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ABOUT TEN YEARS AGO I had the honor and the pleasure of discussing at the William Alanson White Institute a paper by Dr. Otto Will. It was a wonderful paper, but as wonderful as that paper was, as well as the others that Dr. Will has written since then, this paper is even more profound, and of a scope so large as not to be easily grasped at a first reading of it.
Perhaps I am biased. After all, catatonia has been a particular interest of mine since my first contacts with psychiatry. Moreover, I have witnessed with disappointment in the several decades of my involvement with psychiatry an almost total neglect of the field of catatonia on the part of the psychiatric and psychoanalytic profession. And yet in my opinion nothing could be more revealing of the nadir of the human condition than the study of catatonia. In addition to all the usual psychodynamic conflicts, the drama of man appears here fully in his ethical dimension: to do or not to do. As I wrote elsewhere (Arieti, 1967) the catatonic "lives only in the fear of what he could do, and the only choice left to him which he thinks he is not choosing, is not to do."
With great mastery Dr. Will portrays the drama in the case of Kay. In a book of mine now in press, in which I deal with