THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD

Anecdotal trek through the life of the accomplished author, a victim of mental illness.

Saks (Law/USC and Psychiatry/UC San Diego) grew up in Miami during the1950s. The daughter of high-achieving upper-middle-class Jews, she pushed herself from an early age to excel academically. At eight, she began to develop “little quirks,” ranging from obsessive-compulsive tics like lining up all her shoes to night terrors and an eating disorder. When a high-school junior, she confessed to having tried pot, and her parents whisked her off to a drug-addiction treatment center. It was the first of what would prove to be many institutionalizations. Attending Vanderbilt University, she was plagued by alarming symptoms—sleeplessness, frantic behavior, hysterical laughter—that got worse in the late 1970s while she was on a fellowship at Oxford. Hospitalized there several times, she started taking antidepressants and seeing a Kleinian psychoanalyst she calls Mrs. Jones; for four years they worked through her delusional states while Saks got through her studies. (Transcriptions of some of these aggressive sessions are among the book’s few intriguing passages.) At Yale Law School, a full-blown psychotic episode landed her in New Haven Hospital’s Psychiatric Evaluation Unit, where she was finally diagnosed as a chronic paranoid schizophrenic. After weeks of heavy medication and therapy, she returned to finish law school. Various attempts to wean herself from medication had disastrous effects. She moved to a teaching job in Los Angeles and found a new analyst, Dr. Kaplan, who eventually gave her an ultimatum: Cease the psychotic babbling and plan your life. She did. Saks’s is a success story: She maintained friendships, romance, job security and even her (physical) health despite crippling setbacks. Unfortunately, she spends more time on the history of institutionalization and treatment than she does on the emotional and psychological details that would rescue her account from tedium.

Worthy, but often a snooze.