Word: hairshirt
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Sand's is a life that offers strong temptation for armchair psychologizing, and unfortunately Cate succumbs. Although his narrative does justice to Sand's complexity, his labels do not. She is diagnosed as "a do-good mystico-religious personality" with a "hairshirt complex," and her sexual frustrations are rather cavalierly attributed to a chronic case of "nympholepsy"−the desire for an ecstasy so sublime that no mortal can satisfy it. Gate also makes Sand do some special pleading for viewpoints that are clearly his own. He conjectures, for instance, that "were she alive today, Sand would regard...
Still, many patients feel resentful the minute their therapist leaves town. Explains Dr. Jacob Swartz of Boston: "It has to do with the mythology of the godlike physician, the fantasy that doctors are monklike hairshirt types who never need a vacation." Moreover, because a patient tends to establish a close parent-child relationship with his psychiatrist, he feels abandoned during his absence. Vacationing on Cape Cod last August, Manhattan Psychoanalyst David Mann received several phone calls from patients who had read about the novel Jaws. "They asked if I have been eaten by a shark. What they really wanted...
...author compares her life with that of an anchorite hermit. In fact, she is anything but a hairshirt recluse. She smokes cigarettes. She drives a car. Like nature, she is sometimes guilty of repetition and a certain atrocious lushness:"Silver trees cut into the black sky like a photographer's negative" and "clouds slide by like a tablecloth whipped off a table." But sooner or later, a pilgrim who refuses to believe in progress, she cuts back to the bone. To an age hooked on novelty, variety and pluralism, her message is as clear as William Blake...