Jonathan Rosen's The Best Minds disturbs me at the American Psychoanalytic Association Meetings...

 Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds, Joan Peters, Untangling, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Grief, Mourning, Schizophrenia, Deinstitutionalization.

Jonathan Rosen, the author of The Best Minds was a presenter at the Winter Meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association.  He presented immediately after the author of another memoir (Untangling), Joan Peters talked about her writing.  Both of them are professional writers and they were speaking about their memoirs to a group of analysts so that there could be a subsequent discussion about the relationship between the writing of memoir and the psychoanalytic process.

Joan’s memoir is about her psychoanalysis – which seemed to me to be a kind of cheating on the topic. Reflecting on being in analysis when being in analysis might be more about the process of analysis itself than about the process of writing a memoir.  And writing the memoir turned out to have been an integral part of the analysis.

Joan noted that there are relatively few memoirs about analyses – something that I would expect there would be more of.  I thought about and intended to keep a journal of my own analytic experience, but I was so crunched for time (or I used this as a rationalization) that I never seriously undertook that project.  I did occasionally keep a dream journal – but that was difficult because the dreams seemed not to make sense when simply written down.  I needed to provide context for them to make sense – and that was what we were working on in the analysis, and it was a lot of work.  To rehash that work would have been even more work.

Joan’s analysis was also a lot of work.  It was actually a second analysis.  She had engaged in an earlier, useful analysis with an analyst who explained to her the difficulties that she had as a child.  In this second analysis, those difficulties came to life as she engaged in an intimate, bruising relationship with a woman who provided the kind of care that she so desperately had hoped her mother would provide when she was a child.  The contrast between what she was currently getting in the analysis and what she didn’t get as a child led her to experience her earlier deprivation in the present, in a way that led her to desperately desire her analyst when not in the session – so that she became much more needy, but also more deeply engaged in this second treatment.

Writing about her analysis was something that her analyst suggested, and she took to it immediately.  It served to help her survive times without her analyst – she could, as it were, conjure her analyst up when her analyst was away.  So, the memoir was less about a psychoanalytic process than it was an adjunct to and support for the analytic process that may have served an analytic function for her on its own, but that was not easy for me, as an audience member, to ferret out.  It seemed to be a piece with the analysis.

When I was in psychology graduate school, my two roommates were a poet and an essayist/memoirist.  Both of them were writing about central aspects of their life.  The memoirist was writing a piece about hats.  He would ask me questions about hats.  I don’t know that he ever finished that essay.  It wasn’t really about hats, it was about his father and, at least during the three or four years we were roommates, he never reached a sense of resolution about his father, so that the essay never got finished, even though he finished many other essays about a wide variety of topics that he then published – as well as a book about his failed first marriage. 

So, when Jonathan Rosen began talking about his relationship with his best friend Michael Lauder when he was ten, I was all ears.  This was going to be a memoir about a relationship, and it would then also be about the psychological experience of having and maintaining a friendship across the course of a life.  This had the potential to be the presentation that was advertised – a memoir as a quasi-analysis.  But that was not to be.

Jonathan began by giving us an overview of the material covered in the book.  He said that he chose to write it as a memoir rather than as investigative journalism, where it would have begun with the ending, but it could have gone either way and he chose the format of a novel because he wanted to draw the reader in.  But he related the ending at the beginning of the presentation to us – partly, I think, because of time pressure, but perhaps also because of the impact he wanted it to have on us.

Jonathan met his friend – he starts the memoir going back to this moment – when he was ten and they lived down the street from each other on a cul-de-sac in New Rochelle, a close-in suburb of New York City.  Both were verbal and smart – both went to Yale – but his friend was someone he looked up to – literally.  His friend was nicknamed toes because he was always moving up onto his toes, and he was also nicknamed tall, because he was the tallest in the class.  Jonathan also metaphorically looked up to him because, with Michael’s near photographic memory and ability to both summarize and quote books, he helped Jonathan hide that he was dyslexic and had not read texts that the rest of his class mates had.

Michael got derailed when he was at Yale – he had a psychotic break and became a person with schizophrenia.  This occurred at the same time that deinstitutionalization was occurring – so that long term hospitalization, which can be a useful treatment for people with severe mental illness, was largely unavailable.  At the same time, a cadre of psychiatrists, under the sway of R. D. Laing, who maintained that mental illness was a sane reaction to an insane world, created a space in an old mansion where people with schizophrenia (not patients) could naturally heal.

When Michael appeared to be improving, he became the poster child for the movement.  He was admitted to Yale Law School, written about in the New Yorker and the New York Times, and he wrote his own version of his “recovery”, one that was the basis for a screen play of a movie that was to star Brad Pitt and be directed by Ron Howard. 

Jonathan pointed out that this was consistent with the narrative they had been provided for their own lives – that they would become stars – famous, wealthy, and accomplished; they would be heroes.

The problem with that scenario was that Michael was not, in fact, able to function at Yale Law School.  But rather than being kicked out, he was coddled and passed along.  He was, after all, the poster child of the deinstitutionalization movement; a movement that, from Jonathan’s position, was pushed by the legal establishment under the misguided rubric of affording civil rights to patients who had previously been confined.  Michael was, from the perspective of his professors, healed, recovered and not in need of hospitalization.  As seeming proof of being in a recovered state, Michael engaged in a relationship with a woman – and she became pregnant.  All looked good, until he killed her.

Now, Michael’s picture was in the New York Post under the headline Psycho!  The charade of Michael’s mental health came to an end and Michael has been in a forensic hospital (he was judged not guilty by reason of insanity) for the past 26 years. 

Jonathan did a great deal of research for this book.  He interviewed law professors and psychiatrists; he interviewed Elyn Saks, a woman with schizophrenia who has gone on to become a psychoanalyst and a law professor herself. He ended up with a very jaundiced view of the law and of psychiatrists, and of psychoanalysts in particular because of the belief of some that schizophrenia is not different in kind, but really different in amount of disturbance – and that the same rules of treatment can be used with schizophrenia that are applied to those who are conflicted, in pain, and suffering from mental illness, but whose brains are not broken (my word, not Jonathan’s),

Both of these presentations were moving, and both presenters evoked my sympathy.  I was concerned for Joan.  She clearly went through a particular kind of hell in her second analysis and there is a sense in analytic treatment that to heal we have to face demons that are difficult.  She certainly did that in her treatment, in her writing and in her presentation.  And I was able to stay with her.

I was not able to keep taking notes when Jonathan was speaking.  I felt too sad to keep writing.  I felt for Jonathan – the kid who looked up to Michael.  I felt terrible about the way he was treated by well-meaning but deeply misguided individuals – everyone from the Dean of the Law School to the psychiatrists who created an asylum of sorts that didn’t come close to addressing his needs. 

On a larger level, I felt deeply sad and angry about a society that was overly rigidly committed to protecting the civil rights of the mentally ill and would sacrifice the ability to provide care in order to provide the kind of freedom that was littering the streets outside of the very fancy hotel where we were staying with people who could barely function and who were using powerful street drugs in plain sight to numb themselves so that they could go on living.

But I was also paralyzed.  As a psychoanalyst, I was complicit. Long ago, I treated a patient who was hospitalized after killing his girlfriend.  He, like Michael, was not able to acknowledge that he had done this.  I theorized that, when my patient would be able to grieve – to acknowledge what he had done and to truly feel sorrow about that - he would no longer need to be hospitalized.  I was at that hospital on a one-year training assignment and heard many years later from a friend at that hospital that he had eventually been released, but I did not know what had led to that.

This thought, unbidden, that I had been a good treater – on the side of the sick and injured person – was, I think, a reaction to the guilt I felt as a result of being accused by Jonathan, and I was reminded of something that a supervisor had once said when processing the suicide of a patient.  He said, in the wake of a suicide we all vacillate between guilt and blame.  The one relieves us of the other, but neither provides a comfortable resting place.  I think Michael’s murder of his girlfriend was also a suicide and I began to wonder if Jonathan was moving back and forth between guilt and blame.

As the audience asked questions about the process of writing, one of their questions was about the experience of putting things out there for the world to hear.  Joan noted that it was easier to write her memoir after her mother had died.  Not that her mother would have been ashamed.  She would have read the description of her as a description of a woman who was strong and had raised her daughter using the strength that came in handy after the death of her husband – she would not have seen herself as emotionally unavailable.  Joan used this as an example of her general point that, regardless of what you think you are writing, the audience will do with it what they will.

Jonathan talked about feeling OK about putting out finished versions of his writing, but not the material before it was finished – the latter material would be too raw.  So, I began to wonder whether Jonathan’s book, his memoir, but more importantly he, himself, is done.  Is he, like my friend with the inability to finish the story about the hats, not done mourning the loss of Michael? The amount of sadness I felt in listening to the story – and the quality of that sadness, the heaviness of it, leads me to think that he is not done.

When asked to talk about whether immersion in the material had been “therapeutic”, Joan noted that a second analysis was really covering the territory of the first analysis – she was the same person for both – and by implication, I think she would be the same for a third.  All of her talking, feeling and writing did not change the essential facts of her life. 

Jonathan agreed with this and took a more extreme view – that when we unearth things, when we go back to the past, those things do not get better – they simply get unearthed. I think that may be especially true in some kinds of writing (and perhaps some kinds of therapies).  Joan spoke about the analytic third – the presence of an entity that is neither the analyst nor the patient, but some kind of entity that they both contribute to but that neither owns.  This shared alternative entity is, as described by Joan, one that either partner can enter as needed in the process of the analysis.  I think she may have been saying something like; the analytic third allows both the analyst and the patient to step out of themselves – to be in a place that is both theirs and not theirs.

Jonathan noted that Michael cannot leave the institution he is in until he acknowledges that he killed the person that he loved more than anyone in the world, and until he acknowledges that he has a mental illness, neither of which he is able to do.

The current president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Bonnie Buchele, supervised me a long time ago.  She said then that, for her dissertation, she interviewed people who were incarcerated after killing someone.  None of the people she interviewed were denying that they had murdered someone, but, to a person, none of them could remember the act itself.  It was as if, Bonnie thought, the act of killing another person is too horrific for us to process, which is necessary for us to be able to remember it.

I think that neither Michael, nor Jonathan, has fully processed what happened.  Jonathan has engaged fully in an effort to wrap his head around the entire situation, but like the Melancholic in Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia, he cannot let go of the need both to punish, but also not to forgive those who failed Michael (including, I suspect, himself).  He does not trust – and I cannot guarantee that it would be the case – that, without the constant bludgeoning, he will be able to protect the space that he and Michael inhabited together so long ago, an innocent space of being kids with lots of talent in a world that would welcome them warmly.

I agree with Jonathan that the deinstitutionalization movement was a travesty.  We did not build an alternate system – and we didn’t maintain more intensive care for those who needed that.  I am glad that he was written this book where he is championing appropriate care for those who seek services from mental health providers.  We need to figure out how to provide this desperately needed care – and continue to fight for the rights of those who are mentally ill.  Whatever system we build (and we are a long way from that), it will not bring Michael back in a form that Jonathan will recognize as being like the person he knew as a child. 

Going back (the original title of this memoir) will only unearth what is already there.  It will not change the fact that Michael’s life led, in the haphazard way, influenced by the zeitgeist, that it did.  We cannot undo history.  But we can mourn it.  As tumultuous and difficult as Joan’s second analysis was, it appears to have helped her let go of – in part by acknowledging the shortcomings of her mother and Joan’s own desperate need for her to be different – her hope that her mother will become or would have been a different woman.  In that sense, Jonathan’s position is correct.  But Joan’s process of unearthing has led her to a kind of peace – to an acceptance of the experience of her mother – she can even have a little fondness for her and her toughness.  Can Jonathan find a way to forgive himself for failing Michael?  Can he find a way to connect with the person that Michael has become – a person that is vastly different from the one that Michael would have been?  I hope so.

3/8/25 Epilogue:

OK, I have now read the book.  I stand by what I said above.  I would add that I think Jonathan is still competing with Michael, and still aching for Michael to set the standard and to create the path that he would follow.  He misses Michael deeply.  He pours into this book so much information that I, as the reader, am overwhelmed.  It is as if he is saying to Michael, "See what I learned from you?  See what I have learned as a result of your madness?  Are you proud of me?"

One of the things that Jonathan taught me in the book has to do with the nature of language.  Language is defined by other words.  But it is not the world as it is - it is a translation of it.  I used this insight to articulate something about the concrete nature of physical artists - artists who work in media like paint and stone and clay - in a review of the Movie The Brutalist.

The most important thing that I learned though, is that we should change the narrative about mental illness.  We have shied away from characterizing the mentally ill as violent with good reason.  We don't want people to be afraid of the mentally ill.  But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't study violence - perhaps especially as it manifests itself among the mentally ill.

I think the most violent act that is most closely associated with mental illness is suicide.  It is violence against the self - but also violence against those who loved the person who was killed.  It rips a hole in the social network.  Shouldn't we acknowledge it as a violent act and think about it in that way?  Thanatology is not my area of study, so some people may be thinking in this way, but the way that Rosen opened this up for me is important.  He was reviewing writings by people like Karl Menninger that point out that all criminal activity is psychologically motivated - and that the correction of such behavior should be psychology - not criminal punishment; something that has not been shown to be an effective deterrent.  In order to determine the deterrent, we need to know something about the motivation and the characteristic of the person committing the crime.  Of course the law is asking deeply psychological questions, but shouldn't they be doing this in a scientifically informed way?

In any case, the book was an interesting if scattered read.  I now know more about the song American Pie than I did before, but I'm not quite sure what that has to do with the main thesis of the book...

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