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Every psychoanalyst can profit from reading this book—and so can anyone else who treats people with emotional disorders. Come to think of it, anyone will profit from reading it! It is a frank, open, honest account by an articulate, talented writer, describing what she went through as a “madwoman” who lost her grip on life. She also describes how—with a great deal of help—she worked her way out of her emotional collapse. For ten years, she shuttled back and forth among Friern Hospital, just north of London; short stays with loyal friends who refused to let her push them away, despite her outrageously destructive and (especially) self-destructive behavior; a long stretch at a mental health hostel; and, finally, a couple of brief stints at the home of a retired nurse who took in people who were recovering from severe mental illness.
Barbara Taylor's most important helpers were her very good friends, a woman psychiatrist who provided prescriptions for psychoactive medication and emotional injections of courage and optimism, and—most important of all—“Dr. V,” a psychoanalyst (who was in his mid-forties when they began) who saw her five times a week at a reduced fee for over twenty years! She spent more than half a year as an inpatient in one of the very last public asylums to succumb to the axes of cost-conscious “public