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This book is a unique work of criticism: an investigation by a psychiatrist linking a poet's mental illness and his work, informed by access granted by the poet to the records of his 8-month psychiatric hospitalization, and also that of his mentally ill mother.
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) received inpatient treatment at the New York State Psychiatric Institute (PI) for 8 months in 1949-1950 (age 33). I was at PI in 1961 as a medical student doing research, from 1965 to 1968 as a resident, and from 1970 onward, completing my psychoanalytic training and as a Columbia Medical School faculty member. Stevan Weine was a Columbia medical student from 1983 to 1987, during which I encouraged and mentored him. He met Ginsberg in 1987, as he began this project before leaving for his psychiatric residency at Yale New Haven Hospital. Ginsberg's mother Naomi (1894-1956) had died in 1956 during a hospitalization at Pilgrim State Hospital after a prefrontal lobotomy in 1948. One of the startling discoveries of Weine's research is that Allen Ginsberg signed the permission for the procedure, which was widely done then and abandoned later. Ginsberg himself was a potential candidate for lobotomy, and so was a patient with schizophrenia I saw during my residency (Forrest, 1969). Fortunately neither was lobotomized.
Ginsberg's two most famous poems were yet to come when he was hospitalized in 1949. “Howl” in 1956 is said to be “the poem that changed America” (p. 135), and “Kaddish” in 1961, said to be his best, is a disturbing and ambivalent elegiac prayer for his mother.
Ginsberg was an anxious man who guiltily wanted to be jailed and punished, when he was admitted to PI with a recommendation by Jacques Barzun, who recognized his literary ability. It was a plea settlement after charges of property stolen by a sociopathic roommate. The
fifth, or “genius,” floor at PI was devoted to psychoanalytic psychotherapy as well as medication of promising, often brilliant young patients. Allen felt