Now the desire to kill oneself and to assassinate, poison, obliterate or rape others is generally considered in the psychiatric profession as `unhealthy.' Bad. Evil. More accurately, sin. When you have the desire to kill yourself, you are supposed to see and `accept it,' but not, for Christ's sake, to kill yourself. If you desire to have carnal knowledge of a helpless teenybopper, you are supposed to accept your lust, and not lay a finger on even her big toe. If you hate your father, fine but don't slug the bastard with a bat. Understand yourself, accept yourself, but do not be yourself.

It is a conservative doctrine, guaranteed to help the patient avoid violent, passionate and unusual acts and to permit him a prolonged, respectable life of moderate misery. In fact, it is a doctrine aimed at making everyone live like a psychotherapist. The thought nauseated me.

These trivial insights actually began to form in the weeks following my first unexplained plunge into depression, a depression ostensibly produced by a long writing block on my `book,' but actually part of a general constitution of the soul that had been a long time building up. I remember sitting at my big oak desk after breakfast each morning before my first appointment reviewing my past accomplishments and future hopes with a feeling of scorn. I would take off my glasses end, reacting to both my thoughts and the surrealistic haze which became my visual world without my glasses, I would intone dramatically, `Blind! Blind! Blind!' and bang my boxing glove-sized fist down on the desk with a dramatic crash.

I had been a brilliant student throughout my educational career, piling up academic honors like my son Larry collects bubble-gum baseball cards. While still in medical school I published my first article on therapy, a well-received trifle called The Physiology of Neurotic Tension.'