TRANSCRIPT
If there’s one story that shows how naive I was about the mental health system when I first became a therapist, it must be this one.
It was two months before I started becoming a therapist. I had just gotten into a master’s in social work program at New York University, and I realized I am behind. I really have to come up to speed and start reading about psychology and psychotherapy. I had a lot of catching up to do. I’d studied biology back in college. I’d taken one psychology class, which I really didn’t like. It was mostly about rats and pigeons and statistics, and I thought, this doesn’t help me understand psychology at all.
So I went to the library, July of 1999, and I went to their psychology section of my local branch. I went down the stacks and I pulled out maybe five books that seemed like they were the most interesting to me, the most helpful. I brought them home and I looked at them and I thought, which will I start with? Well, I started with the one that seemed like it would be the most interesting of all of them. It was a book by a psychology author called Alice Miller. I’d heard of her before. My mom read some of her stuff, I think back when I was in high school in the 1980s, but I never read any. I didn’t know anything about her. Her book that I had was called *The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self*, and I thought, okay, sounds like a decent enough title.
I started reading it, and to make a long story short, I found it was a pretty good book. I think if I had rated it right after I read it, I would have said eight out of ten. It made a lot of sense to me, very logical. She talked about the connection between childhood trauma, childhood hurts, bad things that parents did to children, and how it affected the children when they grew up to become adults. How childhood issues were connected with adult behavior, adult problems, adult misbehavior. I really liked it. It made sense in my life according to what I’d already figured out by looking inside myself and looking at my world around me, looking at the people I knew, listening to their stories, connecting with their childhood. Also watching my childhood friends, seeing the problems they had as children and seeing how it affected the adults that they became.
So basically what it was is she, in a very clear way and doing a pretty good job, an eight, nine out of ten kind of way, she was making that connection and laying it out in a psychological framework. I thought it was a good book. Well, what I thought after reading this book is, “Daniel, you made a very good decision entering the psychology field, getting ready to become a therapist,” because I figured this book was pretty average in the mental health field. I thought probably most psychology books were going to be about that, that good. Maybe there would be some that were better, probably some that were worse, but it would be about a middle-of-the-road book. After all, it was the first book that I just happened to grab and read.
Well, then I went to the second book, a book by a guy named Harry Guntrip. It was called *Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations, and the Self*. Fancy title! I thought, I’m ready for this. I’m a smart guy. I can make sense of it. I have a dictionary. I can look up words. Schizoid, being split off from the self, being dissociated. I could understand that.
Well, I started reading that book, and it was so boring. It was so impenetrable. It started putting me to sleep. I was like, what is up with this guy? How could such a horrible writer get published? There were some decent ideas, I think, but mostly it was like it was totally overwritten. It was like he was purposefully being impossible to understand. I thought he seemed so arrogant. He seems schizoid himself. This book was schizoid. I’m like, I don’t like this. I made it halfway through the book. The whole time I’m reading it, I’m like, am I stupid? Am I missing something?
Well, then I went to the next book, Sigmund Freud’s *Interpretation of Dreams*. I’m like, I really want to get dream analysis. I’ve been doing a lot of dream analysis on myself. I’ve actually been making a lot of sense connecting what my dreams were to what was going on in my life and what had happened to me in my past. I understood the concept already that dreams were a symbolic representation of my repressed issues, of my unresolved traumas, of my anxieties, of my internal conflicts. I thought, well, Freud must get this way better than I do. He must explain it in a way that’s going to really open the doors for me to really understand myself and dreams better.
Well, I started reading this book, and I thought, it’s not as bad as Guntrip, but it’s kind of like Guntrip’s. But it’s so boring! I’m like, it’s so overwritten. He takes too long to make points. Some of the points I just don’t agree with, and I thought, this is not helping me. A lot of the dreams, the way he interpreted them, I thought, I don’t think he’s right. And I thought, this is not for me, really. Maybe about halfway through the book before I put it down, I said, I can’t deal with this. I don’t have all that much time. I’ve got other books that are better to read. I know there’s good ones out there.
So then I went on to the next book, Lacan, Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst. And I’m like, I literally could not understand what he was getting at. I’m like, what is this? I’m like, I’m a smart guy, right? Hypothetically, and I cannot understand what he’s saying. Fast forward 20 years, I actually became friends with some people who hung out in Jacques Lacan’s inner circle in France, and I told him that I couldn’t understand what he was writing at all. And they laughed and they said, nobody does. It doesn’t make sense. And then I met a lot of people through my career as a therapist who loved Lacan and would talk about him, and I realized even though they were talking about him and saying how great he was, they didn’t understand him either. It was pretense.
And then one of the books I read, I think the fifth book that I brought home, was a book on biological psychiatry. And that, even though it actually made sense what they were writing, I think this was the worst book of all because it wasn’t scientific. I realized as I was reading it, this is garbage. This is lies. What they’re saying proves that something bipolar and schizophrenia is a biological problem. It’s not actually proving it really scientifically. It’s certainly not proving it to me. And I’m reading more and more about this, and I’m really, they’re trying to prove that people need these medications and they need this kind of treatment, and they’re proving the efficacy and the validity of diagnoses. And the more I read it, I’m like, what am I getting into in this field?
Well, now, 20 years later, more than 20 years, 21, more than 21 years later, I look back on it and I think the irony that the first book I read was by Alice Miller. I actually later went back and read all of her books, everything she’d written, and I realized she was absolutely unique in the mental health field. I also realized in the mental health field, in the field of psychotherapy, a lot of people didn’t like her. Most people didn’t like her. She made them uncomfortable. People didn’t want to see this basic truth. They called her reductionistic. She reduces everything to childhood trauma. Well, what I saw is most people in the mental health field, the mental health system itself, was reducing everything to biology, to brain chemicals. They were avoiding trauma. They didn’t want to look at trauma. They didn’t want to look at what happened to people in their past. They didn’t want to look at their own past. They actually didn’t really want to look at who their parents were, what their parents’ deficits were.
And what I finally came to is this book, *Drama of the Gifted Child*, compared to 99 psychology books, was an absolute 10 out of 10. And whereas I originally graded it against objective reality as about an eight out of ten.
And I still stand by that. There are flaws in her arguments. Alice Miller herself was a very flawed person, but that book and her writings were really exceptional in a very troubled and screwed up mental health system.