Böcker av Richard Reichbart

"In an age in which truthtelling has been under siege, Richard Reichbart-scholar, teacher, author, President of a major psychoanalytic institute-tells a truth many would choose to hide. This memoir offers us his own personal experience with psychosis over a three year period when he was in his twenties. He graphically portrays both the feel and the logic of a psychotic episode foreshadowed by his separation from college and from law school and ultimately precipitated by the loss of his beloved grandfather. His search for his identity led him to the Navajo reservation which was 'ideal for the nurturance of my psychosis.' He gives testimony to the help he received from two outstanding psychoanalysts who worked with him to unpack and weave together the effects of childhood events and fantasies on his adult personality. A book for those at all levels of psychoanalysis, one that demonstrates the possibility of psychoanalyzing psychosis."- JANICE LIEBERMAN, PHD"In this brave and unflinchingly honest memoir, the eminent senior psychoanalyst Richard Reichbart takes us with him when as a young man he descended into madness and then recovered his sanity through psychoanalysis. A law school graduate in search of something or someone he had lost, he wanders into a years long abyss of hidden meanings and uncertain identity. Frightened and alone, he has the good fortune of finding the help he needs. This memoir of madness is unique in its multiple perspectives. Reichbart first wrote about how he understood his psychosis soon after recovery, and now many years later writes about it again with a much deeper and more nuanced understanding after a second analysis and with the wisdom of age and experience. Some readers find it uncomfortable to confront the fact that a healer of minds, a psychoanalyst, had once been so troubled. But I can assure those readers Dr. Reichbart is not alone, and his story is a powerful testament to the curative power of a psychoanalytic relationship."-MICHAEL MOSKOWITZ, PHD

Some background. I am a psychologist and psychoanalyst. For the past thirty years, I have been in private practice, treating children, adolescents and adults in Ridgewood, New Jersey, a suburban town not too far from New York City.I have had experiences which figure in some of these stories. Before becoming a psychoanalyst, I was an attorney who lived and worked on the Navajo and Hopi reservations in Arizona and New Mexico. I also represented Native Americans in Denver, Colorado.In addition,. I was a civil rights worker in 1965 for the Southern Christian Leadership Council, Martin Luther King’s organization, primarily working out of Atlanta and also in Fort Valley, Georgia, a small town south of Atlanta. For that matter, I have always enjoyed diverse culture, and have often tried on vacations to explore other cultures than my own, which also figures in some of these stories.Last, I have an abiding interest in parapsychology or the study of psychic phenomena. I have written academically on the subject and taught it and advocated that psychoanalysts and mental health professionals in general be more aware of these phenomena. Psychic phenomena plays a role in a few of the stories contained here.The short stories and poems were written after a work day of seeing patients or on weekends. In ways that are not at all obvious, my patients over the years have inspired some of them, In psychoanalysis, in writing short stories, in crafting poetry, my hope has always been to approach the intimate heart of our lives and of living, with both its terror and beauty; and to question our Western society assumptions of how our world (and our being in it) is constructed. Psychoanalysis, parapsychology, anthropology, and short stories and poems — at their best — lead to us wonder about the world. Hopefully, this collection will inspire the reader to wonder too.

Enjoins us to recognize psi phenomena such as telepathy, precognition and apparitions in our lives and to integrate our understanding of them into psychoanalytic theory and clinical work, literary studies, and anthropology. He investigates psi as it expresses itself in dreams, unconscious dynamics, psychic photography, and precognition and provides instances from his clinical practice.