Mockingbird years

"Here in her own words, therapy veteran, sometime mental patient and a prize-winning essayist Gordon tells the story of her "therapeutic education," marked by no fewer than five therapists before she turned seventeen. Among these, Dr. G, from whom Gordon learned "which gambits and attitudes might cause the wordless therapist to signal his receptiveness, and Dr. H, in whose office the silence was broken only by the therapist's needles clicking as she knit her young patient a sweater.

At eighteen, after a half-hearted suicide attempt, Gordon, mired in adolescent angst, began a three-year sojourn at the prestigious Austen Riggs sanitarium. Here she hoped the status of mental patient would finally invest her life with significance. It was at Riggs that Gordon was "rescued" by the maverick psychoanalyst Leslie Farber, who offered judgment instead of neutrality, friendship instead of silence, and moral instruction through dialogue.

With Farber's help, Gordon finally began to unlearn the lessons of therapy and learn the lessons of life."--BOOK JACKET.