Answers the question for professionals and patients alike: who is the person playing with your mind? Or is it your soul?
A probing, nuanced look at the culture of psychiatry, with particular emphasis on the dichotomy between the drug cure and the talking cure.
Anthropologist Luhrmann (Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft, 1989) spent some time exploring an aspect of psychological anthropology that required her to examine various cultures with the psychoanalytic theories of Freud in mind. As a result, she found herself drawn to the world of psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and their patients. What she found after years of observation and immersion (she served briefly as a psychotherapist herself) were two ways of looking at mental illness. One approaches mental disorders as disturbances of the brain, biological anomalies, treatable with psychopharmaceuticals—Prozac, lithium, and the like. The other focuses on what Luhrmann calls disturbances of the mind, distortions of the personality that respond to the many, varying forms of guided exploration of the conscious and unconscious categorized as psychodynamic therapy. Psychiatrists are usually trained in both, but they are often forced to choose one approach or the other, committing themselves as brain doctors or mind doctors. Recently the two camps began to collaborate, agreeing in essence that a combination of medication and psychodynamics is most effective, but managed care put a severe cramp in that prognosis, forcing many hospitals and doctors into the drug McCure, eliminating or curtailing the now 45-minute hour. In chapters that include empathetic exploration of the stresses of medical training, careful examinations of the difficulties of diagnosis, the split between the scientist and the psychoanalyst, and the crisis of managed care, Luhrmann lays out clearly, with anecdote and case history, the ethnography that shapes a psychotherapist.
Answers the question for professionals and patients alike: who is the person playing with your mind? Or is it your soul?Pub Date: April 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-42191-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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