Brain Evangelists by Gordon Warme MD

Author:Gordon Warme MD [Warme, Gordon MD]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-9951906-1-0
Publisher: Gordon Warme MD
Published: 2016-07-19T23:00:00+00:00

Get cracking, man. This rescue thing you’re doing is very standard, a platitude, saving the maiden in distress. Don’t you remember what they taught us during our training? Your job is to listen with the third ear, to not take your patient’s words literally, to stay meta, to show her you won’t let yourself settle into standard thinking—to rape your own mind, shake yourself up, devise new readings of what she is saying to you. This will set an example, teach her that she can also unsettle her own mind, understand what she’s doing in new ways. But you’re letting the opposite happen, letting her team up with you to hang onto a destructive cliché.

Tell her, for example, something she knows already but that you and she are pretending not to notice, that she is so skilled at her way of life that even you, an old hand at the psychiatric game, are powerfully affected, in thrall to her, her doting caretaker, perhaps romantically enslaved as well. Although it’s true that you are, in a way, her slave, Ms. Monroe will also see that you aren’t surrendering to that, that you keep digging, poking, pushing, and, in a sense, raping her usual ways of thinking. Concerned, yes. Mollycoddling, definitely not. Point out that she is stubborn, determined to live out her old stories, and by your actions show her that although you’ll watch, you are determined to stand for new ways of thinking, ones she’s never thought of before—hell’s bells, ways you haven’t thought of before—honest almost to the point of being harsh. Not that she has to act differently—it’s that business about us not having the right to tell people to live their lives in any way other than they already do—but only that you will work with her to study everything she does.

But be careful. Don’t take my rape metaphor too literally. We psychiatrists have tried many crude “rape” experiments already. Do you remember? Electric shocks, insulin shocks, lobotomies, ice-cold baths, isolation rooms? The rape I’m after is mostly about you, reinventing yourself and how you think about your patient. Never let up on the project of waking your own mind so you can make novel comments about what Ms. Monroe is up to. That our patients portray themselves in certain ways is one of the most important things we psychiatrists have to keep in mind. To use a nastier word—which you may get away with using if you do it tactfully—your bombshell patient is masquerading as a dependent baby, even living with Lee and Paula Strasberg (Monroe’s drama coaches, creators of the school of method acting). They have taken her baby style literally, just as you do. She did it with her husband Arthur Miller too, always calling him “Papa,” even before they were married.

Don’t forget, Greenson, that she’s been an accomplished siren for many years. I even imagine that she was a Shirley Temple when she was little, that all her life people responded to her with amazement, admiringly, enviously, resentfully.

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