Rachel Aviv’s Journey to the Ends of Psychiatry

Aviv is now a star staff reporter for The New Yorker and the heir to the magazine’s unofficial position of “psychoanalysis and psychiatry correspondent,” formerly held by the late, great Janet Malcolm. The other people profiled in Aviv’s début collection, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us, are all much less fortunate than she is: Ray Osterhoff, a successful dermatologist and loving father succumbs in middle age to something then diagnosed as manic depression; he agrees to be institutionalized at the Chestnut Lodge mental institution—known for its rigorous, almost cultlike, devotion to Freudian analysis.