Re: It's like falling in love all over again...

Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Mon, 30 Mar 1998 12:43:48 -0500

> Brendan, I am familiar with students haveing probs with holden and ask
> them to write a letter of advice to holden to help them see what they see
> as wrong as more than just finger pointing...

I swear that this is not a made-up tale.

I spent an evening last week in the pleasant company of a psychiatrist --
actually, someone who specializes in medicine and is an expert in that type
of treatment of emotional disorders.  He was one of those lunatic geniuses
who speaks the way a broken water pipe gushes water uncontrollably.  He had
no idea about my involvement with this list or my knowledge of JDS.

He was making (among ten thousand others) the point that the right kind of
psychopharmacology can help many, many depressed people far more than talk
therapy can, and he said, "You know the book The Catcher in the Rye?  If
they had been able to treat Holden Caulfield with [the type of molecular
structure he was expounding on], the book would have been this:"

Then he brought his palms to about two inches apart to indicate the length
of the tale (not the thickness of the book).  He said, "It would have been
a short story."

He went on to talk IN DETAIL about some of Holden's behavioral patterns,
and then linked each to how this particular chemical structure works in the
brain.

As a friend of ours said, "God, I wish you could have been there."

Whether you do or don't think Holden fits a category of "mental illness"
(and I myself have no interest in commencing that debate, so no
bear-baiting! 8-), I found it to be a literary allusion that totally
blindsided me, coming as it did from someone who was really on a rhetorical
roll about medicine.  Not that I said a word; I barely had a chance to make
a comment.  (Think of the movie "My Dinner with Andre" with Andre Gregory
magnified a hundred-thousand times.)

--tim