Includes chapter notes with bibliographical references (pages 253-270), and index.
Contents:
Epilogue. Death and madness, 1997-1998 -- An unspeakable act, 1986-1987 -- Refrain of the hospitals and the new vision, 1943-1948 -- The actuality of prophecy, 1948-1949 -- The psychiatric institute, 1949-1950 -- Mental muse-eries, 1950-1955 -- Gold Blast of Light, 1956-1959 -- A light raying through society, 1959-1965 -- White and black shrouds, 1987 -- Epilogue.
Summary:
Allen Ginsberg's 1956 poem "Howl" opens with one of the most resonant phrases in modern poetry: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness." Thirty years later, Ginsberg entrusted a Columbia University medical student with materials not shared with anyone else, including psychiatric records that documented how he and his mother, Naomi Ginsberg, struggled with mental illness. In Best Minds, psychiatrist, researcher, and scholar Stevan M. Weine, M.D., who was that medical student, examines how Allen Ginsberg took his visions and psychiatric hospitalization, his mother's devastating illness, confinement, and lobotomy, and the social upheavals of the postwar world and imaginatively transformed them. Best Minds examines the complex relationships between mental illness, psychiatry, trauma, poetry, and prophecy--using the access Ginsberg generously shared to offer new, lively, and indispensable insights into an American icon. Weine also provides new understandings of the paternalism, treatment failures, ethical lapses, and limitations of American psychiatry in the 1940s and 1950s. In light of these new discoveries, the challenges Ginsberg faced appear starker and his achieveƯments, both as a poet and an advocate, even more remarkable.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.