Washington has the deserved reputation of being a hard-working, early-rising town, and among the earliest risers are some of the approximately 1,200 psychiatrists in the metropolitan area who minister to the powerful and famous before their official working days begin.
By 6 A.M., just as dawn begins to break over the Potomac, long black limousines and some more modest vehicles begin delivering policy makers and pundits for 45-minute sessions with their analysts.
Nowhere is this early morning activity more frenetic than at 3000 Connecticut Avenue, an apartment building across from the National Zoo. Referred to locally as the ''Freud Hilton,'' it houses 50 or more psychiatrists, psychologists and clinical social workers, more than there are in some states - Wyoming, for instance - and is the home of the District of Columbia Insitute of Mental Hygiene, a private clinic that treats lower-income people.
When highly recognizable figures - politicians, lobbyists, journalists - meet in its elevators, hallways or waiting rooms, they studiously ignore one another. They may have rubbed shoulders, even exchanged words, at cocktail or dinner parties the night before, but at 3000 Connecticut Avenue a flicker of recognition seldom passes between them.
Ironically and simultaneously, Washington is a city of celebrity and anonymity, abounding in political and media heavies and hundreds of unknown but often influential career bureaucrats. Both conditions create their own psychological problems, compounded by the political necessity of secrecy when difficulties reach the stage where professional help is needed. Seeing a therapist in Washington can be a touchy business for influential individuals who fear that their futures can be thwarted, even aborted, by the revelation.
So great is the fear, several psychotherapists report, that some patients covered by Government health insurance prefer to pay for their visits out of private funds rather than have their bosses know they are undergoing treatment. When Senator Thomas F. Eagleton confirmed stories that he had been hospitalized and received electric shock treatments for nervous exhaustion and depression during the 1960's, he was deemed a political liability and dropped as George McGovern's running mate in 1972. And Daniel Ellsberg, the former consultant in the Departments of Defense and State and the Rand Corporation who leaked ''The Pentagon Papers'' to The New York Times, became a target of the Watergate ''plumbers'' who broke into his psychiatrist's office in 1971 in an attempt to obtain his file and use the material in it to discredit him.
In a high-powered city of super achievers, many of whose careers depend on an untarnished public image, a climate of fear surrounds any form of psychiatric treatment. Politicians are afraid to admit they have psychological problems because the knowledge might shatter the confidence of the voters back home; members of the White House, Cabinet and sub-Cabinet staffs are afraid it might lose them their jobs; lawyers, their clients; journalists, their credibility.
Most vulnerable, perhaps, are intelligence operatives, whose secretive jobs enforce an isolation that often robs them of the ability to trust anyone, even members of their families. When they require treatment, their cases are handled by a small group of doctors with special security clearances who protect the agents' identities and any information they might reveal.
But the capital also abounds with persons privy to national and international secrets of lesser sensitivity, persons whose decisions often affect the futures of corporations, institutions and millions of individuals at home and abroad. The burden of responsibility can become unbearable, particularly when piled on top of existing personal problems.
Those who treat extremely powerful people sometimes find it difficult not to let the ''halo effect,'' the charm and sophistication of exalted personages, stand in the way of rooting out their problems and prescribing proper treatment. It is what the Washington psychoanalyst Irvin D. Milowe calls the ''Forrestal syndrome,'' after James V. Forrestal, the Defense Secretary who leaped to his death in 1949 from the Bethesda Naval Hospital. ''There is a temptation,'' Dr. Milowe observes, ''to respond to the glamour of a national figure, and to his strengths rather than to his special needs.''
The experience of the wife of a well-known and highly successful Washington lawyer illustrates the point. When she and her husband consulted a psychiatrist specializing in marital problems, her spouse established an instant camaraderie with the doctor when he noticed pictures of boats on the wall and fell into a discussion about sailing, to the exclusion of any examination of the problems that had brought him there. The wife was told there was nothing wrong with her husband and that she ''should play a subordinate role, even if you don't like it, and your marriage will be a success.'' The untreated husband subsequently had a nervous breakdown.
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
On the Couch in the Capital
Dengan url
http://koraninternetonline.blogspot.com/2012/11/on-couch-in-capital.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
On the Couch in the Capital
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar