A Look at "Mockingbird Years" by Emily Fox Gordon

A Look at Mockingbird Years 1 Running head: MOCKINGBIRD YEARS

A Look at Mockingbird Years

Ray Woodcock

University of Michigan

School of Social Work

A Look at Mockingbird Years 2

In Mockingbird Years: A Life In and Out of Therapy, Emily Fox Gordon (2000) provides

an account of her experiences as a client of mental health practitioners.1 That account includes

institutionalization, psychoanalysis, unethical professional conduct, orthodox practice, heterodox

practice, and other therapy-related topics. In the broad picture, Emily – who was in her early 50s

at time of publication – presents a tale of transition in attitudes toward therapy, from youthful

romanticism through various phases of exploration and disillusionment, to a complex,

conditional acceptance and simultaneous rejection of therapy. Her writing style is intelligent and

provocative. It makes for a quick and relatively engaging read.

Those are the sorts of praise that I encountered when I was trying to select a book for this

assignment – in, especially, readers’ reviews at Amazon.com (2009). Mockingbird Years

(referred to here as MY) appeared likely to provide a critical and self-critical look at client

experiences in mental health. That is, I hoped for a balanced presentation, with sympathetic but

not overindulged portrayals of client and therapist perspectives. I also wanted a relatively recent

account. I now realize that that last preference may have been somewhat misguided, as most

memoirs are apt to discuss developments over a period of years. The choice of this relatively

recent work was nonetheless appropriate for that purpose, insofar as Emily (2000) treats mental

health institutionalization and Freudian analysis as historical artifacts, not granting them much

contemporary relevance.

There were also some negative reasons, criteria of elimination, by which I came to MY

after rejecting other memoirs related to mental health. For purposes of interest and readability, I

1 In these comments on Gordon’s (2000) book, I have decided not to insert topic headings, but rather to

treat this as an essay. The reason is that, in the writing, I found that Gordon’s deftly interwoven story has generated my own interwoven reactions. I wanted, that is, to indulge opportunities to refer seamlessly, back and forth, among the thoughts that I have discussed, without imposing too much rigidity in terms of what each section of the paper is supposed to be saying. This has resulted in a certain loss of simplicity and clarity. I hope the corresponding degree and expression of insight make up for that loss.


wanted a story that I could relate to, that I would be able to visualize clearly as I went along.

Thus I rejected autism-related memoirs, for example, because I have virtually no experience with

autistic people and would therefore expect to have difficulty visualizing related clinical

anecdotes. I was also suspicious of works that carried a whiff of the incredible. For instance, I

do have an interest in dissociative identity disorder (DID), but I found West’s (1999) claim of 24

separate personalities off-putting. Before investing hours in that text, I would have wanted to

research DID (and West’s book, in particular), to learn how scholars felt about such a claim. As

one other example of such criteria, I was likewise ill-disposed toward sensationalism and

pathologizing, as when Styron (1992) characterizes depression as “madness.”

Having cited readers’ reviews at Amazon.com (2009) as a basis for choosing the book, it

may be appropriate to compare notes with some such readers in the aftermath. I largely disagree

with, for example, the review by “Strigine,” currently designated as most helpful of all readers’

reviews on that website. Strigine states, among other things, that MY examines “the myth that

therapy helps”; that Emily’s parents believed “that therapy, like Jesus, brings salvation”; that

Farber at his worst was “ruinous”; and that Emily “finally lets go of the idea of therapy.” If

Emily’s parents had had such a belief, they would have clung to therapy for themselves. If

Farber had been ruinous, then Emily, his long-term devotee, would have been ruined, and

presumably would not have come back for more, years later. Emily hardly had to “let go” of the

myth that therapy helps; she does not seem to have believed it in the first place, starting with her

years of silent sessions and continuing with the anti-therapist.

Several such reviewers seem to share my disagreement with Strigine on the matter of

Emily’s work with Dr. B. This Emily who was supposedly learning that therapy does not help

somehow decided, as a mature adult, to spend more years with her last therapist – whom she


considered the “good-enough therapist,” MY, p. 184) than she had spent with any other. As

reader-reviewer Dianne Foster (Amazon.com, 2009) observes, Dr. B expertly helped Emily end

her dependence upon Farber and also upon himself. In an observation offered by another such

reader-reviewer (self-named as simply “A Customer”), Emily acknowledges such achievements

despite her beginning with a decidedly hostile attitude toward this therapist, Dr. B – whom, I

would add, she had hand-picked after an informed and critical search.

Several such reader-reviewers raise concerns that I had not clearly identified during my

own reading, but that I find noteworthy in their articulations. I had not, for example, paid much

attention to the title. It is possible, as Dianne Foster (Amazon.com, 2009) suggests, that it refers

to the client who feeds back the various explanations and beliefs provided by therapists. But that

does not aptly characterize some important behaviors in Emily’s relationships with Farber or

Dr. B. I wondered, instead, whether the intended titular reference is to the reflective style of

therapy, in which the therapist’s remarks could be said to imitate what the client has said; but

that fails too, insofar as most of her therapists did not use that approach. My best explanation is

that the self that Emily presented to the world, during much of her life, was a pastiche of bits and

pieces from all sources, therapeutic and otherwise – that, in other words, the book is a story of

progress in the assembly of a personhood, picking up whatever she could apply to that end from

what was, for her, the inadequate landscape of her youth. Notwithstanding the alleged

plausibility of Emily’s youthful idealization of madness (Donaldson, 2002), she did manage to

generate the foundation for a relatively stable and self-sufficient middle age.

Besides failing to identify such issues as clearly as these other readers did, during the

interlude between my reading of the book and my return to the Amazon.com (2009) reader-

reviewers, I also achieved only an incomplete resolution of the various characterizations of


Emily’s writing style and perspectives that I had encountered in my pre-reading selection

process. This is, I think, a book that was written by Emily in several parts – in effect, by

somewhat different personalities. It seemed to me that there was a substantial difference in

writing style between the lovingly crafted earlier sections and the forced march, as I experienced

it, of her later account of Dr. B. I can only guess at the specifics that would underlie the process

by which the manuscript thus developed. One possibility, to illustrate my point, would be that

her tales of therapists up through Farber were based upon notes – probably rich, entertaining

notes – accumulated by a younger woman over a period of years, during which she had leisure to

populate the world of therapy with interesting ideas and characters, each granted the indulgence

of time needed for proper portrayal as the novelty that it would be in the young woman’s

experience. By contrast, her perspective on Dr. B was that of an older woman – developed in

retrospect and without the benefit of such marvelous notes, judging from its relative dryness –

who found therapy to be work, not play.

In all events, but especially if I have correctly surmised the general process of the book’s

formation, this is, in good part, a story of Emily’s transition away from a world of debilitating

socioeconomic privilege. The family of her childhood, with its direct or indirect resources

sufficient to afford (indeed, even to contemplate) cocktail hours and years at Riggs (compare

Snowden, 2003), did not fare very well – not as well, in Emily’s telling, as the family of her own

adult life seems to have done. Privilege, traditionally construed, appears to have been especially

hard on Emily’s mother, whose status was reduced in some ways from partner to assistant as the

family ostensibly moved up in society. Nor was privilege very good for Emily, to whom it

evidently imparted a sense of exemption from ordinary obligations. She seems fairly immune to

Farber’s disapproval of her seduction of married men; she apparently understood, but ignored, a


roommate’s displeasure at the extended alcoholic binges indulged on the premises by her friends;

it never occurred to her to offer payment to Farber. Small wonder that Emily began with such

vigorous opposition to her husband and Dr. B: they appear to have assisted in a substantial part

of the work required for her transition to a more realistically constrained sense of daily living.

She blames herself, more than the men, for such clashes. Men, generally, fare reasonably

well in her story. There are the more or less positive examples of her father and of father-like

Farber, the latter contrasted most tellingly against the irritatingly ineffectual tendernesses of Dr.

S, on one hand, and the clinical remove of Dr. B, on the other. Although she seems to find Dr. S

pathetic, she admits a duty to say a proper goodbye. She does not seem to have blamed her

father’s career advances for his mother’s decompensation; to the contrary, if I recall correctly,

she blames him for declining an opportunity for a further step in that direction. She does not do

much with the obvious opportunity to criticize Freud or male-generated psychology in general,

and does not treat the rape as an opportunity to rant.

Indeed, the rape story is odd in its extreme brevity. That oddity, in the hands of such a

gifted writer, is enormous. Something is not right there. One possibility is that the rape

threatens a good-man myth upon which she bases so much (e.g., her allegiance to Farber, her

pride in her father). But she can differentiate good men from bad. What seems more likely is

that she says so little about the rape because saying more would raise questions she does not

wish to address. She may, for example, have invented it, either to conceal something else or to

manufacture an obscure excuse for marriage, and may realize that elaborating upon the tale

would increase the risk of its debunking. She may have experienced orgasm during the rape, or

may have had some other reaction that she does not know how to process. The rape may fall into

that rare category of experience that exceeds the limits of her resilience or nonchalance. She


may grant to her rapists no more than what she sees as the necessary minimum acknowledgment

of power over her. Or perhaps she has had so much analysis of the rape, and is so aware of its

potential to complicate her story, that she refuses to discuss it – but she does cite its subsequent

impacts upon her thoughts and plans, and certainly she ponders other, lesser events at greater

length. In short, there remains an exceptional refusal to provide lucid clues on what the rape

story and/or experience is really all about for her.

Resilience and/or nonchalance, in my reading, undermine Geller’s (2001) substantial

acceptance of some of Emily’s claims of therapeutic victimization – regarding, for instance, “the

ruthless stripping away of defenses” and “the powerful reductive suction of psychoanalytic

thinking.” Emily’s tart observations about her early therapists, apparently composed or at least

preliminarily formed contemporaneously, suggest the preservation of a safe zone or observation

platform from which she could skewer her self-styled helpers. Contrary to her profession of

turning “away from the world and toward the self,” this is not a book about the lived experience

of mental illness in any introspective sense. Closer to the mark, what we have here lies on the

frontier (or in the symbiosis) between privileged, extended adolescence and mild antisociality.

She writes so entertainingly, in part, because she still sees humor in boundary transgression:

Emily was not likely to suffer the more profound deterrents, available to less advantaged youths,

of having her ass kicked or thrown in jail for misbehavior.

There are, however, some limits to Emily’s experience of privilege. McIntosh (1997)

would see plenty of white privilege here – it is definitely a white book – but one might want to

refine that with the observation that much of what McIntosh would see exists in any condition of

power and/or homogeneity. Emily got away with a lot, but in another sense she didn’t get away

with enough. Instead of developing and/or blunting her edges in ordinary adolescence, her status


as a misfit (see Arboleda-Flórez, 2008, p. 2) led her into varying degrees of mental and physical

apartheid. It is easy to second-guess her parents’ decision to enroll her in therapy and then to

send her to Riggs, especially as her story emerges from a putative expert in manipulation of

psychological concepts. But the parents were intelligent people. It is true that her early

therapists failed to socialize her for survival in the world; but her parents’ judgment was that the

world of their time was not capable of doing that either, and that judgment was probably

defensible. In those pre-deinstitutionalization days, the limits of socially acceptable behavior –

the distance you can go before crossing the line at which people write you off rather than put up

with you – had not been stretched to today’s capacious dimensions.

It is not clear that Emily sees this, even now. She refers to “a time when my life was

innocent of therapy” (MY, p. 29), and follows that with an account of an “idyllic” childhood in “a

gentle, fostering place” (p. 33). It’s not terribly hard to imagine how her rage, often mentioned

in the book, and her general “wild and bad behavior” would have gone over in such a place –

regardless of whether that behavior was “mild by today’s standards” (p. 63). She now considers

it naïve to think that mental health clients “were expected to be crazy” (p. 63), but that still seems

to be the standard by which she adjudges herself an unnecessary conscript in the therapeutic

struggle. Her obvious intelligence does tend to support her mother’s (and probably her father’s)

concern about her poor school performance. She was, it seems, not doing very well. So I am not

sure that the problem was therapy. It seems more likely to have been the maintenance of narrow,

rigid concepts of acceptability, to her detriment, by the very childhood community she claims to

adore. Therapy just happened to be the tank into which they tossed the ones that were the wrong

size. In another place and time, she might have been in the asylum, or the circus, or dead; or

maybe a less gentle community would have knocked her into line (see Ramirez, 1999).


Interestingly, Emily does not make a strong case that therapy stigmatized her. She can’t;

she’s too busy explaining how therapy appealed to her and drew her in. It’s not stigmatizing if

it’s exactly where you want to be. Therapy was accepted; all the more reason to have considered

it appropriate for her. Her argument is, in fact, that therapy has become steadily more accepted,

more universally incorporated into the society – in which case she was ahead of the curve,

prepared to alight at a point in adulthood where the two converged, where to be therapeutically

inclined was to be an ordinary educated American. As if to display a contrarian streak, however,

the approximate time of this realization coincides with the decision process by which she

purportedly came to reject therapy – again, not because of its stigma, but because of its effects on

her motivation, aspirations, self-image, etc.

Compared to the parents, Farber had an easier time of it, in that his effort to bring the

world back into the picture did not entail living with, and worrying about, the development of his

own child. His innovation, according to Spinelli (2002), was to question the adequacy of the

existentialist orientation toward the therapeutic relationship – or even the therapeutic group – as

a “social microcosm” (Yalom, 1995, p. 28) of the client’s experience in the world. The world

needs to be present in therapy; but even that is a step short of considering that the world is

therapy. Farber remains, in Emily’s telling, a romanticized anti-therapist, offering a radical new

concept. Yet perhaps his concept is only a partial step toward the conclusion that therapy is a

poor substitute for life in a healthy society. Emily has not, in the end, embraced any such

realization: she is not actively developing her self, for instance, within the context of, and as a

contributor to, an updated remake of something like the lovely town of childhood recollection. It

is not “an irony” (Miller, 2000) that Farber was her great inspiration; Farber – and, later, Dr. B –


were, in their individually oriented thinking, as far toward healing as she was prepared to go,

within the cultural constraints of our time.

Hence Emily gives us limited sketches of her parents, evincing the familiar belief that

they would be consummate shapers of the individual in focus, and of course of her therapists; but

her brother, husband, friends, lovers, neighbors, even her child remain remarkably under-

developed in this account. The interpersonal aridity of Camus’s (1989) Stranger comes to mind.

The idea that these people are peripheral to her experiences in therapy is preposterous. She

singles out the alleged envy of the one friend who supposedly shared her idealization of Riggs

(though I would still like to hear the friend’s version of that exchange), but declines to flesh out

the larger circle of individuals – of whom she was surely aware – who would have received the

news of her institutionalization with dismay, ridicule, or perhaps incredulity. If she now

displayed awareness and consideration of such persons, and told us that the turning-inward of

therapy had rendered her deaf to their remarks at the time, then, all right, we might have a sense

of how her departure from therapy is connected with her entry into the world indeed. What we

have instead seems to be more or less the same person with the same self-focus. One could

suggest that therapy, even with Farber, ultimately appealed to her to the extent that it allowed her

to remain who she was – and that we do likewise, to the extent that we applaud her tale.


References

Amazon.com. (2000). Customer reviews [of] Mockingbird years: A life in and out of therapy.

Retrieved October 5, 2009 from http://www.amazon.com/Mockingbird-Years-Life-Out-

Therapy/product-reviews/0465027288/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&

showViewpoints=1

Arboleda-Flórez, J. (2008). The rights of a powerless legion. In J. Arboleda-Flórez & N.

Sartorius (Eds.), Understanding the stigma of mental illness: Theory and interventions

(pp. 1-17). London: John Wiley & Sons.

Camus, A. (1989). The stranger. New York: Vintage.

Donaldson, E. J. (2002). The corpus of the madwoman: Toward a feminist disability studies

theory of embodiment and mental illness. NWSA Journal, 14(3), 99-119.

Geller, J. L. (2001). [Review of the book.] Psychiatric Services, 52, 695-696.

Gordon, E. F. (2000). Mockingbird years: A life in and out of therapy. New York: Basic.

McIntosh, P. (1997). White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see

correspondences through work in women’s studies. In R. Delgado & J. Stefancic (Eds.),

Critical white studies: Looking behind the mirror (pp. 291-299). Philadelphia: Temple

University Press.

Miller, L. (2000). “Mockingbird Years” and “The Last Good Freudian”: Two memoirists look

back on their many years of psychotherapy – and what they see ain’t pretty. Retrieved

October 7, 2009 from

http://www.archive.salon.com/books/review/2000/06/14/gordon_webster/index.html


Ramirez, T. M. (1999). Feeling different: A major mental health problem in a diverse society. In

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9). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Rodriguez, C. (2000). Culturally sensitive psychological assessment. In I. B. Canino & J.

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treatment (pp. 84-91). New York: Guilford.

Snowden, L. R. (2003). Bias in mental health assessment and intervention: Theory and evidence.

American Journal of Public Health, 93(2), 239-243.

Spinelli, E. (2002). The therapeutic relationship as viewed by existential psychotherapy: Re-

embracing the world. Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, 32(1), 111-118.

Styron, W. (1992). Darkness visible: A memoir of madness. New York: Vintage.

West, C. (1999). First person plural: My life as a multiple. New York: Hyperion.

Yalom, I. D. (1995). The theory and practice of group psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books.

A Look at "Mockingbird Years" by Emily Fox Gordon

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