Fires in the Dark

Starred review from May 15, 2023
Psychologist Jamison (The Unquiet Mind) brings personal and professional insight to this rigorous, deeply felt meditation on psychological healing. Focusing on the relationships between sufferers and those who help them, Jamison begins with the discovery of combat-related trauma during WWI. Diagnosed with “shell shock,” English poet Siegfried Sasson was treated by W.H.R. Rivers, a psychologist, physician, and anthropologist known as the “English Freud,” who combined empathy with clinical brilliance. Healing need not come from psychologist, physician, or priest, Jamison notes, pointing to Black singer-activist Paul Robeson, whose music and art “expressed the suffering he saw in others and that he knew for himself; he lent it meaning.” Other artists crafted memorable, mythopoeic protagonists, such as author Pamela Lyndon Travers’s Mary Poppins. The stories of these characters can convey therapeutic effects, according to Jamison: “Those who enter into the worlds of exemplars and heroes... will be tutored in bravery, in suffering, and in suffering put to purpose.” Citing her own experiences seeking help for depression, Jamison concludes that “healers leave their mark.” It’s an eloquent, wide-ranging, and edifying look at healing relationships of all kinds.

Starred review from April 1, 2023
A scholar of psychology and psychiatry examines some of the changing regimes by which the mentally troubled are treated. Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind, Touched With Fire, and Night Falls Fast, opens with a graceful portrait of Sir William Osler (1849-1919), the medical pioneer recognized by American doctors a century later as "the most influential physician in history." Osler explored many aspects of medicine, but much of what concerned him toward the end of his life had to do with the death of his son, who was badly injured on the Western Front. Returned to combat, he died there. "Death had been Osler's tutor for the shadowland," writes Jamison. "As a young pathologist he had performed nearly a thousand autopsies; he was keenly aware of the debt owed by the living to the dead." Now it was personal, and he and some of his peers urged physicians to use the same attentive and loving care nurses delivered, with the charge to "bear witness to suffering, not flinch from it; be still with it and apprehend its meaning." Those mind-oriented physicians had plenty to do when unfortunate veterans such as the poet Siegfried Sassoon, shellshocked and tormented, sought postwar care. (Said one physician to Sassoon, while on home leave before returning to the front, "you appear to be suffering from an anti-war complex.") Jamison moves on to a consideration of the ancient connections of healing, ritual, and magic, some of which come into play in modern therapy. Along the way, while looking further at stress- and trauma-borne illness, the author studs her narrative with luminous figures such as Paul Robeson and Robert Graves, whose book Goodbye to All That was "a bitter, unsentimental account of war, atrocity, and death." There the hero quest and its challenges come in, and, Jamison concludes memorably: "There is a cost for this, and to redeem it we look to our healers." A humane, elegantly written contribution to the literature of trauma and care.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.