Descent into Darkness

Richard D. Chessick M.D. Ph.D.

Description

This book is unique because it presents a thorough coverage of the psychodynamics of mental illness in the form of a novel.  The characters engage on a trip to Europe beginning in Chicago and proceed to Ankara, Berlin, Cappadocia, Hattusas, Ephesus, Pergamum, Troy, Istanbul, and Milan. The reason for the novel form is that the author feels the fullest understanding of the human psyche requires a dialogue between science and the humanities.
     The basic plot of the novel is that Martin, an aging Chicago psychoanalyst receives a grant to lead an educational tour. He centers it on Turkey in order to build on Freud's metaphor of the mind being similar to archeological layers where what is new is built on and incorporates the remnants of the past. The party of five couples, a collection of mental health professionals, academics, spouses, and others provide living examples of the psychopathology also articulated in the numerous lectures Martin delivers on the tour. So they inadvertantly serve as clinical examples.
     At the same time the personal internal sufferings of Martin are described, beginning with his infatuation with a patient and ending with a serious psychosomatic condition, illustrating how psychological problems can lead to the development and exaserbation of such illnesses. Woven into the dramatic stories and lectures are references to philosophers, psychiatrists, novelists, historians, play writers, composers, artists, and ancient writers, as well as historical dissertations that illustrate the weaving of one strata of human and social development upon another.
      There is a discussion of training of therapists and treatment procedures, based on a profound empathy and deep concern for the mental suffering and pain that can characterize the human condition. The conclusion of the novel has a clever twist that drives the messages of the novel directly to the reader.
      This is a book to read for fun and adventure, but also teaches a great deal; the author is an internationally known author, teacher, lecturer,and clinician and offers it here in an unusual and dramatic way.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Psychotherapy
• Psychology

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 15 février 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781453530498
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

D ESCENT I NTO D ARKNESS
The Psychodynamics of Mental Ilness: An Introduction and Illustration in the Form of a Novel

by
Richard D. Chessick, M.D., Ph.D.
Copyright © 2011 by Richard D. Chessick, M.D., Ph.D.
ISBN:               Ebook                978-1-4535-3049-8
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Table of Contents
 
Forward
Preface
Chapter 1:    Chicago
Chapter 2:    Ankara
Chapter 3:    Berlin
Chapter 4:    Cappadocia
Chapter 5:    Hattu ş a ş
Chapter 6:    Ephesus
Chapter 7:    Pergamum
Chapter 8:    Troy
Chapter 9:    Istanbul
Chapter 10:  Milan
About the author
Richard D. Chessick, M.D, Ph.D. is Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Northwestern University, Life Fellow of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst (emeritus) of the Center for Psychoanalytic Study in Chicago, Senior Attending Psychiatrist (emeritus), Evanston Northwestern Healthcare Hospital, and is in the private practice of psychoanalysis in Evanston, Illinois, U.S.A. He is the author of 17 books in the field of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy, and of over 200 papers published in peer-reviewed professional journals, as well as another 200 book reviews. In an over 50 year career he has been an invited lecturer and teacher all over the world, in academic departments of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and philosophy.
 
[e-mail]
 
Books also by Dr. Chessick:
Agonie: Diary of a Twentieth Century Man (1976)
Intensive Psychotherapy of the Borderline Patient (1977)
Freud Teaches Psychotherapy (1980)
How Psychotherapy Heals (1969, 1983)
Why Psychotherapists Fail (1971, 1983)
A Brief Introduction to the Genius of Nietzsche (1983)
Psychology of the Self and the Treatment of Narcissism (1985, 1993)
Great Ideas in Psychotherapy (1977, 1987)
The Technique and Practice of Listening in Intensive Psychotherapy (1989, 1992)
The Technique and Practice of Intensive Psychotherapy (1974, 1983, 1991)
What Constitutes the Patient in Psychotherapy (1992)
A Dictionary for Psychotherapists: Dynamic Concepts in Psychotherapy (1993)
Dialogue Concerning Contemporary Psychodynamic Therapy (1996)
Emotional Illness and Creativity (1999)
Psychoanalytic Clinical Practice (2000)
The Future of Psychoanalysis (2007)
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank those members of the panel at the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry 50 th Annual Meeting in Toronto, Canada, in May 2006, who were kind enough to review and discuss extracts from this book: Gerald Perman, M.D. (chairman), Marianne Eckardt, M.D., Douglas Ingram, M.D., Christoph Mundt, M.D., C. Edward Robins, STD, Ph.D., Scott Schwartz, M.D., and Ann-Louise Silver, M.D. He also wishes to thank the audience at that panel for their interest and contributions to the discussion of the book. Ms.Roberta Green and Ms.Alice Gutenkauf were kind enough to read selected chapters and offer helpful suggestions. Linda Chessick was extremely helpful many times in the preparation of the manuscript. This book could not have been written without the capable help of my loyal assistant for many years, Ms. Elizabeth Grudzien. Thank you all.
TO MARCIA
 
They preserve the purest and tenderest affection for
each other, an affection daily increased and confirmed
by mutual endearments and mutual esteem.
. . . Henry Fielding ( Tom Jones )
Gods who rule the ghosts; all silent shades;
And Chaos and eternal Fiery Stream,
And regions of wide night without a sound,
May it be right to tell what I have heard,
May it be right, and fitting, by your will,
That I describe the deep world sunk in darkness [*]
  Forward
Commentary by Christoph Mundt, M.D., University of Heidelberg
Dr. Christoph Mundt is Professor of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Chairman of the Psychiatric University Hospital, and previous Director of the Center for Psychosocial Medicine all at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and is the editor of the journal Psychopathology .
 
I was brought up as the son of a publisher in Munich with novelists and poets around, among them returning emigrants, being frequently guests in my parent’s home. So I was provided with a penchant for literary art, novels in particular. This is the reason why I will take this novel as a novel, as a piece of literary art, not of science, following the author’s denomination of it as a didactic novel. Novelists’ observations and language are less restricted than the scientific one, reflecting the complexity and subtlety of inner worlds better than scientific formalisation even in descriptive psychopathology. I am not alone with this view. Oswald Bumke, the great German editor of psychopathological textbooks in the 1920s to 30s, claimed that one true novelist finds out more about the human psyche than a hundred scientists.
Interpretation of the novel as a piece of literary art
When I went through the first chapter of this novel, titled “Chicago”, it occurred to me to lay out a number of topics which are partly entailed partly superseded partly set aside in relation to the ever-present theme in this novel of teaching principles of psychodynamics and psychoanalysis. These topics in outline are the following:
The literary format of this piece of teaching as such: Art or science? If art, can it grasp its objective?
Bereavement, grief, loneliness; being thrown back to oneself and his reminiscencies, aloofness with a notion of resistance and negation.
Aging, illness, being bound to medication as an artificial means to sustain being alive; salience of long-term memories over presence—and future-directedness; going back to one’s roots, collecting the essentials.
Identity as a topic recurs several times in Chessick’s book, later again related to psychoanalysis, its delineation to psychiatry, psychopharmacology, neurobiology, and the humanities vs. neopositivism.
The Ghazalian experience pointed out at different levels: The would-be love-affair of the main protagonist Martin and J.; the passages about bacchanalia; orgies and cannibalism and indirectly the fusion with Freud and his revered system of thinking, experiencing, and approaching the world.
All this is interwoven with the prime motive of the novel of teaching psychoanalysis and psychodynamics with its different facets and foci as main tune and cantus firmus to the many descants and contrapuntals.
I do not re-iterate Chessick’s story in detail here, but will immediately go into the interpretation.
So, what does the novel tell us?
The main protagonist, Martin, is strained by his particular life situation of bereavement. His wife is recently deceased. His heart is broken, he suffers angina and atrial fibrillations.
The journey that Martin invites his friends and colleagues to partake is a journey to the past with the aim to reassure himself about what his life was dedicated to: Psychoanalysis and existential philosophy dealing not only with helping patients but with recognising oneself and living for ‘clarification of existence’, to use a word of Jaspers, or the Greek command to know yourself.
Formally the novel consists of narratives and descriptions of the relationship between the protagonists interrupted by theoretical passages in form of lectures or a kind of Socratic dialogues. The narrative parts show outbursts of what is put as ‘instinctual’ drives by the author, both sexual and aggressive ones. The main protagonist, Martin, tries to balance the group but is entangled with his own feelings to his former patient. His attempts to temper and master the group dynamics gradually fail, at some instances even in a dramatic way. His group member Edward considers his teaching as lofty and detached from real life and his group management as a complete disaster. Another group member Richard leaves the group with the announcement to put all effort in ruining Martin’s reputation as psychoanalyst upon his return to Chicago. In the end the group dissolves before returnng and Martin is alone. The text-passages about the pairing up in the group in new relationships and the aggressive attacks on Martin’s teaching are interrupted by theoretical reconfirmation of the instinctual drive-theory including aggression. It is contrasted to Kohut’s reformulations of self-psychology, obviously disenchanting Martin as non-orthodox but hinted at as a possible alternative way to understand what happens.
This formal stratification of the novel—real life illustrating theory—theory opening the eyes for real life—resembles Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel In Praise of the Stepmother. In this novel chapters with partly charming, partly rude and almost pornographic descriptions of the son-mother-relationship interchange with chapters on antique mythology, for example, the story of Kandaules and Gyges. It is a literary technique which lifts the plain story to a high abstraction level and opens a perspective on individual developmental psychology and the whole cosmos of cultural history behind the seemingly plain story. So the patronizing dominance of husband or father over wives and women in