Songs from the Black Chair: A Memoir of Mental Interiors (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Songs from the Black Chair: A Memoir of Mental Interiors Bradley Lewis (bio) Charles Barber . Songs from the Black Chair: A Memoir of Mental Interiors. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. 202 pp. Hardcover, $22.00. The pleasure of reading Charles Barber's Songs from the Black Chair arises from the elegance and beauty of his prose. Barber crafts each of his "mental interiors" with the richness of fiction and the precision of phenomenology. The topics he chooses circle around what we commonly call "mental illness": emotional suffering, hallucinations, obsessions, despair, estrangement, suicide, and substance abuse. Barber has become an expert on these topics, but not through formal study. Instead, his expertise is the result of attentive meditations on his own experiences and those of the people close to him. Barber's work comes across as fresh and insightful, especially in comparison with the over-objectifying methods of scientific psychiatry today. As the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, warned nearly a century ago, the West must balance its inquiries into the objective world with equal attention to the internal world. If it does not, it risks becoming dangerously ignorant of its core subjectivity. Husserl's advice to turn inward, to study mental phenomena as carefully as one would study objective phenomena like neurotransmitters, may be [End Page 178] familiar to those who work in the field of narrative medicine, but it is clearly not followed in mainstream biopsychiatry. Fortunately, the slack is being taken up by writers of fiction and memoir, and Barber's work is an excellent example. The three protagonists of Barber's memoir, Henry, Nick, and Charles (Barber), grow up as faculty kids in a small college town. They consider themselves part of a tradition of literary excellence, and they expect to have lives as successful artists. But by the time they reach adulthood, each is alienated and lost in the margins. Henry commits suicide and Nick becomes severely depressed. Barber is incapacitated by obsessions and given a diagnosis of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). He eloquently describes his breakdown: I lost . . . the organicity with which one thinks, the natural and sometimes creative flow that makes up anyone's daily inner monologue. That inner conversation, that stream of consciousness that had once flowed through me easily and often richly from topic to topic, idea to idea, suddenly stopped. It froze. It froze into a single word or series of numbers. I couldn't stop myself from repeating words and numbers to myself. "Black" was a word I repeated to myself . . . black black black black black black black black black black black black black black black. (54) Barber narrates the story of his recovery from OCD somewhere between a "medical testimony" and an "advocacy for alternative treatments."1 He comes to see himself, after a long period without professional help, as "truly ill, mentally sick, sick in the head" (118). Shortly after he accepts this definition, he sees a psychiatrist who prescribes Prozac. Barber's testimonial praise for this drug is almost glorious: Exactly twenty-one days later . . . I felt the chemicals percolate into my brain. It was like a warm, gurgling running feeling in my head, like a little tap of water had been turned on somewhere. The fluoxetine had arrived! In a moment, in that discrete moment, I felt relief, and relief, I have learned, is a highly underrated emotion. The world refreshened in a moment. . . . It seems to me that in that moment, I rose a few inches off the ground. I felt that a window to euphoria that had been closed for years was reopened. I floated; I felt lighter; I felt unbounded and untethered, released into a more bearable and greater light. (120) [End Page 179] As helpful as he finds the medications, Barber stresses that his recovery comes not only from medicine but also from his alternative lifestyle: from writing his memoir and scaling down his status and material ambitions to become a peer counselor. Indeed, the title of the book, Songs from the Black Chair, refers to Barber's work as a peer counselor at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. In his cramped, beautifully ugly office, Barber has a...