The Imprinters: Surviving the Unlived Life of Our Parents

Abstract

The Imprinters: Surviving the Unlived Life of Our Parents. Eileen Walkenstein. Phoenix, AZ: Perfect Printers, 2008, 372 pp., $39.95 (softcover). INTRODUCTION BY PETER R. BREGGIN This book review begins with my introduction because I wished to share and to celebrate what I know about the incredible career of my friend and colleague Eileen Walkenstein, but I felt that the actual book review should be written by someone like Adrianne Johnson, who did not personally know her. I first met psychiatrist Eileen Walkenstein in the early 1970s when I was breaking into the arena of politics and psychiatric reform by organizing an international campaign to stop the resurgence of lobotomy and psychosurgery (International Center for the Study of Psychology and Psychiatry, 2009). Initially, I was almost entirely isolated within the mental health professional, but gradually a few courageous souls came to support my efforts to stop this barbaric psychiatric assault on the brain. Eileen was one of the first psychiatrists-if not the very first-to dare to stand up with me against the psychiatric and neurosurgical establishment. She became an early board member of the Center for the Study of Psychiatry (CSP), and so she has a direct connection to this journal, which CSP sponsors. I was deeply grateful for her backing and soon grew in admiration for her friendship, courage, and devotion to providing genuine help to suffering individuals. She continued for many years to lend support to CSP's reform work. She was at the time a psychiatrist with a busy practice in Philadelphia. Eileen graduated medical school and entered psychiatric when few women dared to or had the opportunity to break down the walls surrounding medical and psychiatric patriarchy. It is impossible imagine the courage and self-determination that this required. As a resident, she already knew that electroconvulsive therapy was bad for the brain, and she found a way to avoid participating in the routine use of the "treatment." Eileen stood up for integrity and honest in the field of mental health when there were as yet no other psychiatrists anywhere in the world openly taking a stand against toxic drugs, shock treatments, lobotomy, and the like. There wasn't even a humanistic psychology movement when she was daring to be among the first humanistic psychiatrists. In a personal communication to me, Eileen described herself as being "passionate" about her work and "equally passionate in my vociferous struggles against the vicious, 'acceptable' racism in my medical school, where I also witnessed a brutal, transorbital lobotomy performed on an 18-year-old" (Walkenstein, personal communication, 2010). She described these experiences in her first book, Beyond the Couch (1975), which author and feminist reformer Lucy Freeman endorsed as "a brave, daring, swinging book guaranteed to make us all fight for our psychic freedoms." In her book Don't Shrink to Fit! , Eileen decried-and offered alternatives to-what she called psychiatry's "craze to brand people with psychiatric diagnoses." Eileen recently wrote to me about her initial insights into psychology: "With a large, comfortable practice in the United States, I woke up one morning and realized I was no longer comfortable with my comfort. I had to do something more. I needed my work to have more relevance to the massive suffering I was encountering, and I decided to go in search of-what? Something that turned out to be as elusive as the unicorn." Her odyssey would take her to England, France, and finally Italy, where she discovered "the nucleus." Eileen explained to me, "The presence of the 'nucleus' illuminates why family relationships are often so deadly, why even with the best of intentions we are betrayed by and continue to betray those nearest to us. In Italy, when I realized we had uncovered a vital entity, I began taking detailed notes on all facets and events surrounding this 'nucleus. …