Obsession: The Bizarre Relationship Between a Prominent Harvard Psychiatrist and Her Suicidal Patient

By Gary S. Chafetz

Explores the dangers of a society that values titillation over truth in the story of Harvard psychiatrist Margaret Bean-Bayog, who was accused of seducing a suicidal patient, Paul Lozano, who later... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0517595583
• ISBN13: 9780517595589
• Release Date: March 1994
• Publisher: Crown
• Length: 365 Pages
• Weight: 3.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.3" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Obsession: The Bizarre Relationship of a Harvard Psychiatrist and her suicidal patient

This was a very thoughtful review that appeared in the Boston Globe on March 25, 1994. The Chafetz book was actually brilliant, fair, and honest. McNamara's book was so biased as to verge on fraudulent. Boston Globe Author: By Geoffrey Stokes, Special to the Globe Date: 03/25/1994 Page: 50 Section: LIVING BOOK REVIEW BREAKDOWN Sex, Suicide, and the Harvard Psychiatrist By Eileen McNamara Pocket, 289 pp., illustrated, $22 OBSESSION The Bizarre Relationship Between a Prominent Harvard Psychiatrist and Her Suicidal Patient By Gary S. Chafetz and Morris E. Chafetz Crown, 365 pp., $25 Geoffrey Stokes, who has written extensively on the media, writes the My Back Pages column for the Sunday Globe book section. By now, of course, everybody knows the saga of Paul Lozano and Margaret Bean-Bayog: After a youth that was both troubled and sunny, with loving parents who sexually abused him, Lozano entered Harvard Medical School in the autumn of 1983. At the end of his second year, at which point he was both close to suicide and a strong, well-adjusted student, he began a course of therapy with Dr. Bean-Bayog. Over the next four years, she simultaneously kept him alive through heroic and innovative therapy and so badly mistreated him -- perhaps having an affair with him or at the very least, masturbating in his presence -- that her therapy caused him to regress dramatically. Finally, nine months after their therapy terminated, he killed himself, proving both that she'd done wonders to keep him alive for as long as she had and that her infantalizing treatment had left him incapable of coping with the world. The malpractice suit and licensure hearing that grew from these events -- and the attendant media coverage -- were influenced by Harvard's disdain for ordinary folk, by bigotry against Mexican-Americans, by working-class distrust of intellectuals and by bigotry against uppity female doctors and were thus both a replay of the Salem witch trials and a long overdue tightening of lax supervision of the medical profession. Such wildly contradictory accounts are what one would have to believe if one somehow managed to accept the different facts, opinions and tones of these two books -- one by a Globe reporter, the other by a Globe contributor -- as true. But blanket acceptance of this sort being impossible, a reader has to choose -- and though it might theoretically be possible to select a factoid here, a judgment there, the two present such radically different views that the choice is necessarily all-or-nothing. This is not easy; though I am somewhat more sympathetic toward Bean-Bayog as a result of these books, I'm not that much more certain about what ''really" happened during Lozano's therapy and life than I was when his vexed case was playing itself out on the front pages. But I am sure of this: One of these books -- McNamara's -- is pervaded by a bias that fatally cripples its argument. It took me a while to realize this, partly because I've admired