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HomeShop at BookSurgeScienceLife SciencesZoologyGeneralThe Insanity Wars |
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 Do not read this book Dec 02, 2010
By J. Kyng
I must agree with the reviewer of Honig's other book "Hard Boiled Eggs". How this book can even be available staggers me. if an author was known to have cruelly abused and spiritually destroyed another vulnerable group, (but one that has a voice, which unfortunately seriously mentally ill people do not have), it would be condemned widely. This book deserves condemnation. The acceptance of such methods by the psychiatric establishment speaks volumes about the powerlessness of patients and reminds me of the way the Catholic Church remains unwilling to confront the appalling sexual and other abuses perpetrated by priests.
This man's psychiatric qualifications are highly dubious to say the very least. His methods involve physical abuse, (including the use of cattle prods in the past) and psychological torture of patients. His mentor was the appalling Dr John Rosen, who was eventually struck off for his disgusting and brutal "treatment" including gross sexual abuse and illegal incarceration of helpless patients, in two cases resulting in patient deaths.
Please read Jeffrey Masson's "Against Therapy" for a horrifying expose of this style of "therapy". The fact that this kind of violence can be justified by some practitioners as promoting healing (when in fact it simply satisfies the narcissistic and sadistic drives of the supposed helper) only makes it all the more outrageous.
 Review-The Insanity Wars by Harold Stern PhD Feb 10, 2011
By Albert M. Honig
"Theodor Rohm"
Book Review by Harold Stern, PhD
The Insanity Wars
By Albert Honig, D.O.
It is difficult to review a book written by an old friend that incorporates the reviewer's memories and experiences which parallel and weave in and out of the reviewer's life. This book is a work of fiction that reads like a historical novel. Although the author points out that nothing in the book is intended to be a depiction of people living or dead, he cannot control the thoughts and reminisces of the reader, and so I will give free reign to mine and to the ghosts that spring up in the process.
As far as the cast of characters, there are those of the author and some of my own. We can begin with Sigmund Freud who in 1927 wrote "The Question of Lay Analysis". The issue that Freud addresses in this excellent book concerns a young Viennese pupil of his named Theodore Reik. This same pupil later arrives in New York City and becomes the founder of the National Psychological Association of Psychoanalysis of which I happen to be a member and I recall the one lecture of his that I attended. In the late 1950's a group of young Philadelphia psychiatrists traveled weekly to New York city to be in analysis and study with Reik, Albert Honig was one of these doctors and I became acquainted and ultimately friends with Dr Honig through these studies and subsequent encounters.
This part is fact. I had met, read a book, "Direct Analysis" attended one of his lectures and later learned that the psychiatrist, John Rosen, M.D., who in the late 1950's founded a unique treatment center in Bucks, County near Philadelphia, had been a fellow psychiatric resident with my analyst and teacher Dr. Hyman Spotnitz. I later met, became friends and studied with a young Princeton psychologist PhD by the name of Bert Karon who had worked with John Rosen and has since specialized in the study and treatment of schizophrenia. He is now a retired Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan. Dr Karon discussed with me many of his experiences working at the treatment center created by Dr Rosen. Upon John Rosen's retirement, Albert Honig founded, and became director of the Delaware Valley Mental Health Foundation (although not named as such). The Foundation became the locale for the main activity that encompasses this book.
I believe it is no surprise that having spent most of my professional life studying and treating psychotic individuals that I should be fascinated by the description in this book of the therapeutic work done by the psychiatrist who tells his story of challenges and hardships that have to be overcome in order for him to practice his therapeutic art. Yes, I too have worked in mental hospitals, but never with the facilities to work with psychotic patients who were given up by some of the so-called premier treatment centers as being untreatable. These were people who could not be managed without restraints because of their psychotic rage and behavior. These are impossible patients. I should know, I have had a former one of them in my practice. I marvel at the creative skill Dr Mel Lipkin in the novel brings to his work and I wish that I had some of the ingenuity needed to bring these patients back over the threshold of insanity into a chance for a decent life. A basic tenet that fuels Dr Lipkin's theory of the treatment of Psychosis is that the ability to form and sustain relationships is essential to gaining mental health. With this idea, Dr Lipkin builds cottages and hires couples to act as surrogate families for his patients at his clinic. This is an interesting idea and the book describes in good detail how this works.
Another facet of life described in the book has to do with the social forces needed to overcome the inherent stigma and intolerance that exists not only toward such patients, but also against the therapists who have the audacity to believe they can cure these so-called incurable people and do it, not behind think hospital walls, but right out there in the open.
In the story we follow the events of the young doctor in his training, his courtship of his future wife, difficulties in his marriage, and in the politics of his residency, as well as his analysis with Dr Reik who accompanies him and counsels him when he has difficulty in his work and in his life. Yes, the transference is forever.
The reader may think that this review is more about the writer than about the book, but perhaps that is what makes a book like this worth reading.
The Insanity Warsthe insanity wars
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