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Dr. Bob is Robert Hsiung, MD,
bob@dr-bob.orgShown: posts 1 to 8 of 8. This is the beginning of the thread.
Posted by Quintal on August 22, 2008, at 16:22:19
Your post further up the board got my attention.
__________________________________________________"He made his reputation based on his experimental treatment ward for schizophrenics at the Sheppard Pratt Hospital, between 1925-29. He employed specially trained ward attendants to work with the patients to provide them with the peer relationships he believed they'd missed out on during the latency period of development. Doctors, nurses and other authority figures were banned from the ward. He believed there was a homosexual element to latency age peer relationships and that a failure to go through this stage led to self-loathing, a withdrawal from the world in fantasy and psychosis, and a failure to move on to heterosexual adjustment. Thus the patients, who were all young male homosexuals as well as schizophrenics, in their positive interactions with the attendants, also young male homosexuals, would heal the wounds from missing male intimacy as pre-adolescents."
I was impressed.
___________________________________________________That sounds very nice. Much better than aversion therapy anyway, but I wonder how he managed to set something like that up in the 1920s? Wasn't homosexuality illegal back then?
I was going to bring a copy into therapy today, but chickened out at the last minute. Luckily she started talking about identity later in the session, asking me to define myself in terms of 'I am' statements, so I got up the courage to slip in "I am gay" in there after a while. We didn't talk about any of this because she wrapped up the session soon after. I 'don't know' why it's so difficult to talk about it like that. Being so vulnerable and exposed. I'm so used to keeping myself safe.
The thing about male intimacy sounds about right. I remember lots of advances from my male friends at about the age of twelve. They were going through that homosexual phase but for some reason I never took part in it, and got left behind. I stopped speaking soon after that. This makes me realise the lack of male bonding in my life. I'm totally disconnected from my dad emotionally, at least in terms of positive emotions. I don't think there was ever much love there. I was too much like my mother.
Yeah, anyway. The last time I had any male intimacy was the night I was admitted to hospital funnily enough. A male nurse came in while I was naked in the shower cubicle, and he just went and sat on the edge of my bed as if this was perfectly normal. I felt closer to him than I have to anyone in long time. As he was leaving he opened the shower door and looked me up and down and settled on my penis. It was an odd feeling. I spent all the night wanting to have him close and hold me, stroke my hair, and more. It's weird because I fantasized about a setup similar to Sullivan's experiment. If he had of been gay and that kind of intimacy was allowed I'd have been in seventh heaven. I'm sure it would have done me more good than the tablets I was given.
Q
Posted by vwoolf on August 23, 2008, at 11:41:21
In reply to Sigismund - Harry Stack Sullivan, posted by Quintal on August 22, 2008, at 16:22:19
I found your post very interesting. I had read about Harry Stack Sullivan's work before, but this really brought it home very poignantly. Thank you. I wonder if it would have helped you to have been in a ward like the one he set up?
Without wanting to highjack your thread, I wanted to ask you if you could talk more about something you mention in passing, i.e. that you stopped talking. This happened to me when I was about 16, and I still don't really understand it. The books I have found on elective mutism always only give case studies of small children in the first years of school. I have never read about or spoken to anyone else who became mute as an adolescent. If you prefer we can talk about this via Babblemail.
Vee
Posted by Quintal on August 23, 2008, at 13:36:34
In reply to Re: Sigismund - Harry Stack Sullivan, posted by vwoolf on August 23, 2008, at 11:41:21
Your post is very welcome! What was happening around the time you stopped talking? 16 is a tricky age when we're leaving school and having to adjust to adult roles. Do you think there could have been some anxiety and self consciousness about that? For me I think it was the realization that I didn't fit in any more. That there were parts of me that weren't acceptable. I was ashamed of myself, so I guess I tried my best to dissapear. There were still elements of rebellion though, such as my frequent (and striking) changes of hair colour. I suppose I didn't want to fade away completely.
Back to elective mutism. I spoke to my family at home, well, not to have lengthy conversations with them. Maybe they hoped I was just a sulky teenager, but I think school would have let them know there was a problem. The only members of my family to challenge me over my quietness were my aunt and uncle. I used to stay with them for about two weeks of the summer holidays, and in the end they got sick of it. There was a lot of conflict and I asked to be taken back home early. They were so worried that they asked my parents to take me to the doctor, and she referred me to a child psychologist. She was a kind and sweet old lady, but a bit naive. I sat politely through something like five sessions, but I would never really open up. When she asked me if I felt better I said I was, and we left it at that.
As a side note, I found a lump on my testicle when I was 13 and was sure I had testicular cancer. I told no one though. I can't remember what exactly I was thinking at the time. My blood seemed to run cold, and I decided it would be better to die than have to go through all that treatment. Just shows how much I valued my life at that time. Now that I think about it, it was around that time that I stopped speaking. I think it began when I went back to school after the summer holidays. I eventually went to the doctor when I was 17 and she said it was just a varicose vein, but I didn't feel any better for it.
Anyway, I've talked enough about myself. I can't seem to stop it. But yes, it would have been very nice to have gone to a place like the Sheppard Pratt hospital. I think that might be the antidote to my narcissism. A bit of tenderness and affection. Someone to get in touch with the real me hiding beneath this gradiose exterior. I just can't bring myself to let people see what I'm really like. Should really talk more about this with T next session.
Tell me more about your experience.
Q
Posted by Quintal on August 23, 2008, at 16:46:28
In reply to Re: Sigismund - Harry Stack Sullivan, posted by vwoolf on August 23, 2008, at 11:41:21
Posted by Sigismund on August 25, 2008, at 19:20:14
In reply to Sigismund - Harry Stack Sullivan, posted by Quintal on August 22, 2008, at 16:22:19
Hey, I've been away.
I suppose intimacy comes in all shapes and sizes. Since physical touch was something we weren't good at back then, it is touch that does it for me.
I can remember a 70's demo when we all linked arms and sat on the road waiting for the cops to drag us off. That is comradeship I suppose, contrasted unfavourably sometimes to friendship (didn't have much of that either), but I found the feeling of being held and needed by someone else (especially a man, with which sex, I might say, I had no touch for 20 years except for punishment, such is the making of a man) so unguarded that it was intoxicating.
Posted by Sigismund on August 26, 2008, at 1:17:46
In reply to Sigismund - Harry Stack Sullivan, posted by Quintal on August 22, 2008, at 16:22:19
Harry Stack Sullivan's Contribution to Clinical Method
Leston L. Havens, M.D.
FROM AMONG SULLIVAN'S MOST IMPORTANT contributions, I want to discuss what seems to me most innovative in his working methods. First, by way of background:
1. Perhaps his fundamental observation was of transference: this did not only develop, he claimed; it was present and ubiquitous from the start. In the language of the English analytic school, introjects and projects are the building blocks of personality and social relations; or as I prefer to say, there are always "other people in the room".
2. These transferences or parataxes are based on experience. Society, not anatomy, is destiny.
3. In dealing with transferences there is no single, detached position from which interventions can be made; the observer is always a participant, reinforcing some projections, diminishing others. Therefore technical activity and flexibility are necessities.
Of course many workers have suggested active and flexible technical measures, perhaps most notably Ferenczi.
Posted by Sigismund on August 26, 2008, at 1:26:40
In reply to Re: Sigismund - Harry Stack Sullivan » Quintal, posted by Sigismund on August 25, 2008, at 19:20:14
From somewhere or other............
>Harry Stack Sullivan:
The Psychiatric InterviewIt would be a quite serious error to presume that the communication [in the psychiatric interview] is primarily verbal. The sound-accompaniments suggest what is to be made of the verbal propositions stated. ... Part of the skill in interviewing comes from a sort of quiet observation all along: "Does this sentence, this statement, have an unquestionable meaning? Is there any certainty as to what this person means?" ... The client's attitude is not in itself to be taken very seriously; many very resistant people prove to be remarkably communicative as soon as they discover that the interrogator makes some sense and that he is not simply distributing praise, blame, and so on...
I do not believe that I have had an interview with anybody in twenty-five years in which the person to whom I was talking was not annoyed during the early part of the interview by my asking stupid questions. ... A patient tells me the obvious and I wonder that he means, and ask further questions. But after the first half-hour or so, he begins to see that there is a reasonable uncertainty as to what he meant, and that statements which seem obvious to him may be remarkably uncommunicative to the other person.
They may be far worse than uncommunicative, for they may permit the inexperienced interviewer to assume that he knows something that is not the case. Only belatedly does he discover that he has been galloping off on a little path of private fantasy which clearly could not be what the patient was talking about, because now the patient is talking about something so obviously irrelevant to it.
In the psychiatric interview, it is a very good idea to know as much as possible about the patient. It is very much easier to do therapy if the patient has caught on to the fact that you are interested in understanding something of what he thinks ails him, and also what sort of person his more admiring friends regard him to be, and so on.
- Harry Stack Sullivan
Quotes picked up from Harry Stack Sullivan: 'Basic Concepts in the Psychiatric Interview' in The Essential Psychotherapies (ed. Daniel Goleman & Kathleen Riordan Speeth), 1982
Posted by Sigismund on August 26, 2008, at 1:39:52
In reply to Re: Sigismund - Harry Stack Sullivan, posted by Sigismund on August 26, 2008, at 1:26:40
From somewhere else.......
Treating Schizophrenia
Sullivan believed personality and personality disturbance were a function of interpersonal relations. Unlike Freud, he insisted later periods, especially adolescence, were as critical as the first five years for personality development. Since he believed mental illnesses were a "problem-solving" reaction to an unbearable situation, Sullivan insisted schizophrenia, no matter how bizarre, could be treated. He is recognized as the psychiatrist who removed schizophrenia from the class of incurable disorders, unlike Freud, who believed schizophrenia was untreatable because his "talking therapy" was useless with people who could not communicate rationally. Sullivan's contributions to the technique of clinical interviewing pioneered efforts to understand and help the severely disturbed. Sullivan was also the first to suggest that the therapist could be a greater participant in helping the patient cope with his behavior, instead of merely striving to understand it. His orientation deemphasized biology and sexuality in explaining human behavior, and his new theory of the importance of interpersonal relations revolutionized psychiatry by broadening its relevance to social problems and helped to bring it into the modern age.
Source:Helen Swick Perry, Psychiatrist of America, the Life of Harry Stack Sullivan (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1982).
>Since he believed mental illnesses were a "problem-solving" reaction to an unbearable situationInteresting hey?
Whaddya think?
You mean life has purpose?
This is the end of the thread.
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