[Photo by Bryan Jones]
I have two offices, one for answers and another for questions. As a clinical psychiatrist, I begin my day in a room filled with soothing art and soft leather chairs, where my pharmaceutical prescriptions and psychological interventions are intended to meet the pressing needs of my patients. Here, I’m supposed to have answers, or at least that’s the hope.
Then, at some point near noon, I descend 12 floors, cross a cobblestone drive, pass into an old granite building and settle into a cubicle that overlooks Manhattan’s East River. Here, by a blackboard filled with arrows, scribbles and circles, and surrounded by hundreds of color-coded files and books, I do my work as a historian of psychiatry. It now becomes my job to critically pick apart the assumptions and beliefs of my own practice, my own field.
Two separate rooms, two different modes. Is that true? I was daydreaming recently, searching for a simple response to a question often asked of me — namely, how does my practice as a psychiatrist relate to my historical studies? — and that was what I first came up with.
Unfortunately, after but a moment of reflection, my neat division collapsed. In clinical psychiatry, perhaps more than in any other field, you incessantly ask questions, and the right question can often become an answer. “‘Not good enough’ for what?” may be all that is required from me to help a patient comprehend a sudden depressive turn. Likewise, historians, though driven by skeptical questioning, certainly can generate solid answers about what happened and why.
[For more of this story, written by George Makari, go to http://opinionator.blogs.nytim...s-battle-lines/?_r=2]
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