CBR17 Bingo: Red – Behold, the cover.
Robert Lindner, a prominent psychoanalyst during the 1940s, relates five unusual cases he has worked on – a murderer, a Communist, a bulimic, a Fascist, and a physicist who believed he was living a parallel life as overlord of a distant star system.
I’m not sure where I heard of this book – most likely through the case of “Kirk Allen,” whose story of science fiction delusion is related in the final chapter of the book. While it was a bestseller at the time, it’s sunk to obscurity now that Freudian techniques have fallen mostly out of practice. Certainly while I find Freud’s theories interesting, they are not at all convincing to me.
Luckily, you don’t need to be a believer to enjoy this book. The cases that Lindner describes are interesting just in their stories, both because we delve into the brains of the patients with almost a voyeuristic intensity and because we get a snapshot of how people lived and how they thought during this era. Lindner’s tone is compassionate, if vaguely paternalistic – and his writing verges on psychological horror at points, especially during “Solitaire,” the story of the bulimic Laura. You find yourself feeling terribly unsettled at some point or another during each case at the fragility of the human mind and the suffering these fairly average people are experiencing.
Of course, sometimes you find yourself unable to move past Lindner’s dated theories about Oedipal complexes (frankly I’m convinced that Freud’s original theories are so skewed because he simply did not acknowledge the sheer prevalence of childhood sexual abuse), and consequently the ignoring of the obvious. In “The Jet-Propelled Couch” for example, I think the sexual abuse that “Kirk” suffered at the hands of his governess probably has more bearing on his delusions about his parallel life than the early death of a nanny who was a maternal figure to him. Similarly, Lindner’s treatment of his patients seems to make more sense when it drifts away from classic Freudian analysis.