Mockingbird Years: A Life in and Out of Therapy [Paperback]

Emily Gordon's parents believed in therapy in this way. Like many parents today, they sent their daughter to therapists for what appears to be simply her being a somewhat weird, refelctive, clumsy child and, I suppose, by some rather quaint standards, a difficult adolescent. By the time she is 18, she already knows how to participate in the games therapists play, which are described sardonically and matter-of-factly through the book. The years that she should have spent in college were spent in an expensive loony bin. Gordon narrowly escapes the grim fate of some of her fellow inmates. Her account of the place shows that in the right context, dumb staff, mind-numbing boredom and the seduction of the patient role can be quite enough to destroy a young person, even when no Cuckoo's Nest drama or forced treatments occur. She is rescued by "Anti-Therapist" Dr. Leslie Farber, whom she follows when he moves to New York.

Farber as described in the book is a fascinating figure. Beyond Emily Gordon's gratitude we get a distinct impression that when he was good, he was very very good, and when he was bad, he was ruinous. He is a man with a wonderful ability to cut through humbug but who seems be a captive of his "pose" as a prohphet of authenticity, a man whose compelling severity with himself sometimes turns into cruelty to others. In her post-Farber life, during which she gets married and becomes a mother, Gordon has to go through a few extra turns of the screw before she finally lets go of the idea of therapy. Some of the disillusionment scenes are superbely comical, such as when she forces a therapist to come up with rather hypocrtical justifications for the size of his fee.

The insight gained by Gordon in her disillusionment informs her writing. She writes with admirable sensitivity to the complexity of life, resisting temptations to tie loose ends. While the book is full of introspection, it avoids the pitfalls that therapy's influence has created for anyone who wishes to write about her own life without slipping into cliches. And strangely enough, it manages not to be depressing. The other side of rejecting the idea that therapy cures all is the realization that there is more to life than can be contained in therapist's manuals. And wouldn't it be dreadful if this were not the case? Implicitly, Gordon, who switched from being a patient to being a writer, directs us back towards the tentative comfort of reading literature, which may in a way be about embracing life as the insolvable thing it is.

Emily Fox Gordon writes beautifully. Of her early life with her mother she remembers... "When she bathed my brother and me, she floated candles anchored in halved walnut shells in the bathtub. She turned off the lights, lit the candles, and stood smoking a cigarette in a shadowy corner of the bathroom as we sat in the midst of a small shining armada."

But things did not remain idyllic. As she grew up, her parents abandoned her emotionally--Gordon's mother became addicted to pills and alcohol, and her father involved in a high-level career. She became depressed, attempted suicide, and thus ensued many years of classical therapy.

Fortunately, Ms. Gordon finally worked with Dr. Leslie Faber, a psychiatrist who helped wean her from her dependence on classical therapy via his "talking" method. Later, Dr. B. helped her end her dependance on Dr. Faber. She says of Dr. B., "like the Cheshire cat, he began to vaporize, leaving nothing behind but a glow of unconditional positive regard....In resisting his impulse to lure me back into the charted territory of psychoanalytic explanation, he granted me my wish to be realeased into the wilds of narrative."

Ms. Gordon's wonderful book is the result.

While there is much about therapy which needs to be addressed, to make such sweeping, cynical statements about a very complex process is, at best, still living on that great river called DEnial.

Hope Ms. Gordon finally managed to get a life without relegating her deceased analyst to Sacred Icon status.

Needless to say, I am someone who benefited from good therapy. So, I have a hard time seeing someone with Ms. Fox's talents still seeing life in such either/or and black/white terms. bathwater.

Reader beware. Bitterness and much suppressed rage runs rampant throughout this very witty, supposedly detached look at the therapeutic process.