From Irv Yalom (2017) to John Whitehorn (1944): A thoughtful quote

When I was in college and medical school at Stanford in the 1970s/1980s, one of the most prominent faculty psychiatrists was Irv Yalom, a world expert in group psychotherapy.   Later in life, he wrote a number of novels and a number of books of "short stories" describing numerous interesting patients he had treated (with their permission and with anonymized details).

I've read a couple of his patient stories books (often as audio books) and this spring I read his autobiography, BECOMING MYSELF, A Psychiatrist's Memoir (here).

In his autobiography, Yalom describes monkeys escaping from the labs of Dr. Karl Pribram in the 1960s, when the labs were adjacent to the psychiatry clinics in Stanford's then-new Palo Alto hospital.  I was a lab assistant for Dr. Pribram around 1980 as a college student and KP was quite influential on me.  One of Yalom's mentors at Hopkins, Dr. David Hamburg, recruited both Yalom and my PhD advisor, Dr. Jack Barchas, to Stanford.   (Barchas went on to chair psychiatry at Cornell for some 20 years.)

But here is where I am going:

Yalom describes his lifelong respect for his Hopkins residency mentor Dr. John Whitehorn, a well respected clinician.  Whitehorn wrote a seminal article on psychiatric interviewing in 1944.   (Here).  There is a wonderful quote in Whitehorn's article (p 211):

"Limping may be caused, so to speak, by the deficiency of certain muscles, the innervation of which has been destroyed.  But it is not the injured muscle which limps - it is the man, managing to somehow keep going despite the defect."

I loved that.   In context he continues, "Study should be aimed at finding, and therapy at helping, him use whatever means may aid the man to do better."