Billig / M.D. Untangling Lives

A Psychiatrist Remembers
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-6678-0087-5
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet/DL/kein Kopierschutz

E-Book, Englisch, 168 Seiten

'Untangling Lives: A Psychiatrist Remembers' is a memoir that focuses on how a psychiatrist separates his own personal history and experiences from the narratives of his patients in psychotherapy, particularly focusing on issues of loss and recovery. Dr. Billig, a psychiatrist, provides autobiographical material, patient therapy descriptions (identities and circumstances disguised), and remembered excerpts from his own personal psychoanalysis to demonstrate the importance of the therapist understanding his own past as he treats patients in psychotherapy.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Billig, Nathan

M.D.,

Leseproben

1.
The Bronx I sat on the curb watching the big boys play stickball in the street. The sun felt warm and welcome on my face, arms, and legs as my hands ran idly through the city silt that had accumulated at the edge of the curb – a gum wrapper, a Canada Dry bottle cap, a rusty paper clip, some gray sooty stuff, and clumps of pollen from the trees just stirring with spring. I absentmindedly sifted all these through my fingers as I watched the big boys and hoped that someday I could play stickball as well as they did. I daydreamed about my baseball hero, Joe DiMaggio, and wished I could also be as good a baseball player as he was. A year earlier I had eaten a quarter of a pound of butter, a whole “stick” of it, in the hope of becoming as strong as Joe D. I don’t know why I thought that would do it for me; maybe mostly because I was eight years old and had dreams. It was April 1, 1950, April Fool’s Day, and more importantly, it was the beginning of spring in the Bronx. It was warm enough, so, miraculously, I was allowed to wear short pants and a tee shirt that day. Maybe I was finally done with the baggy corduroys and flannel shirts of winter. But spring, which always was a refreshing relief from winter, this year brought worry. For weeks, maybe months, I had a “pit of my stomach” feeling; lately it seemed worse. I did not know then that that feeling would be with me, on and off, for decades to come. On that day I felt that something was really wrong. I wanted to know, but I also didn’t want to know. The family seemed unusually glad to get me out of the house early on that Saturday morning. Maybe that’s why there was no fight about the shorts and tee shirt. Usually, I was allowed to wear short pants and a short-sleeved shirt only when spring was well along, practically summer, it seemed. I wanted to get out of the house too. There were a lot of sad, worried eyes at home that morning that spring had suddenly come to the West Bronx. We were a family that did not readily talk about feelings, particularly difficult ones, so I had no idea of the magnitude of what was coming. But I was perceptive enough to know that something momentous was going to happen. We lived in the University Heights section of the Bronx, on Montgomery Avenue, near the Park Plaza movie theater, and not far from the Hall of Fame at the old New York University uptown campus. I spent many Saturday afternoons running past and playing among the hundreds of busts of famous people, like Longfellow, Fulton, Wordsworth, and Hawthorne, whom I did not know, except from their bronze busts and what my older brother and sisters had to say about them. I saw my first movie, Pinocchio, at the Park Plaza just two years earlier, when I was six. I did not actually see the whole movie because I was scared when Pinocchio ended up inside the whale, and I fled to the lobby, crying. Also in the neighborhood, near the movie theater, on University Avenue, was Olinsky’s Appetizing Store where we shopped a lot. I used to go there often with my mother. I can retrieve the familiar, pungent smell of the old pickle barrels, which included separate ones for sour and half-sour pickles and pickled green tomatoes. The cheeses – farmer, pot, American, muenster, and many others – gave off another set of smells, and the herrings – smoked fish like lox, sable, sturgeon, and whitefish – yet another. The newly baked breads – rye, pumpernickel, corn – which we always bought a sampling of, never made it home intact. The mounds of potato salad, coleslaw, sauerkraut, and an assortment of delicacies including special jellied candies and several flavors of halvah were laid out in abundance. I think that only the Bronx, and maybe Brooklyn, had appetizing stores. In some other places they were called “delis,” but those were not nearly the same. They did not have the multitude of flavors and smells that gave the appetizing store its character. It was a great place! It was truly a whole supermarket of Jewish delicacies. Near Olinsky’s was the candy store that sold Mello-Rolls. “Candy stores” in New York, in the 1940s and ’50s and maybe before that, were like luncheonettes, but they were crammed with racks filled with all kinds of candy bars, gum, mints, newspapers, magazines, cigars, cigarettes, and even some small toys. There was a real soda fountain counter with revolving stools with leather covered seats, and you could get fresh-made sodas, several basic flavors of ice cream, egg creams (a mixture of chocolate syrup, milk, and seltzer in exactly the right proportions), and all kinds of milk shakes and malteds. Everything was jammed into the too small space of the store, so much so that items were regularly falling off the shelves. I stopped there frequently, particularly for the Mello-Rolls, the barrel-shaped chocolate or vanilla ice cream wrapped in paper that unrolled into a special cone that was also barrel-shaped on the top. Somebody creative must have thought to invent it. Another of my favorite treats of those days were the half vanilla, half chocolate Breyers ice cream Dixie cups that my grandfather would buy for me when we walked on York Avenue, near his house in Manhattan. Montgomery Avenue had rows of houses typical of the West Bronx – everyone attached to another with alleys in between every two along one side of the street and apartment houses with strange smelling lobbies and hallways on the other. I thought that the poorer people lived across the street, although we were hardly rich. My brother, Jack, told me to try to stay on our side because it was safer. What Jack said usually went with me, except for a few times when I knew he was wrong. One day, he especially hurt me. That was the day, when I was about six, he distracted me while we sat across from each other eating lunch at the kitchen table. When I got ready to have dessert, the Milky Way candy bar that had been there for me at the beginning of the meal was gone. Jack bragged about tricking me and would not give it back. Maybe it was just a normal prank of an older brother. Despite that episode, Jack, who was seven and a half years older than me, was my guardian around the neighborhood, against potential threats from some mean, bigger kids, and he usually allowed me to tag along with him and his friends. Later, when he was a student at City College, he would take me to the campus to watch his fencing team matches or to visit the college newspaper office, where he was a reporter and by his senior year, the editor in chief. Besides Jack, who was playing stickball with his friends, Eddie and Gene, and some other fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds that day, I also had a sister, Cecile, who was about eighteen, and another sister, Lois, who was twenty. As I sat at the curb, they were upstairs in the house with my mother, father, and the maid, Viola, who took care of me a lot since my mother got sick. I was not sure what the sickness was, but it seemed bad. I knew that my mother had had an operation and that there was a bandage over her chest near where her heart was, for a long time. Sometimes I heard that her “dressings” had to be changed, and I learned that meant she needed a new bandage. While she was in the hospital, we were always supposed to tell my grandmother, when she telephoned, that my mother was “at a meeting.” I wondered if Grandma had a “pit of the stomach” feeling too, hearing that my mother was suddenly going to a lot of meetings when she never had done so in the past. Grandma was smart and must have been alarmed, but she asked no probing questions. My mother seemed weak and sad since the operation, and she did not do much around the house except rest. She usually managed a smile and seemed cheered when I was around her. One night after Viola had finished cleaning up after our dinner and had gone home, I was in the kitchen while my mother was slowly drying some remaining dishes. I saw that, occasionally, she was also drying some tears on her cheeks with the dish towel. She looked tired and sad. She looked old even though she was only forty-two. Tired from that small amount of work, she sat on a chair and with tears on her milky white cheeks, she pulled me to her and hugged me pretty hard, kissing me gently on my cheek, with just a hint of a smile. Her hands, which had been soft, were now thin, almost transparent; I could see her blue blood vessels through the skin. Maybe that was from being sad, I thought, from wringing them so much. I remember other nights, before going to sleep, when I crawled onto her bed, got right next to her, stayed there as long as I could, and looked at a book as she hugged me tight. She was warm and kind of delicate. In the opening of her nightgown, I saw the bandage over her chest, and she had a smell, not a bad one, maybe even a super-sweet one. I would later smell it again in a hospital when I was a medical student. I never did figure out whether it was a smell of healing or of getting sicker. That year, April first was also the first night of Passover, the night of the first Seder. That was always a big night in our family. Until I was five, we had Seders at my grandparents’ house on East 89th Street in Manhattan where we lived on the third floor of their brownstone house. My grandmother would have specially cleaned the house, and my grandfather, a painting contractor, repainted the kitchen every Passover. At the Seder he would lead the chanting of the Haggadah, the story of Passover; we chanted along with him and enthusiastically sang the special songs. I was usually the...