Mockingbird Years: A Life In and Out of Therapy

Emily Fox Gordon, now in her fifties, has had a lifetime of psychiatric treatment—hence the subtitle of her book, A Life In and Out of Therapy. In Mockingbird Years she describes her experiences, her reactions to them, and her evaluation of them.

Gordon spent her early years in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and her father's career changes moved her family to New York City in 1959 and to Washington, D.C., two years later. During the years she lived with her parents, her treatment included psychological testing at age eight, one year of psychoanalysis two times a week with a female therapist at age 11, a second year of psychoanalysis with another female therapist at age 12, and a third course of psychotherapy with a male therapist at age 16.

In the mid-1960s, when she was 18 years old, Gordon became a patient at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She spent one year there as an inpatient and then two years as an outpatient. She moved several times after that, living in Greenwich Village in New York City; briefly in Washington, D.C., with her family; in New York City again, this time uptown; then in New Jersey; and once again in New England. Through much of that time, she was engaged in outpatient psychotherapy.

Gordon is a wonderful writer. Her language is rich, her metaphors moving. For example, of her Austen Riggs experience she writes, "I was a hog for attention and welcomed nearly any kind, but the doctors' questions, the nurses' charting of my moods and actions, all this had the feel of the speculum about it." Or: "When I described my Leonia [New Jersey] years to Dr. B., he was quick to suggest post-traumatic stress, the sequela of my rape. I found this idea comforting but unilluminating, an instance of scientific relabeling, dignifying a bruise by calling it a hematoma."

Gordon uses language extraordinarily well to describe the psychological places in which she finds herself as well as the actual circumstances she lives through. Her description of the sequela of deinstitutionalization in New York City in the fall of 1968 is telling: "The psychiatric wards had recently been emptied by deinstitutionalization, the patients released into what psychiatrists called 'the community.' The benches of the pocket parks along Broadway were lined with lunatics—mutterers, twitchers, hallucinators, impassioned monologuists, silent day sufferers. I remember encountering the first bag lady I had ever seen. I stared wonderingly at her swollen ankles, flecked with open sores, her layers of charcoal-gray garments, and what I could see of her face, mysteriously lowered and only half visible in the shadows of the cave formed by the blankets she had wrapped around her head."

Gordon's conflictual feelings about psychotherapy are the highlight of the book. She remarks regularly on, and demonstrates with examples, how she is both the beneficiary and the victim of lifelong psychotherapy. She observes, "I am one of those people—we're not so very rare—for whom life has been not so much examined as conducted in the therapy." So much therapy before she was out of her teens left her with "the habit of the analysand, the ruthless stripping away of defenses. But in my case not much self had yet developed, and surely none of it was expendable. I was tearing away not a hardened carapace but the developing layers of my epidermis. By reducing myself to a larval, infantile state, I was doing what I felt I was expected to do, and what would please the therapist."

The process of therapy was in many ways limiting for Gordon. "I felt the powerful reductive suction of psychoanalytic thinking," she notes. "My years of psychotherapy had taught me to move away from the future toward the past, away from the cognitive toward the emotional, away from the complex toward the simple, away from the sophisticated toward the primitive, away from the active and toward the passive—away from the world and toward the self."

Interactions between patient and therapist are no less ambivalently portrayed: "He [Dr. B., her last therapist and the only one she had chosen as an adult] was getting off, no doubt, on the idea of rescuing me from my thralldom to a distinguished dead practitioner. This was the supplanter's story so familiar to the profession." The psychiatrist from whom Dr. B. was rescuing Gordon was Leslie Farber, the practitioner she had started with at Austen Riggs and continued with for many years as an outpatient in New York City. This relationship with Dr. B. raises issues about boundaries and boundary violations that Gordon glosses over.

Gordon uses Farber to describe Austen Riggs. In a biting paragraph, she writes, "What bothered him was that Stockbridge was such a Potemkin Village. There were no jobs here, no industry, unless you counted tourism and mental illness. Everyone seemed to be rich and idle. Or at least idle, he amended; he had encountered a few toothless rustics lounging outside Nejaimes, the general store—placed there by the Chamber of Commerce, no doubt."

What about the accuracy of Gordon's portrayal of places and people in Mockingbird Years? Of course, any autobiography is not a recounting of facts but a recounting of perspective. Having been a student at Williams College and lived in Williamstown, having spent a summer at Austen Riggs on a medical school clerkship just a few years after Gordon was a patient there, and having spent many years in the areas of New York City that Gordon describes, I can say that much in her book rings true. Her portrait of the medical director of Austen Riggs, whom she does not name, is so well painted in words that anyone who has ever met the man would instantly recognize him in the description. A professor emeritus at Williams College told me that Gordon's portrayal of her father as "one of the first Jews to teach at Williams" was not quite accurate. A retired psychiatrist who spent his career on the staff of Austen Riggs took issue with Gordon's portrayal of the center.

According to the book jacket, Gordon now lives in Houston. She apparently has moved far away from the Massachusetts-New York corridor that was the venue for all her psychotherapies. Her book, however, shows how she can never move far away. Psychotherapy apparently is who she is, and it is also who she does not want to be. Mockingbird Years is a powerful, very well written portrayal of a lifetime of psychotherapy that all those involved with the profession should read.

Dr. Geller is professor of psychiatry and director of public-sector psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.