Chatting Up A Storm - Claudia Cragg

When our younger son finished reading Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar some years ago, he commented that it was not only an extraordinary literary work but also, of course, a source for rare insight into the complications of mental illness. This reminded me  of a conversation (not so much a formal interview, you understand) I had a few years ago with the fabulous and extraordinary author, Joanne Greenberg, who as Hannah Green wrote I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. This work is a fictionalized depiction of Joanne Greenberg’s own treatment experience decades ago at Chestnut Lodge Hospital in Rockville, Maryland, during which she was in psychoanalytic treatment with Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. The book takes place in the late 1940s and early 1950s, at a time when Harry Stack Sullivan, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and Clara Thompson were establishing the basis for the interpersonal school of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, focusing specifically, though by no means exclusively, on the treatment of schizophrenia. Greenberg ha