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Very Very Short Stories
In this issue, a psychiatrist, two psychoanalysts, and a medical student each contribute a short story. The writers share not only an interest in psychology but also a gift for creative expression, each with his or her own distinct voice. Three of the stories are meditations on real people. The fourth is a piece of pure fiction suggested by a well-known painting from the 1960s.
In writing about his psychiatrist father, Mark Singer, also a psychiatrist, draws an inner portrait of a man who strongly influenced him. “When my dad retired, I inherited some of his patients. Writing about him was a bittersweet experience that evoked the notion of memory and the passage of time. My father took great interest in the stories of people’s lives and seemed particularly moved by nostalgic experience. He seemed to find comfort in the ways that a feeling of loss could be paradoxically linked to a feeling of pleasure. And how a sense of longing for the past could be affectionately fastened to a quality of hope for the future.” Mark Singer wrote this story in the months before his father died.
Francoise Jaffe, who has just completed the four-year training program at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP), uses creative writing to better understand a gift of handmade puppets a patient sent to her after leaving therapy. “What drove me to write the story is the haunting and lingering emotions that the puppets create. I feel a strong pull towards them. My patient’s artistic gift is undeniable. But for me, his artistry is mingled with my deep affection for him—an emotion I could never express because he was such a difficult patient, and because he was a patient. But now I am free. Free to write, to touch, to gaze, and to daydream. He has given me tools to understand him and my relationship to him in a highly unusual way: a multi-sensory window on his and my souls. The puppets remind me that therapy is always an unfinished business.”
Roger Salerno is a pro