History Psychology

Fires in the Dark: Healing the Unquiet Mind

Kay Redfield Jamison is a well-known psychotherapist at Johns Hopkins who herself famously suffers from bipolar disorder. In 1996, she wrote eloquently about her journey in An Unquiet Mind. In this book, she posits the idea that to be most effective, healers – the doctors, counselors, and leaders – need to be healed themselves. To support her argument, she provides life narratives of many such eminent people, with a focus on the early-to-mid twentieth century.

Jamison uses historical stories to illustrate that many of the best healers are sufferers, too. She explores the phenomenon known as “shell shock” in World War I. At the time, soldiers experiencing this were sent away from the front to heal. Strangely, those who are healed were immediately sent back to the front to fight and often die. At the time, physicians and nurses saw this inherent contradiction in their work. Their task from the military enabled more dreary death.

Many of these discursions serve as meditations, almost like short homilies in a memorial service. They are not overtly directional but instead meander, much like a psychotherapeutic encounter. The psychiatrist WHR Rivers plays a leading role in this discourse, and other well-known topics include Paul Robeson, Notre Dame Cathedral, Siegfried Sassoon, ancient Greek medicine, and William Osler. In the epilogue, Jamison says that she started out to write a book about healing, but she ended up writing a book about healers.

This work will disappoint readers who like a structured, orderly writing style that engages contemporary debates. It’s well-researched and interesting, but it’s neither controversial nor trending. It’s more about circumspectly peering into others’ private lives to find how they find healing. Her thesis that those healed make the best healers is echoed throughout the centuries, but is strangely forgotten in modern medical training, with all its focus on objectivity and evidence. In practice, healing remains as much of an art as a science, particularly in fields like psychiatry and psychotherapy. Jamison, a provider and receiver of life-healing aid, reminds us of this thematic strand in history. I think her contribution here contains an idea that deserves to be heard and reflected upon.

Fires in the Dark: Healing the Unquiet Mind
By Kay Redfield Jamison
Narrated by Beth Hicks
Copyright (c) 2023
Random House Audio
ASIN B0BKXPK4V4
Length: 7:58
Genre: History, Psychology
www.amazon.com