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A Psychologist's Thoughts on Clinical Practice, Behavior, and Life

The Tragedy of Mental Illness:

Rudolph Schoenheimer, a loner and brilliant biochemist, was forced to leave Germany in 1933. He discovered that body constituents are in a continuous state of chemical renewal with chemicals appearing and disappearing even in adult organisms while their structure and form remain unchanged. Believed to be a certain winner of the Nobel Prize, he suffered from manic-depression and killed himself at the age of forty-three in 1941.

 

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Things Aren't Always As They Seem

Near Huntington, Long Island's railroad station is a lovely, condo-like, low-income housing development. A young teacher, walking to the home of a student for a parent visit, saw three teenagers sitting on a stoop and became frightened (everyone knows how dangerous teenagers are!). As she nervously walked by, one teenager asked the others, "Do you think she sells vacuums?"

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Sensations While Dreaming:

In a dream yesterday, I held hands with a long-past lover in school and felt the warmth of her hand on mine. Upon awakening, that wrist was painful. Now, this discomfort might have derived not from the dream but from having pulled too heavy a load in a cart that day or holding a tablet for too long while watching a movie. Which got me thinking.

 

Some people dream in color but for me this occurred only once and then momentarily. A coworker of years ago suffered nightmares from which she awoke screaming several times a week, then bearing marks on her wrist where, in the dream, her mother held her down while sexually abusing her. She had experienced this during childhood.

 

Dream content has inspired art and presented the solution to scientific problems. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." (Shakespeare/Hamlet)

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