Lauren Slater and "Creative Non-fiction" Welcome to My Country 1997 Prozac Diary 2000 Spasm: A Memoir with Lies 2001 Opening Skinner's Box 2004
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Lauren Slater and "Creative Non-fiction" Welcome to My Country 1997 Prozac Diary 2000 Spasm: A Memoir with Lies 2001 Opening Skinner's Box 2004
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By Michael Murray
1.
Psychology
Lauren Slater is a working psychologist. She also has a facility for language
that lends a quality to clinical writing not normally encountered there.
Her debut,
Welcome,.. gave an articulate, humane and enlightening glimpse into the veiled
world of psychology.
Our language allows us the descriptive terms 'madness', 'insanity'; our
classical reasoning unwraps these into degrees and definitions of
states.Research, its working manual, the DSM, the field guide to American
Psychiatry, lists tests and categories of illness.
Welcome introduces us to the Slater style; it gives us a 'take' on psychology which, because we know so little of its world, we therefore accept as the given. She is an engaging writer, deeply engrossed in her subject, very capable with her clients.
She can also be a little disconcerting; we glimpse her physical life: working with a sex-addicted client she studies her body in private, naked before a mirror. The psychologist as a woman, with own sexual life.This subtext of the subjective self runs through all her books.
The following books, Prozac., and Spasm, take us deeper into disconcerting
realms. The latter book constantly tugs the rug from beneath us. We read how
from early adolescence she experienced increasingly disabling
epilepsy. She has a tough vulnerability, a psyche much picked over by
professionals. She lays open the personality traits epilepsy saddled her with,
the constant attention seeking, petty theft of 'tokens', compulsive lying,
hyperbole..The surgery to control the epilepsy was severe: to split the brain's
hemispheres to localise its origin, then a lifetime of suppressant drugs.
The cost of this is most evident in her fears for her unborn child; coming off the medication becomes ungovernable, yet the chances of affecting the child are great.These are the dilemmas germane to our lives: questions of 'quality of life'; 'assisted suicide'; abortion; euthanasia.The medicine also robs some patients of sexual desire. The sex-addicted client; she questions herself, does this give her an edge in objectivity? Or does it place some experiences out of reach?
Her explorations
are most successful in Skinner's Box. There is a greater seeming objectivity;
the self has a more distinct role and position. Skinner's Box explores ten key
psychological experiments. She begins with B F Skinner, and what has become
known as Behaviourism. She seeks out the people involved, outlines their lives,
aims.There is a follow-through structure to the book, from Behaviourism, how
cults work, social, then institutionalized responsibilities, surrogacy in
monkeys, the addictive personality, memory and false memory, and lastly
that great bug-bear, lobotomy.
2 Creative
Non-fiction
Lauren Slater is a writer.
"Creative non-fiction" is her term, it lets her stake out her writer's territory in the landscape of psychology.
Feedback on
Skinner's Box sees Robert Spitzer, consulted on Rosenhan's work on psychiatric
diagnoses, saying:
".I have written about DSM-111 (a clinical textbook). I have never said it was
"scientific" or "stringent". DSM-111 facilitates scientific study but it makes
no sense to say it is itself "scientific". Stringent is a word I never use."
Elizabeth Loftus' response to the chapter on her work on false-memory syndrome points out: "Slater quotes me. saying that 25% of the sample is a "statistically significant minority". (I) would never say something so scientifically improper."
But also:
"Slater refers to the woman who yelled "whore" (at me) in the airport. No woman ever yelled "whore: at me in an airport." Sticklers for facts and details, except in this case the details are wrong, the setting was an alleyway. What we have here are the professionals looking for their same exact formulations in what is, by nature, an inexact 'popular science' book.Lauren Slater is not writing textbooks. She weaves a humanising tale around cold and clinical data. She finds the human being behind our now monster B F Skinner. She gives the heroin- addicted rats in their maze quality of life. She gives the heartrending and often unacknowledged toil behind Loftus' work. The professionals jealously and rightly guard their reputations; it is their legitimacy amongst their peers is at risk. Lauren Slater maybe inadvertently ruffles their hair. It is inherent in their area of work, the value-laden and murky world of the sense of the self.
The Freudian contention is that lies, hyperbole, reconfabulate the basic data of the sense of self, that language, by playing off its varied roots against each other can reveal, as much as fog, that sense.
Stanley Milgram's electric-shock experiments in Obedience and Authority ostracised him for many years. It was morally challenging work.We still do not know if it had any value.
Maybe it is best we keep an eye on these people.