Don’t Fear the Freudians
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In back was a burnished mahogany mantle and a closed-up fireplace with a foot-high rust-colored gargoyles acting as bookends. They didn’t do their job sufficiently so numerous novels, anthologies, tomes, essay collections, short stories, poems, memoirs, chapbooks featuring both rhyming and free verse works, spilled over and helped distract the sometimes daft, sometimes silly, sometimes brilliant young adult clients.
The sheer number of memoirs on depression, self-harm, eating disorders, alcohol abuse, problem gambling, opioids, and surviving violence of some sort were considerable, along with young people gifting their favorite choices once a year to us, the caregivers, usually on a holiday, perhaps Thanksgiving or Christmas or Hanukah. They’d giftwrap them in fancy bookstore paper or in plastic bags, or aluminum foil, or the pages of the Sunday comics to their favorite counselors, teachers, MSW’s, shrinks, life-coaches, personal trainers, principals, postal workers, or even their specialized cardiac surgeons, cashiers, busboys, ushers or pilots.
Whether it was William Styron, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Kay Jamison, or even Augustan Burroughs and his raucous and moving Running with Scissors. Oh, how the young reader’s minds identified with the tortured authors, which pulsed with spirit and tenacity. 
“When they come to be here with us at the Institute in Hartford, it needs to be like an oasis for them, a beacon in the night, so right away we must establish that they are no longer mental patients, but CLIENTS.” Dr. Legg had insisted on that term being used daily, and I’d heard him say it a hundred times, easy. 
“Tell me your latest confession,” I said to Jillian. Finding a seat in my office, she adjusted her artfully placed Houston Texans baseball cap. She hailed from Corpus Christi and had a cherubic face with blondish-brown curls which fell about her cheeks in a beguiling way. She was twenty, and five foot even, and sometimes she talked out the side of her mouth, but her laughter was an unashamed cackle and she rarely held back. She had been at our hospital for twenty-three months, which was not unusual back in the day, and she was also a featured client, employee, and a burgeoning star, which was a point of contention to many in the clinic and beyond. 
Should a group of mostly male white shrinks promote an attractive young woman who struggles with serious mental health issues, and reward that curvy woman on a fictional TV show for being a provocateur kind of character? It’s a visceral topic which divided many in the community and at the clinic, and from the professionals across the country and around the world, too. Days ago, New York Times Sunday magazine featured a cover photo of Dr. Legg embracing Phin at the base of the Powder Ridge Mountain reading, “Dr. Legg and Don’t Fear the Freudians: A Ratings Juggernaut Charms the Nation Each Week, But Is it Ethical and Does It Do More Harm Than Good?” 
The show was broadcast once a week at 10 p.m. and on that particular eve of Christmas Eve, it was the most watched show on television, beating everyone else.
“Are we rolling here, Doc?” Jillian asked, before sitting on a comfy recliner.
“Fire away,” I said.
“Yesterday, I devoured Ritz crackers and a toasted cinnamon-raisin bagel with light cream cheese off the hard-on of a twenty-one-year-old bulimic actor named, Ned, from Venice Beach, California.”
“What time did this occur?” I asked.
“Around 3:54 p.m.,” Jillian said. “I skipped out on our Assertiveness Training Skills.”
“How come?”
“Those classes are excruciatingly boring and youthful desire had me feeling frisky and jumpy,” Jillian said. “Ned was cute, and his aunt ran an upscale bakery in West Hartford and they had a surplus of toasted cinnamon-raisin bagels on hand.”
“In hindsight, was he a worthwhile mate?” I asked.
“No, it was a poor choice.”