Yesterday I was informed by Martha, my significant other, in regard to a one-way conversation I was having with her about a book I'm re-reading, that I seem to develop any psychological symptom I happen to be reading about. I read quite a bit of psychological literature. Be that as it may, allow me to rave on:
Up till the age of about six I was on the fast track to be the most Interesting Man in the World. I was handsome and brilliant. But, unbeknownst to me or anyone but God, I had a genetic flaw; a gene, that if left unmolested in an environment of peace and tranquility, was destined to allow me to become Fernando Lamas. That is unless I encountered some unusual stress; which happened to me in the second grade. Her name was Miss Phillips.
Miss Phillips was an Apple Knocker from Upstate. That's the name the locals on Eastern Long Island gave to the school teachers who were sent by the government education Czars from upstate New York, where all they grow is apples and snow, to where we lived, where they didn't have too many kids, but had even less teachers.
There were some excellent Apple Knockers, but Miss Phillips wasn't one of them. She was depressed, mean-spirited, didn't like kids, and wasn't very bright. I'm being kind, but only because I was six and didn't have very good credibility as a school teacher critic.
I felt like I had been plunged into a cold bath. Until then, I had basked in the golden sunlight of my beautiful, entertaining mother, my baby sitter Mary Anne Milligan, my new baby sister, Baba, and my joy filled, smart, and creative first grade teacher, Mrs. Joyce.
There were only about four kids in Mrs. Joyce's class, so she was able to give me all the attention my narcissistic young psyche craved. We built an almost life sized cardboard house, and covered the floor with a braided rug we made ourselves. We made Jackson Pollock-like drawings, and pasted together paper chains with delicious wallpaper paste. Life was good.
Miss Phillips ruined all that by waving her magic wand and making me depressed. Or at the very least, dysthemic. Not only that, but my little first grade had been combined with a slightly larger second grade, who were kept back in order to make the school look bigger, or for some more rational reason that I wasn't informed of, and that meant I now became lost in a crowd of perhaps as many as ten other unruly small human beings, all crying for attention.
Miss Phillips did not do anything in particular to harm me, that I can remember. I'm sure I wasn't molested or beaten or locked in the closet. But suddenly I hated school, and my system was flooded with all sorts of chemicals from my Hypothalmus and Amygdala setting off sparks in my Corpus Callosum and Cerebral Cortex; Dorsolateral, Ventromedial and Orbitofrontal. Mentally, the shit hit the fan.
One short little gene, which I affectionately refer to as the Gene with no name, got a wiff of the wrong chemical and turned into Mr. Not-So-Nice Guy. If this all is starting to sound a little scary, please, try to stay with me. That little gene stopped doing what it was doing and slid across the floor in it's tube socks, knocking the other little genes off kilter like a jackknifed truck on a crowded super highway hitting glare ice.
That was the moment I turned into a neurotic; or what they called a neurotic in 1948. Jackson Pollock was one. So was Jean Paul Sartre. And Tennessee Williams. In short, any grownup worth talking to in those days was one.
In my book, [That is to say, literally, in My Book, as yet unpublished, at this writing,] which I might have mentioned somewhere earlier, I went into my childhood as a neurotic, but to bring us all up to date, let me re-frame the discussion in contemporary terms, by assigning to myself a place in The DSM - Ta Da.... Five !
If you don't have a DSM V, you should get one. Then, I could borrow yours. I can't afford one myself. The price-tag amounts to the better part of my Social Security check. But I certainly would borrow yours, because I've read all the freebee articles on Google that give you tantalizing peeks at what's new and what's not, since the old days of DSM lV.
Here's me, ever since that morning when I woke up in my attic bedroom and realized I had to go back to that gloomy hell on the south west side of the ground floor of the Amagansett Grade School;
Cluster C (Anxious, Fearful ) Personality Disorders: .........( skip over OCD... ) ....Avoidant Personality Disorder: Inhibited; introverted; intense feelings of inadequacy; hypersensitive to rejection; socially awkward.
I was a different person. Of course, by then, being six, I'd already formed a completely developed cover-story, that of Bon Vivant and song and dance man, so I had to carry on; but it was all a big sham. I'll try to cover this material in more detail, if my attention deficit, (that's another story) will let me, at some future date.
By the way, I don't mean to imply by the above that I fully subscribe to the DSM-V. Far from it. I'm a contrarian for one thing, and so disagree with everything, but also, I understand that theories are only written to supply structure and that structures are built to be torn down.
For perspective, I rely on the insight of scientist-writer Prof. Barbara Oakley. In her book, Evil Genes*, in a chapter on Slobodan Milosevic, talking about the related disorder borderline personality, she says the following:
"The bottom line is that, if one uses a categorical DSM-lV approach [..this being before "Five" came into being,] to analyzing borderline personality disorder, a person has to be so severely disabled to achieve a definitive diagnosis that he essentially can't function effectively in society. Diagnosis exists primarily to facilitate treatment in a clinical setting, but a number of problematic individuals - even if they do have symptoms that would reasonably qualify as clinically significant - just don't come into a clinic to receive the attention of psychiatric or forensic services.
"Another problem with diagnosing borderline personality using the DSM-lV criteria relates to the fact that the criteria are written in clinical, dispassionate fashion that obscures as much as explains borderline symptoms. And there is yet another problem: the DSM-lV assumes that all nine criteria are equally contributory, and allows for the seeming paradox that someone with the supposedly enduring diagnosis of BPD could suddenly be 'cured' of the illness by overcoming even one defining criterion."
On second thought, maybe I'll just stick with being neurotic.
*Evil Genes; Barbara Oakley, Prometheus Books, 2007
