The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine

Book Review

Wish I Could Be There: Notes from a Phobic Life
By Allen Shawn.
Viking, New York, 2007.
Reviewed by Howard Spiro (howard.spiro@yale.edu).

I have often admired the infusion of people with Downs Syndrome into everyday public life, so different from the way things were when I was young.  But in private life, people with mental disorders may be harder to take at times, possibly because they sometimes  interact with us less than pleasantly. It would be good for “mental disorders” to be renamed biologically based brain disease, but that will happen only when the current wave of brain imaging studies shows that the mind flows from events in the brain. 

I bring this up to a medically oriented group because of a new book by Allen Shawn, son of William Shawn, the longtime editor of The New Yorker. The author, widely accomplished in music, is himself confined by a many phobic barriers, from fear of open spaces to equal anxiety in closed quarters. He describes, painfully for him and us, how many tests of his phobias he has failed. Yet his life seems to have been good: he is professionally successful, on the faculty at Bennington College, a remarkably prolific composer and writer, married more than once with children equally successful.

He has read a great deal, but the medical/health care reader will find more informative his descriptions of his own problems. They began in childhood, and probably had a familial/genetic origin, for he relates how his father and several other members of that generation clearly were restricted in what they dared to do. The author’s own problems, however, blossomed with age, and the removal of his twin sister with autism to a supportive institution, and he suggests that they worsened with specific traumas. Although at first his childhood fears could be regarded as within “normal” range, the accompanying anxiety and panic put them far beyond all that.

As an adult, Shawn learned to do many things, drive to Vermont, take a trip to England, and he found it helpful to write down what he was feeling. In Emily Dickinson’s poetry, he finds the echo/mirror of his own problems, and he returns to her poetry for convincing illustrations. He turns also to Freud for explanation, but his exposition of Freud’s  “Little Hans” may appear contorted to skeptical readers. More convincing, however, is the author’s common sense distilled from wide reading: he suggests that controlling the environment helps to control the routines that the phobic person requires, and that has turned some phobic people into leaders. He recognizes that he may well have become a performer for that reason, and that his father as editor of The New Yorker could have his own way with little disagreement. Taking on responsibilities, Shawn found, enabled him to control and therefore to overcome many of his fears, still at great cost. He does not find it easy, even to this day.

The book is not one to enjoy, but as we medical care-givers cannot, thankfully, have all experiences, you will find more empathy by dipping into this latest example of “pathography.”

Published: May 12, 2008