Read Online Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker - Free Book Online

gassed with carbon dioxide or concentrated oxygen (the so-called “gas cure”). The gold standard of treatment, in the 1930s, had beeninsulin shock therapy, in which the patient was injected with insulin to induce a short coma; the theory was that regular treatments, a coma a day, might slowly chip away at the effects of psychosis.Then came the lobotomy, the severing of the nerves of a patient’s frontal lobes—which, as the British psychiatrist W. F. McAuley delicately put it, “deprives the patient of certain qualities with which, and perhaps because of which, he has failed to adapt.”
    Their counterparts searching for the biological cause of schizophrenia weren’t treating their patients any better. In Germany, EmilKraepelin, the dementia praecox pioneer, had opened an institute to research a hereditary link to the disease and had turned up little to nothing. A researcher at his institute,Ernst Rüdin, became a major figure in the eugenics movement, among the first to argue for sterilizing the mentally ill. A student of Rüdin’s named Franz Josef Kallmann went even further: Preaching eugenics in the United States after the war,Kallmann called for sterilizing even “nonaffected carriers” of a gene for schizophrenia, once such a gene was found. The leadership of biological psychiatry seemed settled on the idea that mentally ill people weren’t people at all. *
    In the face of such troubling social forces, it’s hardly surprising that Freud-inspired analysts like Fromm-Reichmann rejected the idea of a biological basis of schizophrenia completely. Why should psychiatry sign on to a scientific discipline that treated humans like horses to be selected for breeding? Instead, Fromm-Reichmann believed that patients, deep down, wanted a cure—that they were waiting to be helped, like a wounded bird or a frail child in need of understanding. “Every schizophrenic has some dim notion of the unreality and loneliness of his substitute delusionary world,” she wrote. And the therapist’s mission—a high-minded undertaking thata new vanguard of American psychoanalysts soon embraced—was to break through the barriers the patient had erected and save them from themselves.
    In 1948, Chestnut Lodge admitted a teenage girl namedJoanne Greenberg, who would go on to bring Fromm-Reichmann a measure of immortality. Greenberg’s 1964 best-seller, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden —a fictionalized memoir, she later called it—was the story of a teenage girl named Deborah Blau who is trapped in the delusional kingdom of Yr. Deborah believes herself to be possessed by an outside force, much the way Daniel Paul Schreber felt that he had been, a half century earlier. (“There were other powers contending for her allegiance,” Greenberg writes.) Deborah seems walled off from the world forever until her therapist, Dr. Fried—a thinly disguised Fromm-Reichmann, with a surname unmistakably echoing Freud —breaks through and rescues her. Dr. Fried understands young Deborah’s demons—their source and their reason for being. “The sick are all so afraid of their own uncontrollable power!” Dr. Fried muses in the novel. “Somehow they cannot believe that they are people, holding only a human-sized anger!”
    What Dr. Fried does for Deborah in this book influenced a generation of psychotherapists. Like Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker, Dr. Fried was a model of insight, compassion, and drive—patiently, ardently connecting with her patient, cracking her particular code. One of the keys, the doctor concludes, is recognizing that the girl’s own parents had unwittingly fanned the flames of mental illness in their daughter. “Many parents said—even thought—that they wanted help for their children, even to show, subtly or directly, that their children were part of a secret scheme for their own ruin,” the doctor reflects in the pages of Greenberg’s novel. “A child’s independence is too big a risk for the shaky