The Mind's Fate: A Psychiatrist Looks at His Profession.

AuthorMullan, Fitzhugh

Robert Coles Little, Brown,& Co., $24.95

In the winter of 1967, medical students at the University of Chicago, frustrated by their staid, conventional education, decided to create a curriculum of their own. They would be graduating into a medical and political world that was racked by the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and student protests on campuses across the country, and so the technical offerings of their medical curriculum seemed very narrow indeed. Even as they studied clinical medicine, Martin Luther King, Jr. was marching into segregated Chicago communities and the bombastic 1968 Democratic convention was soon to take place. Their school was not far from the front lines of America's social battleground. The students initiated service projects at community organizations around Chicago, sent some of their number South to work in the voter registration and school integration campaigns and, more to the point, invited a series of speakers to come to the university to talk to them about the tough problems facing medicine and the country, At the top of the list was Dr. Robert Coles, a young Harvard psychiatrist who addressed the students on "Psychiatry and Society."

That talk, the early writings and life experiences that led to it, and Coles's work since have an extraordinary consistency of theme and purpose. Life is important, Coles argues, but it is often troubled politically and personally. Both as an articulate observer and a participant clinician, a psychiatrist has something to offer in making these circumstances better. Psychiatry for Coles is neither an instrument of narrow practice nor a license for psychopharmacology. Rather it is a vehicle for listening, learning, and interpreting, for playing back and reporting on the dilemmas, confrontations, and generosities that make up personal and communal life. Art, particularly literature, informs and enriches his definition of his work and his writing. He draws much more heavily on George Eliot and William Carlos Williams than he does on Louis Pasteur or William Osler.

The Mind's Fate: A Psychiatrist Looks at His Profession is an expanded and updated version of the volume of the same name that was published in 1975. A collection of his essays written over the years for a variety of publications, ranging from The New Republic to The Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology, the book suggests the breadth of Coles's work. There are reviews, commentaries, and an...

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