Where Are You?

After many years as a clinical psychologist, I still recall things that happened during my first work with emotional illness.  I was a lowly undergraduate working as a psychiatric attendant at my university's hospital. 

We attendants did a lot of talking and card-playing and walk-taking with patients, and sometimes the dark, poisonous secrets that lay within the illnesses would pour out to us rather than to the pros.  But sometimes we were just used for muscle.

Electric shock therapy was more widely used then, and we often had to coax or even drag some terrified soul into the little white rooms with the anesthesia masks and the shock boxes.  I remember sitting in an ethics class, with my head full of Plato and Kant, pondering the good or bad of my acts the day before, when my white ducks had gotten blood-stained wrestling a razor blade out of the grip of a young man who was begging me to let him die, and later I had helped cart him bodily to be zapped, as he damned my soul to hell.  I never managed to reason it through with Kant, but a couple of weeks later the issue became settled enough for me when, wearing a different face, the man thanked me earnestly for saving his life.  In fact, ECT still saves many lives, as much as the idea of it may scare us.

Another attendants' task was to stay with the unconscious patient after the shock treatment.  There were Recovery Rooms for this purpose, each with space for 6 or 8 beds, an attendant standing beside each.  You see, after ECT a patient comes to gradually, and is confused and disoriented for a time.  If simply taken to their rooms and left to wake up alone, they might wander into the streets in their pj's, thinking they were who knows where (I often felt more or less this way myself without benefit of ECT, after some especially confusing shift).  But anyway, the attendants' job was to stand by the awakening patients and question them to determine when they were well-enough oriented to be safely alone.  You did this with questions like:  "what year is this -- Who is the president now -- what hospital is this?"  And the favorite: "Where are you?"

One day I was standing beside my sleeping patient.  On my other side was Anthony, an older veteran.  He was talking with Mrs. Jones, a big black woman who was beginning to awaken.  She groaned as her eyelids fluttered.  Anthony asked:  "Mrs. Jones, where are you?"

"Hunnnh?"

"Tell me where you are."

"Huuuunnh?"

 "Mrs. Jones, where are you?"

Then Mrs. Jones looked up and focussed on Anthony's face and made a little smile.  With her right hand she touched her large bosom.  She said, "Why . . . here I am."

Many years later, when teaching my own undergraduates about existential psychology, I used Mrs. Jones' moment of self-discovery.  She showed how in times of destruction and confusion, when all the structures and habits and beliefs that make up our normal life have collapsed, the spirit can stand up within the ruin, and find inside the shining, bright star of self.