Countless human tragedies involving mental illness are enacted daily, but generally come to public notice only when they surface as lurid headlines involving violence. My son, who became ill with schizophrenia when he was 26 years old, was, like most mentally ill people, of no danger to anyone but himself. He wandered upstate New York and New York City for over two years, homeless, delusional, and totally at risk. Only he can tell that story; the following account is of my ordeal as a parent during the first years of my son's struggle with mental illness. I hope it reflects the fact that each of the one in five people in this country who have some form of mental illness have family and those loved ones also need the support of the therapeutic community and organizations like NAMI, whose help to me was immeasurable.
for JerryWet faced and disembodied, stumblingbeyond the rail at the racetrack of the worldinto the hooves’ thunder, I see the lead horsepounding around the last turn go downto its knees and pitch h...
Waking alone I feel your kiss and remember nights we were together—of course, that was then. And we are strangers now to those untried innocents we once were. Still, lying here in the half light, I...
This excellent book, as the syzygistic quality of its title indicates, challenges stereotypical thinking about masculinity. We habitually imagine masculine aggression in a context of egotistic acti...
S ylvia Brinton Perera’s book is at once a scholarly psychological opus and a record of her personal night sea journey “through an inner and outer chaos” (p. 12). She opens by telling us that within the span of 8 months she lost her brother, her father, her former analyst, and her husband. One terrible blow, or even two, we can, with help, withstand. But four? Part of the value of this book is its testimony to the author’s resourcefulness and courage. She tells us that during this time of confusion and intense, often polarized, emotions, while paying attention to her dreams and her relationships to inner and outer figures, she thought of Jung’s words, “We need some new foundations. [Therefore] we must dig down to the primitive [for] . . . a new experience of God” (p. 19). Previously, Sylvia Perera had unearthed and written about several images of wholeness in female form. Now in her digging she came upon a male image of wholeness: that of the Irish bull god Daghda, or the Dagda. Delving into the Dagda’s stories, she found that “. . . his image could support a necessary reordering in my psyche” (p. 11). So much so that “his figure has given me structures from the archetypal dimension through which I can reconnect to the integrated masculine that my own brother, father, analyst and partner had carried for me over the years” (p. 12). We know that this journey of reconnection must have been a painful and difficult process for her. But her book is not a memoir in any ordinary sense. I think the addition of a more personal, subjective line of narrative in the book would have made it more powerful. However, I understand why Perera omitted it. Primarily, she is intent on introducing us to the mediating image of the bull god, the Dagda, and helping us toward experiencing his qualities. She structures most of the book “as a kind of Celtic interlace to weave old stories with modern clinical materials and personal reflections” (p. 13). Her aim is not to assess the image historically. Instead she has allowed
