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Cure of Folly, The
by Gordon Warme, M.D.
Going inside the world of madness.
I've always thought psychiatrists to be weird and – to use their own term – anal, and we now have written proof, thanks to The Cure of Folly: A Psychiatrist's Cautionary Tale by Gordon Warme, M.D.
Warme himself explains his ability to psychoanalyze a patient by saying, “Weird, magical thinking is what let me sneak into Mr. Banda's mind and ferret out his secrets, but I can't do that job unless I have a brace of unorthodox inclinations."
In fact, he celebrates his weirdness, confessing, “I'd always known I would be a psychiatrist, but the odd and unusual didn't show in me at first,” later adding, “I now take pleasure only in whatever seeds of weirdness I notice in myself.”
And when it comes to being anal, Warme intones, “we all believe in causality and in free will, a dramatic illusion of the world's lack of system,” and “if I allow myself to see that the world is as real upside down, as it is right side up, doesn't that make me just another puppet?” Of an Ewa Podles concert he attends, he shares, “I loved her deep contralto voice: it didn't seem to be entering me by way of the ears but through my entrails. From my bowels, it marched up through my body and poured out of my mouth, eyes and ears.”
But as weird as he would appear to be, or perhaps because of it, his book is both fascinating and entertaining in a strange highbrow way, kind of like the opera.
Part autobiography, part criticism and dissection of his profession, The Cure of Folly lays bare the insanity of a psychiatrist's world and thinking. If you've ever wondered what goes on inside a psychiatrist's head, here is a frightening close-up.
Warme studied under Karl Menninger at the Menninger Clinic and opines, “Secretly, I held the sentimental belief that I cured my patients with love.” Throughout the book Warme is often critical of others in his profession. “The constant temptation,” he writes, “is to let [patients] off the hook by blaming someone or something else. It's parents, we say, or the bad chemicals in which their brains are bathed. In the past, we blamed demonic possession, the gods, or fate. When we get nervous about the unattractive things we see in our patients, we're ready to blame anyone about whom we hear a complaint, and stop listening for the hidden messages. None of us wants to keep Goethe's words in mind: ‘We are most offended by our faults when we discover them in others.'”
But somehow Warme has been able to avoid these pitfalls himself, refusing to see patients as “'fragmented selves' that need empathic nutriment, ‘cohesive selves' that miraculously flourish in the wake of empathic responsiveness. It's a pretty insulting thesis that we humans have no will of our own, and are merely straightforward creations of the world's treatment of us. Were this true, the shit that rains down on every life might convince us we are all victims.”
He pulls no punches, revealing that members of his profession are unleashing questionable and even damaging treatments on their patients following blindly , including “the mindless use of drugs,” and “glib recommendations for ‘tough love' or ‘more empathy' – gross opposites that live in dizzy coexistence in the psychiatric arsenal,” when the simple fact is most psychiatric patients will eventually improve regardless of the type of treatment used.
In not only his book, but in his profession, Warme has been able to cut through the bullshit and know his calling and his place: “My job is to show my patient – the only person who counts – his suffering is something he does to himself, that it stems from his own set of hurtful rules and that, most of all, he is harmed, hampered, and enslaved by his own cowness. Just like me.”
For those so inclined, The Cure of Folly contains a mine-full of food for thought.
Title: Cure of Folly, The
Author: Gordon Warme, M.D.
Publisher: ECW Press
ISBN: 1550225715
Review written by: Marc Duane Anderson
Reviewer's Rating:8.5
Reader's Rating: 8.67
Reader's Votes: 3
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