Psychology buffs will make of this what they will. Either way, it’s an absorbing story and ought to make a chilling movie.
A collaborative record of illness and recovery by an Englishwoman who suffered from severe depression and the psychotherapist who helped her get to the root of her distress.
Caine, to outward appearances a happily married, financially secure wife and mother, first met Jungian psychotherapist Royston in early 1989, when she was referred to him after an alarming suicidal episode. Royston soon placed her in Ticehurst, a mental hospital near her home in Canterbury, to protect her from self-harm and to enable them to have longer sessions together. Both evidently took extensive notes during the years of her treatment, for their account is rather like a joint diary, with alternating passages by each. As a Jungian, Royston looks for clues in Caine’s dreams and interprets them for her as she reveals them over the next couple of years. Caine leaves Ticehurst at various times, sometimes just for a weekend, sometimes for months, but her sessions with Royston do not end until late 1991. Puzzling, fragmentary memories come back to her, and the story of her life gradually unfolds. She was abandoned by her mother at an early age, subsequently raised by her father, suffered an unnecessary mastectomy at age 14, married an abusive man at 17, was widowed at 20, and raped in a particularly horrifying manner shortly afterward. Royston comes to suspect that Caine has been the victim of childhood sexual abuse, and in his mind her father is the prime suspect. When the identity of the dark, menacing stranger in her dreams and flashbacks eventually becomes clear, the doctor hopes that talking about them will release Caine from her misery. In the end, however, it is a group prayer session that rescues and transforms her. Whether her recovered memories are true cannot be known, but Caine clearly believes they are. The same may be said for Royston’s dream interpretations.
Psychology buffs will make of this what they will. Either way, it’s an absorbing story and ought to make a chilling movie.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-593-04734-6
Page Count: 445
Publisher: Transworld UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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