Word: mentality
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...themselves at the same point on this scale of conversation levels. But there is another dimension to communication, where mutuality is almost impossible to achieve, he said. That is intimacy, an "ultimate intimacy not obtained by shared confessions of guilts, ambitions, Oedipus complexes, or secrets," but a mental unification analogous to sexual intercourse, a joining of thought processes so total that the listener could just as easily be the speaker. In short one gets inside the other's head...
...ones who noticed said they could not have asked for a better setting. The scattered buildings of the century-old hospital sit atop a wooded hill, and its prep-school-like appearance is in marked contrast to the dingy institutional air of Massachusetts Mental Health, the other Harvard-staffed hospital where some students go. At McLean, new patients go through a month of "work-up" -sessions with a doctor in which the patient's case is reconstructed in minute detail. After that, a therapist is carefully selected and the patient sees him several times a week...
Several students interviewed said they were not as disturbed as most of the patients at McLean, and all but one of them stayed there less than a year. Arriving at the hospital was a shock for some. "I couldn't believe that I was actually in a mental institution," one boy said. "It was as if you had been slumming and suddenly found yourself living in a tenement...
...this phenomenon can aggravate a terrific problem in mental institutions-getting patients who have recuperated enough to be able to manage on the outside to leave the community where they feel secure and important. For Harvard students, however, there is usually a less stark contrast between a threatening outside world and a homelike hospital than that many patients face. As one boy explained, "Harvard students want to leave the hospital because they have a solid social structure to return to. In my case," he went on, "I was initially given to understand that I would stay about a year...
Only one student said people changed their estimation of him because he had been in a mental hospital. "They were very straight, very uptight people," he said. "They just did not know how to handle the situation. One of my roommates treated me very gingerly, as if he were afraid of me. The other regarded me voyeuristically, and was offensively solicitous about everything...