Welcome To My Country by Lauren SlaterHer very first job as a psychologist, Lauren Slater is hired as group therapist for a home of schizophrenic men. Although her training has lead her to instruct the men that they are being irrational when they are being irrational, in a tired moment she tries to join the men in their fantastic worlds. Her group takes the spaceship which has landed on Oscar's belly, and- they connect! So Slater continues to join the men in their worlds, and she finds herself a welcome visitor. When Moxi, whose family of origin came from Vietnam, declares that his family is this group, he then welcomes each to his country. Slater alternates chapters on the schizophrenic men with chapters about her other patients, and her next chapter contrasts sharply with her first; in this instance she is working with a man who is integrated in society, a man who is passing for normal, towards whom Slater feels attracted. She compares his misogyny, his violence towards women, with her own past anorexia, placing them both as victims of a womanizing culture. Her schizophrenics' sexuality is seen as loneliness; she makes them almost asexual. Slater views her schizophrenics as human, stuck with disabilities frustrating them as much as they do her. The hypergraphic schizophrenic Joseph's writings are turned into poetry, as Slater attempts to filter out the parts she thinks were simply thrown in as the schizophrenic's tendency to overinclusion. Slater concludes by placing herself among the ranks of the sort of sane- revisiting the institution in which she was once a patient, and now has a patient.
Stirring reading.
