Word: beane
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...story of Paul Lozano and Margaret Bean-Bayog is a remarkable one, so it remarkable literary event. Two books have just been published that both purport to tell the story of what happened between this and his distinguished psychiatrist. Both books are written by journalists associated with the Boston Globe--Eileen McNamara, who writes for the Globe's Sunday Magazine, and Gary Chafetz, a freelance investigative reporter who covered the story for the Globe when it first broke (Chafetz, as a co-author) although the preface indicates that his role was mainly one of consultant and adviser...
...books draw diametrically opposed conclusions, McNamara advocating Paul Lozano's family's story and Chafetz taking Bean-Bayog's side. When I heard that these two books had been (almost simultaneously) published, I very much looked forward to reading them -- how often does one have the opportunity to hear both sides of the story? Surely, we would finally know what really happened in this sordid case...
...summary: according to McNamara's book, breakdown, Lozano entered Harvard Medical School in 1984 and soon entered therapy with Dr. Margaret Bean-Bayog, a psychiatrist and teacher at the school. She pursued a strange course of regression theraphy, making Lozano believe that she was his mother and implanting false memories of childhood abuse. It is almost certain that she had an affair with him or at least masturbated in his presence, but she abandoned him when she successfully adopted a child, leaving him helpless and depressed. He killed himself nine months later...
According to Chafetz's book, obsession, Bean-Bayog's therapy was innovative and difficult to understand , but not irresponsible or beyond the psychiatric pale. The sexual fantasies that Bean-Bayog wrote (and which Lozano Subsequently stole from her office) were a case of countertransference, in which a therapist attempts to deal with her emotional and psychological reactions to her patient. Lozano was psychotic suicidal, pathological liar whose inevitable suicide was delayed by Bean-Bayog's therapy...
Geoffrey stokes, who reviewed these books for the Globe, admitted this: "Though I am somewhat more sympathetic toward Bean-Bayog as a result of these books, I'm not that much more certain about what 'really' happened during Lozano's therapy and life than I was when his vexed case was playing itself out on the front pages." I find myself in exactly the same situation, as if I am watching one of those optical illusions that consists of a vase, depending on the Organizational whimsy of one's brain. Stokes continues: "But I am sure of this...