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Autobiographies traditionally present the writer's view of feelings, memories, crucial life events, pivotal and shaping relationships, memories and chronology, along with family histories. In this second edition of Robert Coles's The Mind's Fate: A Psychiatrist Looks at His Profession, he presents us with 40 essays that span 30 years of his clinical and theoretical development. Thus we have another perspective for understanding him and his many contributions to his specialty as well as to related fields where a psychoanalytic and psychodynamic orientation enriches our knowledge and insights. This retrospective covers the years of 1961 to 1995.
Robert Coles was 31 years old when he wrote the first essay of this collection. He had gone to medical school with the intention of becoming a pediatrician. After working with children who had leukemia and polio, he recognized that these seriously ill children wanted to talk with their doctors—questioning them about life, sickness, and a host of other topics. During a two-year stint in the military service, he worked in an Air Force neuropsychiatric hospital