Dr. Farber is anything but surgical. His central concern is with the evil consequences of treating people as if they were passive objects—and with the virtual impossibility, in our society with its scientific and linguistic conventions, of treating them in any other way, even on the psychoanalytic couch. But perhaps good surgeons, too, are assisted by their awareness of their patients’ humanity even while refusing to become sentimental about their disorders.
The integrity of this book is attested to by the fact that it hangs together like a well-constructed mobile even though it is a collection of ten essays published over the past decade, all but one of them in technical journals. Taken together, they demonstrate their author’s consistent concern with the same moral issues. But there is no repetition at all. A psychiatrist whose fundamental interest is in the relationships of ethics to personal style and authenticity could surely ask no richer or more diverse opportunity for participant-observation than that afforded by an established practice in Washington, D.C. Dr. Farber’s genius loci is also responsible, I suspect, for his selection of the phenomenon of despair—of which Washington has become the unrivaled world source—as the topic for three of the most original of his essays.
How my heart sings 