Why I should be read

A preface for a memoir? Haven't decided

I fully understand how pathetic I am that I have to start my memoir by putting up a post like this one. If I were truly someone to be read it would be common knowledge. I would have all kinds of people recognizing I have something to say. That doesn’t happen enough. Year after year I’ve waited to be discovered in a big enough way, but few words have gone out to the public drawing readers to my writing. And time is running out. I’m 81. At Substack thousands have apparently viewed (or at least opened) my posts since I began posting a few months ago. Some of them must have read something. I check the numbers more often than I should. I also can’t help but notice some writers have tens of thousand of readers, followers, the whole works. My wife tells me my hunger for recognition is too great and I need to find satisfaction in doing the writing itself. I do enjoy that very much but still I fear that I am like the zen koan, the sound of that falling tree in an empty forest. Is there a sound if it cannot be heard?

What is bewildering to me about the lack of response I am getting, is my writing has received high praise from some publicly known, very smart people. True, I’m 81 and what interests people has changed. Answers must be quick and sweet. Meaning, as my wife keeps insisting, I should write a short article, good for a single sitting on the throne. She’s probably on the money but I don’t know how to do that. Whatever subject I attack I find plenty of quick answers but invariably a thousand more questions. I assume that is how it should be when the subject is important. No swift solutions. However, I must accept where things have gone, the importance of the sound byte, and its stepchild, 280 characters allowed in a tweet. More than that. Pictures and videos are what people are looking for. That’s what goes viral. That and terrific songs. Long long articles, complicated thoughts. Not so much. Hardly at all. Even TV commercials are edited to jump around so often that even a simple thought takes too long. The design is on immediacy, ie no thinking. That is simple fact. Like it or not, what is, is. At 81, I’m a member of a soon to be gone group with a different set of rules for communication.

Other problems. My wife’s theory is that almost everything I write presents one or more ideas that will eventually insult every reader. I don’t belong to a single camp. I praise but also piteously attack practically every group of people with sacrosanct beliefs. Including my own. I have a lot of doubts. I’m big on second thoughts. No sooner do I believe something than I consider the opposite. Doubts are not as satisfying as answers. So forget a lot of likes. Plus, I’m bound to get under people’s skin. My wife knows. She’s lived with me for a thousand years. If it shouldn’t be said, I will say it if I think it’s true. Always been that way. I insult everyone including myself. So I have to promise I will shut up around a lot of people she knows. My only defense is that precisely for that reason, readers should find illuminating ideas not found elsewhere. Too much of what people think and know never gets said out loud. So there is entertainment there. Or could be.

On the other hand. On the other hand. I am drawn to half open doors, to see things most people, including me, don’t want to see. Some people like to watch horror films, the scarier the better. I don’t but I am drawn to imagine it. My wife once put it best after reading something I had written. “Thanks a lot. Until now I was having a nice day.”

So why do I write? The purpose of this post? Basically I am saying the praise these articles have received means something. They actually contain useful clarifying insights. So readers on Substack. Take a look.

But also yes I am bragging. Perhaps I’m trying to take advantage of Suzi Weiss’ recent claim that “try-hards” may becoming acceptable: “Out with ironic distance, and in with excellence—or at least the pursuit of it.” And in with bragging (allowed to try-hards) if it serves a purpose

Here’s the bragging

Psychiatrist, Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Traveled , which topped the New York Times best seller list for an unprecedented 10 years, wrote to me that one of my articles was the best psychiatric article he had ever read. He found it so insightful that he sent a family member to me. Can’t say I helped him, maybe a little, but I tried. That article is on substack. It is very readable for the lay public and should be interesting for anyone with life’s usual tsaurus (troubles). After reading it a lot of people wanted to become my patient.

Here is what Lauren Slater, author of Prozac Diary wrote me.

“ I am genuinely happy for you that you found all those positive comments on your website and that they brought you at least some solace and some of the affirmation you have been seeking and that you absolutely deserve. I can’t say I’m surprised because I have read many of your papers over the years and unlike most professional papers they are written with uncommon clarity and a rigorous logic. They remind me of the works of Erik Kandel, not in their subject matter but in their commitment to clarity and their willingness to challenge the status quo in all the best ways. I would love nothing more than to help you amass them into a collection.”

She also, when she was a hot commodity with many readers, told me she wanted to interview me. Never happened. But in any case I like the comparison. Erik Kandel a Yeshiva boy. Erik Kandel is the only psychiatrist to win the Nobel Prize for his work. Thank you Lauren.

Right after I finished my residency I sent a newly written article to Anna Freud. She wrote back “I read immediately what you have written and found it very interesting and convincing… I have searched for the right words to describe the processes which underlie the young people’s attitudes, but I was not able to find them. I believe that you have done much better in this respect and I find myself fascinated by your elaborations.” She put the first part of that article in the yearly hard cover Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, which in the 1970s was like being chosen for the all star team. Thirteen or fourteen of the best articles in a year appear there. It was the first time in many years that someone from my training program, either faculty or trainee was published there. So that was terrific. Still young, and with an unlimited imagination I thought big things were in store for me. I just had to continue doing what I was doing.

After reading one of my articles on the subject Professor Bruce Charlton in England, at the time, editor of the iconoclastic journal Medical Hypothesis, had me write an editorial, attacking psychiatry’s “diagnosis” fetish,( placing patients in “one of 6 or 7 categories which presumably then explains everything.) Samuel Timimi included a contrarian chapter by me in his book Rethinking ADHD. A lot of substack readers here have viewed the second part of that article here. I suppose it is word of mouth. Again not a single like.

I have written numerous articles in the Psychiatric Times trying to get members of my profession to abandon group think and actually have some thoughts of their own. That has not gone over well. The official American Journal of Psychiatry has no interest in my articles. They have abandoned descriptions of individual patients. They consider them “anecdotal”, today a put down term. What they have demanded is numbers, for what they try to claim are scientific articles. Not just them. There are no longer any journals that publish rich case histories about individual patients that bring the patients to life, so that practitioners can try to understand them and their problems and share perspectives about how to treat them. Instead they speak in the name of “science,” which considering how little we understand scientifically is ridiculous. See The Myth of Scientific Psychiatry on this site regarding the absurd “scientific” status of the profession.

I don’t only write about psychiatry. In the 70’s Yale Review published an article I sent them. Recently, I was moved by something the editor of Commentary, John Podhoretz, wrote about October 7th so I sent him a very long article about Israel’s war with Hamas. Like him, my mind wouldn’t stop going after the attack. Page after page poured out of me. It still is coming. I can’t get a hold of what happened then and the aftermath, meaning I can’t quiet my confusion, anger, and sadness with understanding. I suppose there is nothing to understand. What has happened screams at every Jew. It’s called reality. Podhoretz called the article “brilliant” and published an edited shorter version in Commentary’s May issue . The short and long versions of that article are available here at substacks. I write a lot about political controversies. Probably too much. So many intelligent points are made about every flare up. And it all means so little. Who is right? Who is wrong? Endless Talmudic debate and most of it is about nonsense. There has always been a lot of belittling when there are disagreements. Competing ideas can get at the truth because those opposed to each other are looking for the weaknesses of their opponent. So in the end the competition is constructive. But now there is so much hatred.

I should add one of my idols in the past, Pauline Kael, who I read weekly in the New Yorker, wanting to know what she thought of a new movie, went wild over a movie review I sent her in the 70’s. She knew my Bank Street address from my letter, but not my phone number. She sent me a postcard telling me how much she loved what I sent her and asked me to call her immediately. The next evening we were shmoozing in her apartment on Central Park West, arguing about every movie we had liked and not liked.

She was going to get my article in the Atlantic. Don’t ask how I fucked that up but she asked for it to be lengthened. In the new draft I mentioned Freud a number of times. In her inimitable style she hated the revision. In her universe, citing Freud was a mark of mediocrity. Anyway, love or hate was the entirety of her emotional vocabulary. I didn’t understand that at the time, and sensitive creep that I was, (and still am) instead of sending a third draft I thought I had been found out (as a fraud). I didn’t contact her again for ten years. At that point I wrote to her because I vehemently disagreed with one of her reviews. Somehow she found my phone number in Croton on Hudson and we were on the phone for an hour once again talking movies. She didn’t understand what had happened, why I had disappeared. Later I read David Denby’s book about Pauline Kael. She was mentor to a bunch of young talented people, which David Denby called the Paulettes. He was one of them before he eventually became the movie critic for the New Yorker. Repeatedly she told him he was an idiot and should not plan on being a critic. He just didn’t have it. He persisted.

That wasn’t the case with David Lean, the genius behind Dr. Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia. After Kael cut his Ryan’s Daughter to shreds, he found himself unable to work for an extended period. She wasn’t wrong. His spectacular visual imagination was as spectacular as ever, thrilling really, but it somehow came across as grandiose framing of a story about an ordinary person’s drama.

Anyway, if I only had David Denby’s confidence. Well I do in my fantasies, and certainly posses his drive, but shame is a big problem for me. I too often need to hide behind my overdeveloped intellect. Or disappear. I am especially not able to cleverly orchestrate my writing career by learning to effectively use the contacts I have had to get the doors open for me. I suppose I am like an awful lot of writers. I spend my time, in my own world, pounding out word after word elaborating on something new I have realized, or that I rediscovered. That quest has served me well, but also, I have come to understand, not always well at all. I once feasted on my epiphanies. At that point I thought they were essential to understand life. I still get a charge out of a good one, but have resigned myself to accepting that none of us can truly understand our most important questions. That is just the breaks. I guess that is what turns people to God. We need certainty, perfection, a small leap of faith and voilà. The Answer.

There have been other signs that my writing is being read. I ran into the local chief of psychiatry at Danbury Hospital, not far from where I have been living for 44 years. He was totally surprised that “someone like me” lived in the area. He was very much aware of my writing and quickly asked if I would speak at the hospital. I stalled and didn’t contact him because the idea of speaking publicly isn’t something I would like to do. Particularly at my age, words I need disappear from my brain in the middle of a sentence. When writing I am fine. I can google to refind them.

Here is feedback I received about my novel After Lisa from an artist, poet and architect that I respect.

Dear Simon,
I just finished your book.
I don’t know what to say…..I am blown away by how powerful and important this story is.
So much of how you portray the health industry resonates deeply with me as I am sure it will for millions who will read it.
Your descriptions of the psych ward are so much like what I experienced when I was in Danbury back in 1985, and again briefly a couple of years ago. And the frustrations dealing with the insurance companies.
The depth and complexity of human emotions and relationships as you present is overwhelming….and so real and true.
I am also amazed about what this book reveals about who you are….and in that context I just want to say how honored I am to have met you, worked with you and been friend and architect….all the time not having realized until now the genius of what you have been laboring over.”

So there you have it. Great feedback from someone I respect which I too readily dismissed as coming from other motives. What motives? …1) to butter me up 2) to get more architectural referrals, 3) because he likes me and thought he had to say something nice. But the book–who knows? There haven’t been the millions of readers he assumed would “resonate deeply with the novel.” Probably 10 or 20 at most have read the first page.

He wrote to me when he finished one of my two (completely different ) versions of After Lisa . That was terrific, but I actually like The Ballroom and Commodore more. Both I had to self publish after I couldn’t convince a single agent, let alone a publisher to take a look at either of them. I can honestly say those books have never been rejected. Only my ten or eleven different query letters sent to probably a hundred or more agents have been glanced at and ignored. But the actual writing. No one has seen it. The same thing has happened with After Lisa. No one in the publishing world has been willing to take a look at it. But I’ve wisened up. Why bother self publishing it if I don’t have the slightest idea how to promote it. With Commodore, my first self published novel, I actually paid $12,000 to a “professional” promotion company. It was a rip off. I’m sure that is a familiar issue for many writers on this site. There is a whole industry that see vain writers as easy prey.

On the other hand, although I’ve been happy enough with many things I have written (and rewritten 40 times) I cannot end my doubts about the result because any acclaim that I deserve, is also part of a ruse. I want to be thought of as estimable–author, seeker of truth, decent story teller, all kinds of glory that can be attached to my identity. I still remember the fantastic ideas I had about my literary idols. But I’ve lived long enough to realize that was part of the imaginary world I lived in during my youth. No such person exists or has ever existed. I also know, that even if I got placed high up there, (in I don’t know where) I would still be a shmuck like everyone else.

As for the rest, it is my fault that I don’t have a realistic idea of whether the things I have tried to say have gotten through. I’m not exactly a hermit. My wife won’t let me turn into one. So I go through the motions socially. But whether it is my fault, or not, (for not getting out there and making the necessary contacts) not receiving enough of a response is a lousy feeling. I write for hours on end , unfortunately. many times with the fear I am the only one who is going to read what I am working on so intensely. Yes people I respect have given me kudos. There have been many more I haven’t mentioned here (because they are not famous) But still months and years often go by and I haven’t heard a single response to what I have written.

The original point of whatever I write is to clarify an issue. Yes, obviously I want confirmation, but that is because I believe what I am communicating is true and others want that as much as I do. The point of this post also, at the risk of sounding like a braggart shmuck, is to try to stir up curiosity here. I love this site. A very important part of posting here is the hope that I will be able to have a dialogue with thoughtful people if they are curious enough to read what I have posted. I am writing about things I care about. I’m hoping that some other (hopefully intelligent) people will have interests that overlap with mine. Not necessarily agreement, although obviously I favor that. I also have another motive.

I will admit (dammit) that I still want fame and fortune, so that particular motivation continues. But at this point, I tell myself, I am more than satisfied to have meaningful dialogue. The bragging bit is like a salve for my ego whenever I can briefly try to believe I’m a real writer not a wannabe. I repeat the bragging bit I presented above to myself as reassurance. And on my best days I am almost convinced. But that need to be a star is an unfortunate part of my psychology. It will never go away, no matter how much I would like to not only have wise thoughts about that, but actually be wise. Vanity is never an attractive quality. And, in the end, we are all wannabes.

The future for all of us is certain, especially at 81. Earth to earth, dust to dust. In so many ways, no matter how much we are loved or appreciated, no matter how much we may help others, or enjoy ourselves, or find meaning, or bring meaning, no matter how much we succeed and actually become somebody rather than another nobody, we aren’t that different than the thousands, the millions of ants scurrying around successfully building their colony. Here today, than gone not only tomorrow, but forever. As if we never existed.

In the meantime, when we are very much alive and kicking, we may luck out or even deserve perhaps 15 minute of fame. But probably less. Or none at all which will probably continue to be my fate. I know. I am too damn melodramatic. But, at this moment I have convinced myself that, despite where my writing this post just led me and the reader, dancing with powerful ideas about death, I should delete this essay. Yes, for the wrong person it may strengthen their desire for suicide. What kind of psychiatrist writes about hopelessness so casually? My apologies, but Freud said it even better, like a true Eastern European Jew he joked “The purpose of psychoanalysis is to change neurotic suffering into ordinary human misery.” I spent five years writing The Fear of Death and I was in my thirties and did not know anyone who had died. It was based on my reaction to certain novels or tender moments at the movies. Nor was I having health problems. There was my sister’s myasthenia which had once given me a scare. But the book was completely intellectual, written without a smidgeon of the insight true suffering brings. So I don’t know why I can’t muster a cheer rather than kvetch about the most unimaginably terrible fate all of us share. And that few want to be reminded. My only excuse is that it is impossible at my age for someone like me who habitually wants to find “the truth” to not have thoughts like that. Also I am retired and am allowed to not do my job. Doing good work as a psychiatrist was a fine way to earn a living, but that was then. Now I can indulge my desire to kvetch. Back to the subject of this post. My most realistic motive for writing this is for it to be an advertisement, so that I find readers that can be engaged in juicy discussions, people who like to kvetch, or don’t mind it, who understand the need and aren’t judgmental about it. I also enjoy good arguments for and against arguments I am making.

Oh, one more bit of bragging. Here is a link to my photography site. I take a lot of terrific pictures and together with my wife am a prisoner to our gardens. They are something, years in the making, years of improving them. They disappear come winter, but then, with enormous effort, reappear miraculously. Actually, the hell with my writing. Check out the pictures. Or to find something similar in words, something happy, go here (rose grown in our garden, my photograph, cover design by a professional)

Where is my Prozac? It still sometimes works even at 81. I’ve never tried it but that is what they say. It is the answer to our prayers. Or better, I now often pray I can regain a belief in God, which has been long gone, the price I’ve paid for all those epiphanies. Unfortunately, truth is not necessarily its own reward. Better to whistle a happy tune.