidentally, the theory of creativity that Dr. Lieberman cites is "Janusian Thinking," a term coined by Albert Rothenberg, M.D. that refers to the process of holding two contradictory ideas in the mind at once. I also sent a copy of "The Caliban Complex" to Dr. Rothenberg in the fall of 1989. He responded with a referral to Stanley R. Palombo, M.D., a Washington, D.C. psychiatrist I consulted in 1990, during my tenure at the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld: phone 202 362 6004. Dr. Palombo was an outstanding psychiatrist and one of the most intelligent people I have ever known.
________________________________________
According to one theory creativity depends on the ability to hold opposite ideas in the mind simultaneously to live and work with contradictions. "No man can engender till divided in two" wrote W. B. Yeats. Sigmund Freud not only coped with ambivalence; he raised it to a new level of consciousness. Reaction formation, denial, repression, and dream work are some of the terms he used to accommodate the phenomenon of opposites that he observed in himself and others; disgust conceals attraction, altruism conceals and sadism, behind the fear lies the wish, etc. Many people cannot tolerate such oxymorons in their lives; they feel out of control, or "crazy." Their notion of sanity stifles creativity. Freud's elucidation of the dynamic unconscious enabled people to cope better with normal inconsistency and to be more creative as a result.
Freud's own powerful impulses and emotions found their match in his intellect and self-control. He checked his passion for philosophy with the detachment of a chemist, his yen for deductive reasoning with a disciplined inductive approach. Sometimes he fooled himself, as when he denied ambition, malice, and idealism, and when he claimed to be unruffled by critics. He labeled himself an obsessive, but he showed signs of (controlled) anxiety, paranoia, homosexuality, and hysteria as well and probably used all to advantage, as he did his own dreams. As with any powerful new tool, psychoanalysis was used roughly at first and mistakes were made, even by its inventor.
From his concern with archeology, to his wish for a statue of himself in the university courtyard, Freud worked out his ambivalent relationship with the past. Ambition for greatness suggests a preoccupation with the future, but in his case the key fantasy concerns becoming a part of history, an indispensable figure who first solved the riddle of life. It was part of his struggle with mortality, his search for permanence.
Incidentally, the theory of creativity that Dr. Lieberman cites is "Janusian Thinking," a term coined by Albert Rothenberg, M.D. that refers to the process of holding two contradictory ideas in the mind at once. I also sent a copy of "The Caliban Complex" to Dr. Rothenberg in the fall of 1989. He responded with a referral to Stanley R. Palombo, M.D., a Washington, D.C. psychiatrist I consulted in 1990, during my tenure at the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld: phone 202 362 6004. Dr. Palombo was an outstanding psychiatrist and one of the most intelligent people I have ever known.
________________________________________
According to one theory creativity depends on the ability to hold opposite ideas in the mind simultaneously to live and work with contradictions. "No man can engender till divided in two" wrote W. B. Yeats. Sigmund Freud not only coped with ambivalence; he raised it to a new level of consciousness. Reaction formation, denial, repression, and dream work are some of the terms he used to accommodate the phenomenon of opposites that he observed in himself and others; disgust conceals attraction, altruism conceals and sadism, behind the fear lies the wish, etc. Many people cannot tolerate such oxymorons in their lives; they feel out of control, or "crazy." Their notion of sanity stifles creativity. Freud's elucidation of the dynamic unconscious enabled people to cope better with normal inconsistency and to be more creative as a result.
Freud's own powerful impulses and emotions found their match in his intellect and self-control. He checked his passion for philosophy with the detachment of a chemist, his yen for deductive reasoning with a disciplined inductive approach. Sometimes he fooled himself, as when he denied ambition, malice, and idealism, and when he claimed to be unruffled by critics. He labeled himself an obsessive, but he showed signs of (controlled) anxiety, paranoia, homosexuality, and hysteria as well and probably used all to advantage, as he did his own dreams. As with any powerful new tool, psychoanalysis was used roughly at first and mistakes were made, even by its inventor.
From his concern with archeology, to his wish for a statue of himself in the university courtyard, Freud worked out his ambivalent relationship with the past. Ambition for greatness suggests a preoccupation with the future, but in his case the key fantasy concerns becoming a part of history, an indispensable figure who first solved the riddle of life. It was part of his struggle with mortality, his search for permanence.
Letter to Reid Weingarten -- Steptoe & Johnson -- 1997
October 7, 1997
3801 Connecticut Avenue, NW
#136
Washington, DC 20008-4530
Reid H. Weingarten, Esq.
Steptoe & Johnson
Washington, DC 20036
RE: Steptoe & Johnson Employment Inquiry - Homicide/Violence Risk
Dear Mr. Weingarten:
I am writing to assure the law firm of Steptoe & Johnson that at the time of my employment inquiry in February 1985, to which Hiring Committee member Morgan D. Hodgson responded by letter dated March 4, 1985 (copy attached), I did not intentionally withhold any facts pertinent to my current mental illness: an apparently rare form of paranoid schizophrenia that causes me to become more intelligent even as the illness worsens in severity.
As a courtesy to Steptoe & Johnson I forward (on the enclosed computer disc) two pleadings that I filed in the D.C. Court of Appeals, in a currently pending appeal, that will satisfy any concerns you or your partners may have concerning the risk of violence (including homicide) to which I unintentionally subjected your firm. The disc also contains a document pertinent to a criminal investigation instituted by the Federal Protective Service (Jerry McGill, S.A.), ancillary to concerns, affirmed as genuine by the Government of the District of Columbia, relating to a reported risk of violence (including homicide) that I posed at the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, my former employer.
Sincerely,
Gary Freedman
3801 Connecticut Avenue, NW
#136
Washington, DC 20008-4530
Reid H. Weingarten, Esq.
Steptoe & Johnson
Washington, DC 20036
RE: Steptoe & Johnson Employment Inquiry - Homicide/Violence Risk
Dear Mr. Weingarten:
I am writing to assure the law firm of Steptoe & Johnson that at the time of my employment inquiry in February 1985, to which Hiring Committee member Morgan D. Hodgson responded by letter dated March 4, 1985 (copy attached), I did not intentionally withhold any facts pertinent to my current mental illness: an apparently rare form of paranoid schizophrenia that causes me to become more intelligent even as the illness worsens in severity.
As a courtesy to Steptoe & Johnson I forward (on the enclosed computer disc) two pleadings that I filed in the D.C. Court of Appeals, in a currently pending appeal, that will satisfy any concerns you or your partners may have concerning the risk of violence (including homicide) to which I unintentionally subjected your firm. The disc also contains a document pertinent to a criminal investigation instituted by the Federal Protective Service (Jerry McGill, S.A.), ancillary to concerns, affirmed as genuine by the Government of the District of Columbia, relating to a reported risk of violence (including homicide) that I posed at the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, my former employer.
Sincerely,
Gary Freedman
Saturday, January 23, 2010
What Do I Love?
I love the fact that federal officials buy so easily into the notion that I am mentally disturbed. All I have to do is repeatedly refer to a federal official on my blog in a laudatory way and it bolsters my claim for disability payments.
I love the fact that the federal government is so bureaucratic that if a federal law enforcement officer has evidence that a crime is being committed outide his jurisdiction, he will not make a criminal referral to the FBI. That might interrupt his canasta game.
I love the fact that when a powerful law firm engages in racketeering, the Justice Department will not investigate or prosecute because it is afraid of powerful law firms and powerful lawyers.
I love the fact that incompetent and corrupt psychiatrists think I'm mentally disturbed. That, as we say in the trade, is good for business! Yes, indeed, I am crazier and saner than most people.
I love the fact that the federal government is so bureaucratic that if a federal law enforcement officer has evidence that a crime is being committed outide his jurisdiction, he will not make a criminal referral to the FBI. That might interrupt his canasta game.
I love the fact that when a powerful law firm engages in racketeering, the Justice Department will not investigate or prosecute because it is afraid of powerful law firms and powerful lawyers.
I love the fact that incompetent and corrupt psychiatrists think I'm mentally disturbed. That, as we say in the trade, is good for business! Yes, indeed, I am crazier and saner than most people.
I Wonder If Judge Abraham Knows?
I wonder if Judge Abraham knows that I did not bother to revise the Wikipedia article about her. I wonder if she even cares?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynne_Abraham
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynne_Abraham
The U.S. Justice Department: "Maybe We Should Investigate His Fondness for Lord Byron!"
The Reflections of a Solitary on a Snowy January Day
Brian--
January 24, 2005
Hey, buddy. What did you think of that snowstorm on Saturday? Was Mr. Frost nipping at your nose? Did you even work on Saturday or did you have the day off? I heard that the libraries closed two hours early, at three-thirty. You were released from your workday chores prematurely, in mid-afternoon on Saturday, if indeed you were engaged with them at all.
On Saturday I occupied myself with Mr. Frost together with a host of other authors who populated my imagination as welcome guests: Jane Hamilton, Marya Hornbacher, Edith Wharton, Primo Levi, Boris Pasternak, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Brenman-Gibson. Stanley Greenspan was here too. But then, Dr. Greenspan is always here; he holds the key to my inner world, and he comes and goes at will. Oh, and lest I forget, Lord Byron visited briefly to convey a unique message "To Ellen."
In my loneliness I become a spectator. My imagination leads a procession of living creatures before me. I watch and listen to these guests of my imagination as I would a performance at the theater. And at times these fantastic creations of my inner world seem more real than reality itself. I may be affected by a theatrical exhibition; on the other hand, I may not be affected by an actual event which appears to concern me much more. I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes.
I came across a poem of Robert Frost's that seemed especially appropriate: "Brown's Descent." The opening lines read: "Brown lived at such a lofty farm that everyone for miles could see his lantern where he did his chores in winter after half-past three. And many must have seen him make his wild descent from there one night, 'cross lots, 'cross walls, 'cross everything describing rings of lantern-light. Between the house and barn the gale got him by something he had on and blew him out on the icy crust that cased the world, and he was gone!"
I hope you got home safely if you drove through the snow, Brian. My own life is like an unending slip and slide; I seem to be continually at the edge of an abyss, mere seconds and a few feet from swerving involuntarily into oncoming traffic. I fear crashing into the traffic in the opposite lane, hurling into the windshield -- hurting myself and damaging the rearview mirror.
My entire existence, in some sense, can be viewed as the lived aftermath of an accident, or series of accidents -- a fall from grace. I used to think if you fell from grace it was more likely than not the result of one stupendous error or else an unfortunate accident. I hadn't learned that it can happen so gradually you don't lose your stomach or hurt yourself in the landing. You don't necessarily sense the motion. I've found it takes at last two and generally three things to alter the course of a life: You slip around the truth once, and then again, and one more time, and there you are, feeling, for a moment, that it was sudden, your arrival at the bottom of a snowdrift.
That's the way I feel now. I feel as if I'm at the bottom of the heap, struggling to ascend from the snowdrifts that ensnare me in a winter wasteland.
At this moment, the problem is compounded by a writer's block. I feel I'm straining for something to say, something to express. I feel immobile, locked in the grip of a creative and emotional deep freeze.
There is a stillness without and a confused tumult within. I gaze out my window. I seem a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that is warm and sentient in me fast bound below the surface; but there is nothing unfriendly in the silence. The silence is a balm for my inner disquiet. I simply feel that I live in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I have the sense that my loneliness is not merely the result of my personal plight, tragic as it is, but has in it, as I've hinted many times before, the profound accumulated cold of many stark and harshly-demanding winters.
The night following the storm was perfectly still, and the air so dry and pure that it gave little sensation of cold. The effect produced on me was rather a complete absence of atmosphere, as though nothing less tenuous than ether intervened between the white earth and the gray sky above.
I let the vision possess me as I contemplated what to write to you, buddy. I am never so happy as when I abandon myself to these epistolary dreams. A wave of warmth goes through me as I think about the fact that for me the act of writing (not to mention paraphrasing, as well as outright plagiarizing) is the prolongation of a vision.
Saturday night. I set about to write. I scribbled some notes in longhand. What I wrote that night fell into two parts. Clean copies -- improved versions of earlier scribbling -- were set out in my best penmanship. New work was written in an illegible scrawl full of gaps and abbreviations. In deciphering these scribbles, I went through the usual disappointments. Last night these rough fragments had moved me, and I myself had been surprised by some felicitous passages. Now these very passages seemed to me distressingly and conspicuously strained.
The passages didn't flow. A clear and pleasing narrative did not materialize. I felt torn between a fevered urgency and a bitter languor. I cannot blame my inner censor for the block; that censor, like a good psychoanalyst, contemplated my outpourings with evenly-hovering attention. The ideas were there all right, but they failed to materialize into a cohesive communication. I not only feel that I am incomprehensible to others; I am sometimes incomprehensible to myself as well. There were many false starts -- and jarring stops. It was like driving through a winter storm. My thoughts made slow headway, and a vague fear gripped me as I envisioned veering off a train of thought or, alternatively, into a jarring wreck of incompatible ideas. The driver in a winter storm strives vigilantly for a commodious path, and is dismayed when he finds how far, after a seemingly interminable ride, he still remains from home.
It has been the dream of my life to write with an originality so discreet, so well concealed, as to be unnoticeable in its disguise of current and customary forms; all my life I have struggled for a style so restrained, so unpretentious that the reader or the hearer would fully understand the meaning without realizing how I assimilated it. I strive constantly for an unostentatious style, and I am dismayed to find how far I still remain from my ideal.
Saturday evening I had tried to convey, by words so simple as to be almost childish and suggesting the directness of a poem, my feelings of mingled idealism and fear and longing and courage, in such a way that should speak for itself, almost apart from the words.
Looking over my rough sketches now, I find that they needed a connecting theme to give unity to the lines, which for lack of it fell apart.
I take a break from my writing, and look out the window. I peer closely and inquisitively at the flakes of snow on the window ledge. Each crystal flake has an individual identity. Like a poem, each flake speaks of itself alone in a lyrical manner. Each six-sided flake expresses its own self in a broad, spacious hexameter. The regularity of the rhythm, independent of the meaning and inherent in the meter itself, does not strike me as doggerel; rather it contains a unique message expressed in infinite variety within a set form. Variety of expression within a strict form is difficult but engaging; the structural exigencies of poetry obviate verbosity just as nature imposes simplicity of form on the snowflake as a hedge against crystalline "windiness." The snowflake exalts in the concise and strong. It describes itself with the greatest rigor and the least clutter. The snowflake is compact, discrete; it is delineated by neat boundaries. Its individual identity is secure. The snowflake is a paradigm of firm, but precarious, self-delineation. Time and temperature will soon conspire to fuse the individual snowflakes into a crust amounting to a loss of individual identity.
Like the narrative of the psychoanalytic patient, every detail of the snowflake's form, however trivial, has a meaning. In the snowflake each crystalline projection has a structural function just as the analytic patient's outpourings follow narrative necessity.
The patient expresses his thoughts with clinical parsimony. In psychoanalysis the preferred explanation for a series of symptoms tends to be cast in terms of single events from the patient's past rather than different events on different occasions. The single event may be repeated again over time but the form of the event tends not to change. Similarly, nature endows each snowflake with an economy of expression within a hexagonal form.
The flake makes you think of something solid, stable, well-linked. In fact it happens also in crystallography as in architecture that "beautiful" edifices, that is symmetrical and simple, are also the most sturdy; in short the same thing happens with the crystal as with cupolas of cathedrals, the arches of bridges, or the well-designed theater whose structure follows the demands of acoustical science. And it is also possible that the explanation is neither remote nor metaphysical; to say "beautiful" is to say "desirable," and ever since man has built he has wanted to build at the smallest expense and in the most desirable fashion, and the aesthetic enjoyment he experiences when contemplating his work comes afterward. Certainly, it has not always been this way: there have been centuries in which "beauty" was identified with adornment, the superimposed, the frills; but it is probable that they were deviant epochs and that the true beauty, in which every century recognizes itself, is found in the upright stones of a simple farmhouse or the blade of the farmer's ax.
Early Saturday afternoon I looked out my window. The old park -- or what remains of it -- came right to the tool shed, as if to peer at my face and remind me of something. The snow was already deep. It was piled high on the tool shed. Snow hung over the edge of the shed, like the rim of a gigantic mushroom. A solitary raven was perched on the roof devouring, in Lord Byron's words, "the yellow harvest's countless seed." For a moment the bird freezes in an upright position, fixed like a stage prop suspended in time. The world stops.
Although it was early afternoon and full sunlight, I felt as if I were standing late at night in the dark forest of my life. Such was the darkness of my soul, such was my dejection. The new moon shining almost at eye level was an omen of separation and an image of solitude.
I paused and reflected. My mind wandered. Thoughts and images emerged unbidden as I contemplated the blinding whiteness of the snow. A mirage appeared, as a thought out of season. I was in Bayreuth, Germany, in January. The tool shed directly across from my apartment window appeared to me as a chimera; it was Wagner's Festival Theater in mid-January, six months before the summer opera festival will begin. The theater has fallen into its customary winter disuse. As for the out-of-season festival theater -- a "beautiful" edifice of magnificent symmetry and noble and imposing forms -- on a lofty hill outside the town, when there was only the falling snow to be seen and the auditorium was bare, comfortless, and shadowy, it felt to me less like a place of high art and pleasure than a vacant library that had closed early on a snowy January day -- or, perhaps, a New England barn, atop a hill that everyone for miles can see.
The mirage seemed to give the appearance of a somewhat arcane sensation, a suggestion of something simultaneously flaunted and guarded, a sort of a private delusion waiting to be revealed. Through the charms and simplicities of Bayreuth, during the months before the summer festival, the image of Richard Wagner perpetually looms, like an icon or an ideal -- the comforting presence of an imagined friend, perhaps -- and in my fancy left my mirage of Bayreuth in a condition of half-bewitched expectancy. Just you try putting Wagner out of your mind in Bayreuth -- even in January! Wagner became in this moment a symbol of All-Things-wished-for but denied: an embodiment of frustrated enticement. He became a symbol of the special friend one despairs of ever finding. I recognized my emotional emptiness in the phantasm of the out-of-season, vacant theater at Bayreuth. And then, in a moment the image of Wagner that had gripped my fantasies disappeared, as if it had been blown out on the icy crust that cased the world, and he was gone!
I was left with a spiritual hunger borne of a disconnected feeling. The disconnected mood which strains for closure more in the artist than in others is the same bridge that joins me to Victor Hugo's "miserables." My emotional starvation welcomes as a brother fellow seekers: idealistic souls who pursue an inner vision of truth and meaning in defiance of the compact majority. But my starvation, however painful, also aids me in that central necessity for any artist -- to find a communicative Form or structure whereby I can simultaneously heal my inner disconnections and end my disconnection from others. My gift -- if it be called a gift -- permits me, while integrating the contrarities within, to provide such integration for my audience as to unite me with it. This is the self-healing and other-healing function of all art.
It is only by writing these letters that I seem able to derive any satisfaction from life. Social avenues of engagement with others seem blocked by the barrenness of my frozen soul. I am forever locked in the grips of a slippery slope that I desperately want to ascend, but to which I -- like Camus's Sisyphus -- am forced to submit in fatal descent. I lack the capacity for true engagement with others, and so I occupy myself with an imaginary connection with a distant and unseen audience through the communicative form of these letters.
For the genuine artist, the search for a suitable form competes in importance with the need to express a particular content. Mere content alone veers toward dissolution and incomprehensibility in the absence of a unifying structural barrier or boundary.
Structural issues of a different kind also mediate social relatedness, for, as Erik Erikson has observed, true engagement with others is the result and the test of firm self-delineation. Where this is still missing, the individual when seeking tentative forms of friendship is apt to experience a peculiar strain, as if such tentative engagement might turn into an interpersonal fusion amounting to a loss of identity, and requiring, therefore, a tense inner reservation, a caution in commitment. Because I myself have never resolved this strain I isolate myself and enter, at best, only stereotyped and formalized interpersonal relations. For where an assured sense of identity is missing even friendship becomes a desperate attempt at delineating the fuzzy outlines of identity by mutual narcissistic mirroring: to make a friend then often means to fall into one's mirror image, hurting oneself and damaging the mirror.
I seek a real person, an actual other, a comrade-in-arms -- a psychical ballast, as it were -- with whom I can share my thoughts and feelings.
If I can't make a friend, I would hope I might find a therapist with whom I could communicate: someone whose opinions I can respect, someone who might offer narcissistic nourishment to ease my emotional starvation. But at the moment there is no one.
What I desperately need at this time is a therapeutic process, including a transference relationship and the skillful guidance of a seasoned therapist to avail myself of opportunities for new growth: someone who can appreciate the needs, limitations, and capacities associated with my ego structure. What I need is a therapist who has a road map of the structural components of my ego processes to go alongside a road map of intrapsychic content (e.g., wishes, conflicts, fears), that can increase my understanding of my Self and improve my day-to-day adjustment.
Let me tell you something important, Brian. An important fact: I grew up in the theater. My parents were actors and directors, and I myself began performing when I was just a child. There is no place on earth that fosters narcissism like the theater, but by the same token, nowhere is it easier to believe that you are essentially empty, that you must constantly reinvent yourself in order to hold your audience in thrall. In childhood I became fascinated with transformations, with mirage and smoke and mirrors (rearview or otherwise). Perhaps a genetically less sensitive, less porous, and less gifted youngster would have responded with greater resilience to his family and would have achieved a more comfortable day-to-day adjustment. But I was hypersensitive to the goings-on in my family, and my early life in the theater exacted its toll.
I need a therapist who has a rich understanding of the various dramas played out in my intrapsychic life. I need a therapist who will sit quietly as he watches the play unfold, while being in his or her own mind also a co-actor. I need a therapist who appreciates the psychodrama of therapy: one who, within the walls of his office, is able to surrender his identity to the phantoms that haunt his patients, continually attending to the form of the moment of communication while bearing in mind the whole session as it echoes and repeats the form of the patient's life drama. I require a therapist who can accommodate the multifarious diffusion of my identity -- my inner gallery of characters -- and who can surrender himself to the act of witnessing the entire process of my inner drama play out.
Put another way, I need a therapist who understands the structure of my ego -- my psychic terrain, one might say -- and whose map of that structure will permit me to arrive home safely on a snowy, winter afternoon. Someone who knows which roads are navigable, which ones are temporarily blocked, and which roads are permanently impassable. There is nothing more frustrating to a passenger riding in a winter storm than the driver's self-aggrandizing false promises: promises about the ease of travel along a particular road that are based on the driver's foolhardy failure to appreciate the severity of the road conditions.
It's especially important clinically to understand the structure of the ego, in addition to the particular dynamic phenomenon the ego is struggling with at any moment so that therapist and patient can knowledgeably journey across the patient's mental landscape: to observe the patient's wishes and abstracted feeling states, make connections between different wishes and feelings (as well as different sides of a conflict), and understand these in historical, current, and future contexts.
Be that as it may.
It is now early evening on this snowy day in mid-January. The storm has all but passed. The stir is over. I step forth once again to peer outside my window. I strain to make the far-off images beyond my windowpane yield a cue to the events that may come in the days ahead. Night and its murk transfix and pin me, staring through thousands of stars. I cherish this moment, this rigorous conception of a snowy winter evening, and I consent to play my part therein as spectator. But another play is running at this moment, so, for the present, I seek a premature release. And yet, the order of the acts has been schemed and plotted, and nothing can avert the final curtain's fall. The January thaw will soon take off the polish of the snow's crust. I bow with grace to natural law. I stand alone. All else is swamped in fuzzy dissolution. To live life to the end, while peering back to the path one has already traversed, is not a childish task.
Check you out next week, buddy. We're actually more alike than you'll ever know. "Don't think Brown ever gave up hope of getting home again because he couldn't climb that slippery slope." One way or another, I too plan to get home someday.
posted by Gary Freedman | 1:27 PM
1 Comments:
Maurox said...
Thanks, for your visit, and let me to congratulate yourself for your blog, it is great.
Sunday, 11 December, 2005
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Brian--
January 24, 2005
Hey, buddy. What did you think of that snowstorm on Saturday? Was Mr. Frost nipping at your nose? Did you even work on Saturday or did you have the day off? I heard that the libraries closed two hours early, at three-thirty. You were released from your workday chores prematurely, in mid-afternoon on Saturday, if indeed you were engaged with them at all.
On Saturday I occupied myself with Mr. Frost together with a host of other authors who populated my imagination as welcome guests: Jane Hamilton, Marya Hornbacher, Edith Wharton, Primo Levi, Boris Pasternak, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Brenman-Gibson. Stanley Greenspan was here too. But then, Dr. Greenspan is always here; he holds the key to my inner world, and he comes and goes at will. Oh, and lest I forget, Lord Byron visited briefly to convey a unique message "To Ellen."
In my loneliness I become a spectator. My imagination leads a procession of living creatures before me. I watch and listen to these guests of my imagination as I would a performance at the theater. And at times these fantastic creations of my inner world seem more real than reality itself. I may be affected by a theatrical exhibition; on the other hand, I may not be affected by an actual event which appears to concern me much more. I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes.
I came across a poem of Robert Frost's that seemed especially appropriate: "Brown's Descent." The opening lines read: "Brown lived at such a lofty farm that everyone for miles could see his lantern where he did his chores in winter after half-past three. And many must have seen him make his wild descent from there one night, 'cross lots, 'cross walls, 'cross everything describing rings of lantern-light. Between the house and barn the gale got him by something he had on and blew him out on the icy crust that cased the world, and he was gone!"
I hope you got home safely if you drove through the snow, Brian. My own life is like an unending slip and slide; I seem to be continually at the edge of an abyss, mere seconds and a few feet from swerving involuntarily into oncoming traffic. I fear crashing into the traffic in the opposite lane, hurling into the windshield -- hurting myself and damaging the rearview mirror.
My entire existence, in some sense, can be viewed as the lived aftermath of an accident, or series of accidents -- a fall from grace. I used to think if you fell from grace it was more likely than not the result of one stupendous error or else an unfortunate accident. I hadn't learned that it can happen so gradually you don't lose your stomach or hurt yourself in the landing. You don't necessarily sense the motion. I've found it takes at last two and generally three things to alter the course of a life: You slip around the truth once, and then again, and one more time, and there you are, feeling, for a moment, that it was sudden, your arrival at the bottom of a snowdrift.
That's the way I feel now. I feel as if I'm at the bottom of the heap, struggling to ascend from the snowdrifts that ensnare me in a winter wasteland.
At this moment, the problem is compounded by a writer's block. I feel I'm straining for something to say, something to express. I feel immobile, locked in the grip of a creative and emotional deep freeze.
There is a stillness without and a confused tumult within. I gaze out my window. I seem a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that is warm and sentient in me fast bound below the surface; but there is nothing unfriendly in the silence. The silence is a balm for my inner disquiet. I simply feel that I live in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I have the sense that my loneliness is not merely the result of my personal plight, tragic as it is, but has in it, as I've hinted many times before, the profound accumulated cold of many stark and harshly-demanding winters.
The night following the storm was perfectly still, and the air so dry and pure that it gave little sensation of cold. The effect produced on me was rather a complete absence of atmosphere, as though nothing less tenuous than ether intervened between the white earth and the gray sky above.
I let the vision possess me as I contemplated what to write to you, buddy. I am never so happy as when I abandon myself to these epistolary dreams. A wave of warmth goes through me as I think about the fact that for me the act of writing (not to mention paraphrasing, as well as outright plagiarizing) is the prolongation of a vision.
Saturday night. I set about to write. I scribbled some notes in longhand. What I wrote that night fell into two parts. Clean copies -- improved versions of earlier scribbling -- were set out in my best penmanship. New work was written in an illegible scrawl full of gaps and abbreviations. In deciphering these scribbles, I went through the usual disappointments. Last night these rough fragments had moved me, and I myself had been surprised by some felicitous passages. Now these very passages seemed to me distressingly and conspicuously strained.
The passages didn't flow. A clear and pleasing narrative did not materialize. I felt torn between a fevered urgency and a bitter languor. I cannot blame my inner censor for the block; that censor, like a good psychoanalyst, contemplated my outpourings with evenly-hovering attention. The ideas were there all right, but they failed to materialize into a cohesive communication. I not only feel that I am incomprehensible to others; I am sometimes incomprehensible to myself as well. There were many false starts -- and jarring stops. It was like driving through a winter storm. My thoughts made slow headway, and a vague fear gripped me as I envisioned veering off a train of thought or, alternatively, into a jarring wreck of incompatible ideas. The driver in a winter storm strives vigilantly for a commodious path, and is dismayed when he finds how far, after a seemingly interminable ride, he still remains from home.
It has been the dream of my life to write with an originality so discreet, so well concealed, as to be unnoticeable in its disguise of current and customary forms; all my life I have struggled for a style so restrained, so unpretentious that the reader or the hearer would fully understand the meaning without realizing how I assimilated it. I strive constantly for an unostentatious style, and I am dismayed to find how far I still remain from my ideal.
Saturday evening I had tried to convey, by words so simple as to be almost childish and suggesting the directness of a poem, my feelings of mingled idealism and fear and longing and courage, in such a way that should speak for itself, almost apart from the words.
Looking over my rough sketches now, I find that they needed a connecting theme to give unity to the lines, which for lack of it fell apart.
I take a break from my writing, and look out the window. I peer closely and inquisitively at the flakes of snow on the window ledge. Each crystal flake has an individual identity. Like a poem, each flake speaks of itself alone in a lyrical manner. Each six-sided flake expresses its own self in a broad, spacious hexameter. The regularity of the rhythm, independent of the meaning and inherent in the meter itself, does not strike me as doggerel; rather it contains a unique message expressed in infinite variety within a set form. Variety of expression within a strict form is difficult but engaging; the structural exigencies of poetry obviate verbosity just as nature imposes simplicity of form on the snowflake as a hedge against crystalline "windiness." The snowflake exalts in the concise and strong. It describes itself with the greatest rigor and the least clutter. The snowflake is compact, discrete; it is delineated by neat boundaries. Its individual identity is secure. The snowflake is a paradigm of firm, but precarious, self-delineation. Time and temperature will soon conspire to fuse the individual snowflakes into a crust amounting to a loss of individual identity.
Like the narrative of the psychoanalytic patient, every detail of the snowflake's form, however trivial, has a meaning. In the snowflake each crystalline projection has a structural function just as the analytic patient's outpourings follow narrative necessity.
The patient expresses his thoughts with clinical parsimony. In psychoanalysis the preferred explanation for a series of symptoms tends to be cast in terms of single events from the patient's past rather than different events on different occasions. The single event may be repeated again over time but the form of the event tends not to change. Similarly, nature endows each snowflake with an economy of expression within a hexagonal form.
The flake makes you think of something solid, stable, well-linked. In fact it happens also in crystallography as in architecture that "beautiful" edifices, that is symmetrical and simple, are also the most sturdy; in short the same thing happens with the crystal as with cupolas of cathedrals, the arches of bridges, or the well-designed theater whose structure follows the demands of acoustical science. And it is also possible that the explanation is neither remote nor metaphysical; to say "beautiful" is to say "desirable," and ever since man has built he has wanted to build at the smallest expense and in the most desirable fashion, and the aesthetic enjoyment he experiences when contemplating his work comes afterward. Certainly, it has not always been this way: there have been centuries in which "beauty" was identified with adornment, the superimposed, the frills; but it is probable that they were deviant epochs and that the true beauty, in which every century recognizes itself, is found in the upright stones of a simple farmhouse or the blade of the farmer's ax.
Early Saturday afternoon I looked out my window. The old park -- or what remains of it -- came right to the tool shed, as if to peer at my face and remind me of something. The snow was already deep. It was piled high on the tool shed. Snow hung over the edge of the shed, like the rim of a gigantic mushroom. A solitary raven was perched on the roof devouring, in Lord Byron's words, "the yellow harvest's countless seed." For a moment the bird freezes in an upright position, fixed like a stage prop suspended in time. The world stops.
Although it was early afternoon and full sunlight, I felt as if I were standing late at night in the dark forest of my life. Such was the darkness of my soul, such was my dejection. The new moon shining almost at eye level was an omen of separation and an image of solitude.
I paused and reflected. My mind wandered. Thoughts and images emerged unbidden as I contemplated the blinding whiteness of the snow. A mirage appeared, as a thought out of season. I was in Bayreuth, Germany, in January. The tool shed directly across from my apartment window appeared to me as a chimera; it was Wagner's Festival Theater in mid-January, six months before the summer opera festival will begin. The theater has fallen into its customary winter disuse. As for the out-of-season festival theater -- a "beautiful" edifice of magnificent symmetry and noble and imposing forms -- on a lofty hill outside the town, when there was only the falling snow to be seen and the auditorium was bare, comfortless, and shadowy, it felt to me less like a place of high art and pleasure than a vacant library that had closed early on a snowy January day -- or, perhaps, a New England barn, atop a hill that everyone for miles can see.
The mirage seemed to give the appearance of a somewhat arcane sensation, a suggestion of something simultaneously flaunted and guarded, a sort of a private delusion waiting to be revealed. Through the charms and simplicities of Bayreuth, during the months before the summer festival, the image of Richard Wagner perpetually looms, like an icon or an ideal -- the comforting presence of an imagined friend, perhaps -- and in my fancy left my mirage of Bayreuth in a condition of half-bewitched expectancy. Just you try putting Wagner out of your mind in Bayreuth -- even in January! Wagner became in this moment a symbol of All-Things-wished-for but denied: an embodiment of frustrated enticement. He became a symbol of the special friend one despairs of ever finding. I recognized my emotional emptiness in the phantasm of the out-of-season, vacant theater at Bayreuth. And then, in a moment the image of Wagner that had gripped my fantasies disappeared, as if it had been blown out on the icy crust that cased the world, and he was gone!
I was left with a spiritual hunger borne of a disconnected feeling. The disconnected mood which strains for closure more in the artist than in others is the same bridge that joins me to Victor Hugo's "miserables." My emotional starvation welcomes as a brother fellow seekers: idealistic souls who pursue an inner vision of truth and meaning in defiance of the compact majority. But my starvation, however painful, also aids me in that central necessity for any artist -- to find a communicative Form or structure whereby I can simultaneously heal my inner disconnections and end my disconnection from others. My gift -- if it be called a gift -- permits me, while integrating the contrarities within, to provide such integration for my audience as to unite me with it. This is the self-healing and other-healing function of all art.
It is only by writing these letters that I seem able to derive any satisfaction from life. Social avenues of engagement with others seem blocked by the barrenness of my frozen soul. I am forever locked in the grips of a slippery slope that I desperately want to ascend, but to which I -- like Camus's Sisyphus -- am forced to submit in fatal descent. I lack the capacity for true engagement with others, and so I occupy myself with an imaginary connection with a distant and unseen audience through the communicative form of these letters.
For the genuine artist, the search for a suitable form competes in importance with the need to express a particular content. Mere content alone veers toward dissolution and incomprehensibility in the absence of a unifying structural barrier or boundary.
Structural issues of a different kind also mediate social relatedness, for, as Erik Erikson has observed, true engagement with others is the result and the test of firm self-delineation. Where this is still missing, the individual when seeking tentative forms of friendship is apt to experience a peculiar strain, as if such tentative engagement might turn into an interpersonal fusion amounting to a loss of identity, and requiring, therefore, a tense inner reservation, a caution in commitment. Because I myself have never resolved this strain I isolate myself and enter, at best, only stereotyped and formalized interpersonal relations. For where an assured sense of identity is missing even friendship becomes a desperate attempt at delineating the fuzzy outlines of identity by mutual narcissistic mirroring: to make a friend then often means to fall into one's mirror image, hurting oneself and damaging the mirror.
I seek a real person, an actual other, a comrade-in-arms -- a psychical ballast, as it were -- with whom I can share my thoughts and feelings.
If I can't make a friend, I would hope I might find a therapist with whom I could communicate: someone whose opinions I can respect, someone who might offer narcissistic nourishment to ease my emotional starvation. But at the moment there is no one.
What I desperately need at this time is a therapeutic process, including a transference relationship and the skillful guidance of a seasoned therapist to avail myself of opportunities for new growth: someone who can appreciate the needs, limitations, and capacities associated with my ego structure. What I need is a therapist who has a road map of the structural components of my ego processes to go alongside a road map of intrapsychic content (e.g., wishes, conflicts, fears), that can increase my understanding of my Self and improve my day-to-day adjustment.
Let me tell you something important, Brian. An important fact: I grew up in the theater. My parents were actors and directors, and I myself began performing when I was just a child. There is no place on earth that fosters narcissism like the theater, but by the same token, nowhere is it easier to believe that you are essentially empty, that you must constantly reinvent yourself in order to hold your audience in thrall. In childhood I became fascinated with transformations, with mirage and smoke and mirrors (rearview or otherwise). Perhaps a genetically less sensitive, less porous, and less gifted youngster would have responded with greater resilience to his family and would have achieved a more comfortable day-to-day adjustment. But I was hypersensitive to the goings-on in my family, and my early life in the theater exacted its toll.
I need a therapist who has a rich understanding of the various dramas played out in my intrapsychic life. I need a therapist who will sit quietly as he watches the play unfold, while being in his or her own mind also a co-actor. I need a therapist who appreciates the psychodrama of therapy: one who, within the walls of his office, is able to surrender his identity to the phantoms that haunt his patients, continually attending to the form of the moment of communication while bearing in mind the whole session as it echoes and repeats the form of the patient's life drama. I require a therapist who can accommodate the multifarious diffusion of my identity -- my inner gallery of characters -- and who can surrender himself to the act of witnessing the entire process of my inner drama play out.
Put another way, I need a therapist who understands the structure of my ego -- my psychic terrain, one might say -- and whose map of that structure will permit me to arrive home safely on a snowy, winter afternoon. Someone who knows which roads are navigable, which ones are temporarily blocked, and which roads are permanently impassable. There is nothing more frustrating to a passenger riding in a winter storm than the driver's self-aggrandizing false promises: promises about the ease of travel along a particular road that are based on the driver's foolhardy failure to appreciate the severity of the road conditions.
It's especially important clinically to understand the structure of the ego, in addition to the particular dynamic phenomenon the ego is struggling with at any moment so that therapist and patient can knowledgeably journey across the patient's mental landscape: to observe the patient's wishes and abstracted feeling states, make connections between different wishes and feelings (as well as different sides of a conflict), and understand these in historical, current, and future contexts.
Be that as it may.
It is now early evening on this snowy day in mid-January. The storm has all but passed. The stir is over. I step forth once again to peer outside my window. I strain to make the far-off images beyond my windowpane yield a cue to the events that may come in the days ahead. Night and its murk transfix and pin me, staring through thousands of stars. I cherish this moment, this rigorous conception of a snowy winter evening, and I consent to play my part therein as spectator. But another play is running at this moment, so, for the present, I seek a premature release. And yet, the order of the acts has been schemed and plotted, and nothing can avert the final curtain's fall. The January thaw will soon take off the polish of the snow's crust. I bow with grace to natural law. I stand alone. All else is swamped in fuzzy dissolution. To live life to the end, while peering back to the path one has already traversed, is not a childish task.
Check you out next week, buddy. We're actually more alike than you'll ever know. "Don't think Brown ever gave up hope of getting home again because he couldn't climb that slippery slope." One way or another, I too plan to get home someday.
posted by Gary Freedman | 1:27 PM
1 Comments:
Maurox said...
Thanks, for your visit, and let me to congratulate yourself for your blog, it is great.
Sunday, 11 December, 2005
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Jewish Rage! Using Words As Potent Weapons.
In childhood I had a sense of impotence in the face of my father's disparagement. I was small; he was big. I did not fight back. I was filled with a child's rage at what I perceived as my father's cruelty. A part of me developed a lingering hatred of, a grudge against, my father. Part of me wanted to destroy him, as well as the menace he posed.
It would take many years before I would find, joining with brothers-in-art, that under certain conditions I was not "afraid to fight." But my fight would be against the "bitterness of injustice," not in physical combat.
True to the best in Jewish tradition, the conscious acceptable "enemy" for me has become an impersonal set of unjust and corrupt societal conditions, and the means of battle would be waged largely in words within the controllable arena of social conscience within a work of art.
This is a paraphrase of Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Clifford Odets: American Playwright: The Years from 1906 to 1940 at 37 and n. 2.7 at 625 (New York: Atheneum, 1982). Albert Rothenberg, M.D. was a colleague of the late Dr. Brenman-Gibson; they worked together at the Austen Riggs Center in Massachusetts.
It would take many years before I would find, joining with brothers-in-art, that under certain conditions I was not "afraid to fight." But my fight would be against the "bitterness of injustice," not in physical combat.
True to the best in Jewish tradition, the conscious acceptable "enemy" for me has become an impersonal set of unjust and corrupt societal conditions, and the means of battle would be waged largely in words within the controllable arena of social conscience within a work of art.
This is a paraphrase of Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Clifford Odets: American Playwright: The Years from 1906 to 1940 at 37 and n. 2.7 at 625 (New York: Atheneum, 1982). Albert Rothenberg, M.D. was a colleague of the late Dr. Brenman-Gibson; they worked together at the Austen Riggs Center in Massachusetts.
Me and Charles Dickens: Does Writing About Violence and Homicide Make One A Potential Criminal?
The short answer is No!
Murder and soul murder are recurrent motifs in Charles Dickens's works. Humor and sentimentality are suddenly mixed with violence. There is a persistent repetition of murder in all his novels: from The Pickwick Papers (where it appears in the melodramatic, interpolated stories) to his last, unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood. Edmund Wilson points out how acute Dickens can be in revealing the psychology of the murderer, like Jonas Chuzzlewit in Martin Chuzzlewit: "For example, after the murder when Jonas is 'not only fearful for himself but of himself' and half-expects, when he returns to his bedroom, to find himself asleep in the bed."
The themes of abandoned and neglected children, and unfeeling and negligent parents and institutions, appear as obsessive interests during Dickens's life and recur throughout his fiction. The great novelist has created a gallery of monstrous parents and parental substitutes, as well as some who are good--more often unbelievably good. Dickens portrays in so many of his novels a human characteristic that was called "the undeveloped heart" by E.M. Forster (who felt it was especially applicable to the English). Forster was describing the inability to care enough about another person, a deficiency of the capacity for love, joy, and empathy. This impoverishment of the soul is both the result and the cause of soul murder; it can evoke in the deprived and frustrated child a terrible intensity of rage that can burst out into actual murder if it is not frozen by isolating defenses. And the parent's undeveloped heart can of course be expressed not only by indifference to the child but also by hatred and cruelty.
Leonard L. Shengold, Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Neglect (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
The psychoanalyst Alice Miller once made the following observation about Adolf Hitler: "If Hitler had been a talented writer, there would have been no Holocaust."
Murder and soul murder are recurrent motifs in Charles Dickens's works. Humor and sentimentality are suddenly mixed with violence. There is a persistent repetition of murder in all his novels: from The Pickwick Papers (where it appears in the melodramatic, interpolated stories) to his last, unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood. Edmund Wilson points out how acute Dickens can be in revealing the psychology of the murderer, like Jonas Chuzzlewit in Martin Chuzzlewit: "For example, after the murder when Jonas is 'not only fearful for himself but of himself' and half-expects, when he returns to his bedroom, to find himself asleep in the bed."
The themes of abandoned and neglected children, and unfeeling and negligent parents and institutions, appear as obsessive interests during Dickens's life and recur throughout his fiction. The great novelist has created a gallery of monstrous parents and parental substitutes, as well as some who are good--more often unbelievably good. Dickens portrays in so many of his novels a human characteristic that was called "the undeveloped heart" by E.M. Forster (who felt it was especially applicable to the English). Forster was describing the inability to care enough about another person, a deficiency of the capacity for love, joy, and empathy. This impoverishment of the soul is both the result and the cause of soul murder; it can evoke in the deprived and frustrated child a terrible intensity of rage that can burst out into actual murder if it is not frozen by isolating defenses. And the parent's undeveloped heart can of course be expressed not only by indifference to the child but also by hatred and cruelty.
Leonard L. Shengold, Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Neglect (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
The psychoanalyst Alice Miller once made the following observation about Adolf Hitler: "If Hitler had been a talented writer, there would have been no Holocaust."
A Creative Transformation of Rage! (Or -- When Jews Get Angry!)
Dramatis Personae: GARY FREEDMAN, a patron of the Cleveland Park Library
BRIAN BROWN, manager of the Cleveland Park Library
PAIGE BROWN, Brian Brown’s wife
BARBARA WEBB, Brian Brown’s supervisor
BARBARA GAUNTT, one of the assistant librarians
BILL DECOSTA, one of the assistant librarians
Scene: The studio apartment of Gary Freedman. Freedman hears a knock and opens the door. Brian Brown enters.
GARY FREEDMAN: (surprised) --Brian?
BRIAN BROWN: --You schmuck! You bastard! l'd like to cut your fuckin’ head off.
GARY FREEDMAN: You're upset, right?
BRIAN BROWN: You knew what would happen!
GARY FREEDMAN: What are you talking about?
BRIAN BROWN: Don't answer me, prick! You knew! You just didn't give a shit!
GARY FREEDMAN: Take your coat off.
BRIAN BROWN: How could you write that blog? Are you so selfish . . . you don't give a shit who you destroy?
GARY FREEDMAN: --I can tell you're angry.
BRIAN BROWN: --You told our whole story! You gave me away to Barbara Webb! Paige has left me. She's gone.
GARY FREEDMAN: It was loosely based on us.
BRIAN BROWN: Don't bullshit me, motherfucker! Who do you think you're talking to, one of those retarded talk show hosts? I lived through it with you. I know how loosely based it is.
GARY FREEDMAN: What are you telling me: that somebody would actually take seriously some innuendo that you’re a closet homosexual? Are you fuckin’ nuts? Never! Anybody who knows you, anybody who knows you like I know you -– and you know what I'm talking about -- anybody who knows you would find any insinuation that you’re gay to be laughable.
BRIAN BROWN: Of course, you made a few stupid exaggerations. Or, as the critics say: "inspired comic flights.” But Barbara Webb recognized it. You'd have to be sub-mental not to. And Paige was crushed! Crushed!
GARY FREEDMAN: Barbara Webb has suspected for so long that your branch is mismanaged.
BRIAN BROWN: I know! And I denied it. And now, you've gone . . . and confirmed it all for her! Big fucking deal! You made Paige a gracious hostess! Big fucking deal! But it's all here! The schmuck assistant librarians, Frank Green, my grandfather living in Montana. The historical preservation tax credits, for Chrissake! Cruel observations about Sally . . . and her plant watering activities. And of course, Bill Decosta, or as you so pathetically disguise him in your blog, Velvel!
Here it is. (reading from a copy of the blog):
"Bryan and Paige's house, on the other hand, with its perfect lines and friendly fussiness, reeking, I supposed, of historical-preservation tax credits, seemed an impossible dream to me, something plucked from a magazine article about childhood memories conjured on a deathbed. Something seen through the window by the Little Match Girl! Outside, the soffits were perfectly squared. The crocuses were like bells, and the Siberian violets like grape candies scattered in the grass. Soon their prize irises would be gorgeously crested cockatoos along the side yard.”
Big fucking deal! --You turned the tulips into “Siberian violets!”
GARY FREEDMAN: --Bryan . . .
BRIAN BROWN: Brian! I'm Brian, motherfucker! Not Bryan! Except of course, I am Bryan . . . because you made no attempt to disguise anything! You didn't give a fuck! You didn't care enough to disguise it!
GARY FREEDMAN: Please!
BRIAN BROWN: I threw your sorry ass out on the street six years ago. I called the cops on you and had you banned from the library. Now six years later your latest magnum opus emerges from this sewer of an apartment where you take people's suffering and turn it into gold, literary gold! Everyone's misery, you even cause misery and use your alchemy to turn it into gold, like some fucking black magician!
GARY FREEDMAN: Hey, give me a break. I'm the one who wound up being hauled off in handcuffs to DC General.
BRIAN BROWN: You deserve it and worse. You ruined my life! (holding a gun to his head) I'll blow my brains out!
GARY FREEDMAN: What's wrong with you?
BRIAN BROWN: In front of you because you caused it. My brains on your carpet!
GARY FREEDMAN: You're so fucking unstable! Will you relax? You're not going to kill yourself.
BRIAN BROWN: No?
GARY FREEDMAN: No, you're not, because it's not in you. You never were the dramatic type. Barbara Gauntt is the dramatic one. Barbara Gauntt is the French-speaking drama queen. Relax, for Christ's sake.
BRIAN BROWN: You're right. I don't have the nerve to kill myself. I knew it as I came over here. I said no. Not me. Better to kill him.
GARY FREEDMAN: Pardon me?
BRIAN BROWN: Kill the black magician. So he can't spin any more gold out of human misery. (pointing the gun at Gary Freedman)
GARY FREEDMAN: What's wrong with you?
BRIAN BROWN: Shut up!
GARY FREEDMAN: --Put it down.
BRIAN BROWN: --You're so fucking verbal. Who else could have talked three psychiatrists into diagnosing him with paranoid schizophrenia and end up getting over $200,000 in disability benefits. (continues to point the gun at Gary Freedman)
GARY FREEDMAN: You stop right there! Don't pull the trigger! If it makes you happy, my life's been going badly. I've been miserable. My psychiatrist cancels all my appointments. He cancels session after session! I’ve got insomnia. High cholesterol. I squandered all I have on shrinks and medications and Xerox paper. I’ve got chronic fatigue syndrome. I won't stand here in this fucking apartment with a world-class meshugana putz and beg for my life. If you want to shoot me, shoot me! You interrupted me . . . I was working.
BRIAN BROWN: --Whose life were you exploiting today?
GARY FREEDMAN: --You'll be happy. I was re-writing an autobiographical thing from when I was first certified insane.
[curtain]
(For those who need to know--no, Brian does not shoot me in the end. I survive.)
Friday, January 22, 2010
Significant Moments: Defamation Vs. Talking About Defamation
In the 1990s I read personal facts about a federal official I had admired. I read that she was especially close to her father, and that her father's death was an especial loss for her. I was deeply moved. I was inspired to write the following creative piece about Anna Freud and her relationship with her father, Sigmund Freud. (In fact, I had dedicated this piece to the federal official; on Friday January 15, 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice ordered me to delete personal references to the official on my blog.)
http://dailstrug.blogspot.com/2006/11/her-fathers-daughter-anna-and-freud.html
The piece discusses child abuse and the contentious dispute in the psychoanalytic discipline between analysts who attribute psychological problems to the individual's intrapsychic fantasy, and, on the other hand, analysts who recognize the importance of childhood abuse, particularly child sexual abuse, in the origins of a person's psychological disturbance.
I sense the operation of the "repetition compulsion" -- the uncanny -- in my being inspired to write the piece at the outset (in the 1990s) after reading about a particular federal official; the content of the piece itself (namely, child abuse, and the recognition or denial of the perpetration of child abuse); and ultimately, the unintended consequence, years later, in January 2010, of arousing the ire of the U.S. Department of Justice in writing about the federal official in question.
I find the following line in my creative piece to be uncanny:
One was allowed . . .
Nathan Englander, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges.
. . . to perform these acts but not to speak of them.
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.
There was no taboo on the commission of incest, only a taboo on speaking about incest.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
In my own case, the observation is a metaphor. My former employer, the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld was permitted, with impunity, to file false, defamatory statements about me to the effect that I was potentially violent, but I am forbidden to complain on this blog that I was defamed. "In the District of Columbia, there is no taboo on filing false, defamatory statements about another person alleging that he is potentially violent, only a taboo on speaking about someone filing false, defamatory statements alleging that someone is potentially violent."
____________________________________________________
Here is a more expansive excerpt from the piece:
There exists, as far as I know (I looked without success), not a single published account of the devastating effects of incest or childhood sexual abuse before Freud’s time. And yet if this was happening to anything like the extent that is true today—and why should it be any different?—then at least one in three women, possibly more, in the general population had been exposed to a forced and unwanted sexual advance during childhood. In other words, sexual abuse of one form or another was the core trauma of many women’s lives, yet there was total silence about it.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
In the tradition we are dealing with, . . .
Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence.
. . . one was allowed . . .
Nathan Englander, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges.
. . . to perform these acts but not to speak of them.
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.
There was no taboo on the commission of incest, only a taboo on speaking about incest.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
As a scientist . . .
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
. . . Freud . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . had an almost unique opportunity.
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
Here was a man, possibly the first in recorded history, who heard about the sexual abuse of children and recognized what it really meant.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
At that time, had one man put up a fight, it would have had wide repercussions.
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
For Freud to have broken that taboo of silence was, to my mind, one of the great moments of history.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
And yet—
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
Later, in one of the most famous retractions in the history of ideas, Freud . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . contrary to the truth . . .
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.
. . . had recanted.
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
As he put it in 1925 in An Autobiographical Study: “I was at last obliged to recognize that the scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only fantasies which my patients had made up.”
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
Freud’s earliest insights . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory.
. . . about child abuse . . .
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
. . . would only reemerge much later, provoking a host of other episodes.
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.
What Got Me Ticked Off?
People have been coming up to me on the street, they have been asking me, they have been demanding to know -- You seem to have turned angry some time last fall, they say. You started posting angry statements about your former employer, Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, in about September 2009: first on teebeedee.ning.com, then later on your blog My Daily Struggles. Is there something that got you ticked off? What was that?
Well, the answer is simple. If you're a careful reader of my blog you might have guessed that it had something to do with the letter I wrote to a federal judge on about September 11, 2009 about Dr. Nicole Rafanello and her patient at St. Elizabeths, John Hinckley.
In September of 2009, I read a federal judge's opinion granting John Hinckley more freedom,-- and, as FDR would say, "my Scotch soul was furious!"
My jaw dropped when I read the judge's opinion that summarized the expert testimony in Hinckley's hearing. Here was a man, John Hinckley, who committed heinous acts, yet he has a team of mental health professionals looking after him. They even advocate on his behalf. I couldn't believe it! I thought, "Where am I? Is this a dream? What in God's name is going on here?"
I happened to be a patient of Nicole Rafanello's in 2004. I thought she was a total nincompoop. She never did anything for me. Certainly she never advocated on my behalf or testified in court to advance my interests. Yet here she was asking the court to give John Hinckley more freedom!
I am a law abiding citizen. I have never committed a crime. I probably never will commit a crime or an act of violence. At age 56, I have no arrest record. Certainly, I have never been prosecuted for attempted murder. I was described by my former employer as being "as close to the perfect employee as it is possible to get" -- then the employer fired me for no reason, then proceeded to defame me.
Was I angry? I certainly was. St. Elizabeths has not assigned an entire staff of mental health professionals to treat me. I barely get to see the one psychiatry resident to whom I have been assigned. No one from St. Elizabeths has ever advocated on my behalf and never will.
Somehow, I have become the potentially violent criminal -- and John Hinckley (of all people) is the poor innocent soul who deserves more freedom.
Ha! My Scotch soul was (and remains) furious!
The following blog summarizes my work with Nicole Rafanello:
http://grptherapy.blogspot.com/
Well, the answer is simple. If you're a careful reader of my blog you might have guessed that it had something to do with the letter I wrote to a federal judge on about September 11, 2009 about Dr. Nicole Rafanello and her patient at St. Elizabeths, John Hinckley.
In September of 2009, I read a federal judge's opinion granting John Hinckley more freedom,-- and, as FDR would say, "my Scotch soul was furious!"
My jaw dropped when I read the judge's opinion that summarized the expert testimony in Hinckley's hearing. Here was a man, John Hinckley, who committed heinous acts, yet he has a team of mental health professionals looking after him. They even advocate on his behalf. I couldn't believe it! I thought, "Where am I? Is this a dream? What in God's name is going on here?"
I happened to be a patient of Nicole Rafanello's in 2004. I thought she was a total nincompoop. She never did anything for me. Certainly she never advocated on my behalf or testified in court to advance my interests. Yet here she was asking the court to give John Hinckley more freedom!
I am a law abiding citizen. I have never committed a crime. I probably never will commit a crime or an act of violence. At age 56, I have no arrest record. Certainly, I have never been prosecuted for attempted murder. I was described by my former employer as being "as close to the perfect employee as it is possible to get" -- then the employer fired me for no reason, then proceeded to defame me.
Was I angry? I certainly was. St. Elizabeths has not assigned an entire staff of mental health professionals to treat me. I barely get to see the one psychiatry resident to whom I have been assigned. No one from St. Elizabeths has ever advocated on my behalf and never will.
Somehow, I have become the potentially violent criminal -- and John Hinckley (of all people) is the poor innocent soul who deserves more freedom.
Ha! My Scotch soul was (and remains) furious!
The following blog summarizes my work with Nicole Rafanello:
http://grptherapy.blogspot.com/
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