Mockingbird Years: A Life in and Out of Therapy

Rating:
Summary: beautiful writing...emotionally out of touch
Review: a hyper-intellectual author with a flair for exquisite writing, writing a mostly dull memoir, with its most interesting part being her whopping idealization/idolization of her semi-famous therapist Leslie Farber (he symbolically = her parents), who seemed to have primarily his own best interests at heart as he performed her therapy. She seemed to start to dabble with this thought by the end of the book, but didn't really run with it at all. Although I found the book readable (primarily because I was interested in reading about the behind-the-scenes Farber), I found her life dull primarily because I felt she wasn't really accessing her deeper emotional issues, and was mostly just skimming across the emotional surface, and distracting the reader from that fact by her gorgeous, poetic writing...

aside: that both her parents (and her brother) went to swarthmore came as a surprise to me, but shouldn't have. I went to swarthmore too, and found it a highly emotionally uninspiring and dead place, with most of its residents and the institution itself troubled but masked behind a veneer of intellectual brilliance.

Rating:
Summary: Howling in the Therapeutic Wilderness
Review: A very fine book indeed. Gordon's prose is sparkling, natural, and revelatory. There are enough fine turns of phrase in this relatively brief book to fill a small notebook.

Mockingbird Years is an excellent account and ruthless critique of therapy as a way of life. Gordon has attained a level of frankness about herself that derives from her years in therapy, and a ruthless honesty about the limits of -- indeed the ultimate hollowness of -- therapy as a way of life. Gordon's utter candor about her own driftlessness, manipulativeness (the trait that accounts for the title), and neediness account for the negative reactions that some reviewers have formed of her by her own hand. But they give her account its ultimate moral credibility.

What determined Leslie Farber's power in Gordon's life was the fact that his relationship to his patients (at least to this one) was on moral/existential one rather than a therapeutic one. He simply engaged her as a human being, and left her responsible for the rest. The resolution of her account is her final assumption of responsibility for and embracing of life on its terms, rather than on therapeutic terms.

Her account of her relationship with her last therapist, Dr. B, is not unsympathetic to his therapeutic approach or to him personally. She simply found his approach to derive from a therapeutic zeitgeist that is not grounded in any full concept of the human being in the world.

While the account is not a period piece as such, those Boomers who were teens and young adults during the late 60s and early 70s will be interested in her take on the times.

The ultimate validation of Gordon's critique of the therapeutic culture and its bastard offspring (e.g., the recovery movement) will be the fact that her book is sure to be used in the education and training of therapists. There is probably no group more avidly devouring Mockingbird Years than aspiring therapists. But in their striving to read her account as a set of hints for improved therapeutic technique, they will miss her point entirely.

Rating:
Summary: hard to put down
Review: I am a therapist and work at an inpatient psychiatric facility. I often read first person accounts of therapy or life with mental illness, etc. I found this book refreshingly free of jargon and diagnosis. It also provided an interesting perspective on the changes that have occurred in mental health treatment since the 1960s. The author's depiction of herself at the brink of adulthood so closely describes many persons that I see today. The fact that she has walked so far away from the life she led then is encouragement both for today's 'patients' and for all the therapists who seek to help them. It was hard for me to put the book down; I read it in 2 days.

Rating:
Summary: Listen to the Mockingbird...
Review: Mockingbirds are notorious for their propensity to mimic almost any sound. I believe Ms. Gordon uses the mockingbird as metaphor for the patient who becomes dependent on therapy and interacts with the therapist by saying and doing imitative things she "learns" through therapy. Ms. Gordon sees modern times as the age of therapy, when "healing" and "conseling" are seen as ways to cure anything and everything. She suggests classical therapy robs the patient of creative individuality, of the ability to be imaginative

Emily Fox Gordon writes beautifully. Of her early life with her mother she remembers... "When she bathed my brother and me, she floated candles anchored in halved walnut shells in the bathtub. She turned off the lights, lit the candles, and stood smoking a cigarette in a shadowy corner of the bathroom as we sat in the midst of a small shining armada."

But things did not remain idyllic. As she grew up, her parents abandoned her emotionally--Gordon's mother became addicted to pills and alcohol, and her father involved in a high-level career. She became depressed, attempted suicide, and thus ensued many years of classical therapy.

Fortunately, Ms. Gordon finally worked with Dr. Leslie Faber, a psychiatrist who helped wean her from her dependence on classical therapy via his "talking" method. Later, Dr. B. helped her end her dependance on Dr. Faber. She says of Dr. B., "like the Cheshire cat, he began to vaporize, leaving nothing behind but a glow of unconditional positive regard....In resisting his impulse to lure me back into the charted territory of psychoanalytic explanation, he granted me my wish to be realeased into the wilds of narrative."

Ms. Gordon's wonderful book is the result.

Rating:
Summary: Middle Aged? Still Blame Your Parents? Buy This Book
Review: While the writing is certainly readable, it isn't without frustration. There were times I wanted to shake the author out of her deulded state. I do think there comes a point in your life when you have to accept the things that have happened and move on. Parents are not perfect. Find me a person who thinks their parents made all the correct child rearing decisions. That person is lying. While the author does not blame all her troubles on her family, these are the moments that scream the loudest. It's okay to pout about your parents and how they raised you, but to write a book about it after the age of nineteen suggests a deeper problem.