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From the archives

This Is America

A promissory note not yet paid

The Silver Scream

On heebie-jeebies past and present

Talk Therapy

A memoir of psychoanalysis reveals its transformative power.

Kwame McKenzie

The Last Asylum: A Memoir of Madness in Our Times

Barbara Taylor

Penguin

295 pages, softcover

ISBN: 9780143191599

Barbara Taylor’s new book highlights a very personal inner journey.

It is about how a person can move from dreaming about her therapy session like this:

I arrive at my session fit to be tied, as the saying goes. I lower myself on to the couch and go very still. Then I hurl into action. I throw myself at V [her therapist], punching him in the chest, biting his face, kicking his balls, twisting his arms until they snap. Finally, in an ecstasy of fury, I devour him wholesale, beginning with his head. Afterwards I lie satiated, shaking, listening to him breathing quietly behind me. The tumult subsides, my heart rate slows; another kind of image appears in my mind’s eye.

And eventually leave that therapy years later like this:
V: You’re telling me you can...

Kwame McKenzie is the medical director at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and a professor at the University of Toronto.

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