I often think of Emma Bovary.
In 1856, Gustave Flaubert’s first novel was helped along in sales by a trial for obscenity. And yet the school of thought Flaubert embodied was called “literary realism.” Read more on Literature and Psychology…
Filed under Alternative Medicine, Brain, Diagnosis, Disease, medicine, News, Psychology by on May 17th, 2018. Comment. 
My weakness for the “classical arts,” in a world where “beats” pass for music and random words pass for poetry, is known to anybody who knows me. There are a couple of people who discuss classical arts with me in secret, at work or play. Like the opera “Carmen.” I think it is the favorite of a lot of people. Even though it was written in French by Georges Bizet, the use of traditional Spanish musical songs and dances gives it more snappy tunes than even George M. Cohan could cram into one show.
I was minding my own business and singing the habanera to myself. “For love is like a gypsy child/ who has grown up without any rules…”
I told a counterpart in my own profession. “Carmen is a model to all Spanish borderline personality disorders. A perfect model.” Read more on Borderlines In Song And Story…
Filed under Diagnosis, Personality Disorders by on Nov 11th, 2010. Comment.
Most of the really effective compulsive lying folks are not patients. Such people, if ever seen as patients, do not stay as patients very long.
I remember a young woman, the daughter of a woman scientist who befriended me in France. She was beautiful, I could tell from her photographs, in a way I knew I would never be beautiful. Sometimes a poet, sometimes a singer, more often, this young woman in her late twenties, was manipulating (sleeping, I think) her way into bit parts on the Paris stage. We were interested, her mom and me, in the manifestations of the powers of the brain, ranging from raw intelligence, which we both knew we had, to the sort of metaphysical magic her daughter, who was calling herself LaFleur at the time, definitely had. I remember we knew someone who allegedly read photos. He was a “serious” person, an effective hospital administrator in one of the larger Parisian hospitals. Among his occult practices, he read photos. We asked LaFleur to submit him one, with no information other than her age (28 at the time) and name. She gave us a photo. It was one of the strangest photos I had ever seen. The lens distorted her myopic gaze in the vague direction of the camera. She wore some kind of soft cloth that descended low enough to reveal a single nipple and not the other. Of course, the “reader” declined the photo. He said a simple photo that would be used for a passport or drivers’ license would be helpful. LaFleur never submitted one. Read more on My Own Breakfast At Tiffany’s…
Filed under Personality Disorders by on Jul 8th, 2010. Comment.
I had seen this woman as a patient only once before, but I had seen more like her than I could count. She was in her late fifties, like me. Her gray hair fell in waves down her shoulders, Alice-in-Wonderland style. All of her clothing was childlike, too. If her hair had been blonde (as she had insisted it once was and was still meant to be) she would have looked, from the back, like a little girl in her calico dress.
She had been “traumatized” by her family. She didn’t want to talk about details and was more than a little surprised that I made no effort to push her to divulge them. She wanted to tell me about all the types of psychotherapy she had studied and learned, or even more she wanted to tell me about all of the great and famous figures of psychology she had met personally, and how wonderful they were.
“I don’t care if you met God himself or—–herself.” She was not happy with my response, but by now she had enough sense not to be surprised. She was labeled as a “borderline personality disorder” as well as a “treatment resistant depression.” She had refused anything even remotely resembling an antidepressant; she was worried about all kinds of side effects. She was on diazepam (generic Valium) and would accept nothing else. Among other things, this drug would do a fine job of keeping her depressed. She would not consent to anything else and it seemed to have helped minimally with anxiety. The choice of medication had been only one in a garden of self-sabotaging choices. She had been a training patient for a couple of generations of therapists, none of whom seemed to have been able to do her the least bit of good. Read more on If You Are Stuck — Try Dancing…
Filed under Psychotherapy by on Jun 10th, 2010. Comment.