Psychopathology: I & II Fond Student Memory

I had never before scheduled a Saturday morning graduate course. It was entirely unplanned and unintentional on my part. The summer session at CCNY was about to get underway but I had a full time day job to accumulate some money for the Fall term and so my choices were severely restricted. A possible course was being offered by the Psychology Dept. titled "Psychopathology". The meeting place for the class was at Elmhurst General Hospital in Queens. It ran once a week from 9 a.m. to 12:00 noon. I signed on because of my availability but knowing close to nothing about what would take place at those class sessions.

Saturdays in Queens meant that, unlike my regular classes at City College on Convent Ave near 139th St. in Manhattan, where parking was nigh close to impossible, I could drive from the Bronx instead of taking my usually smelly bus and stifling subway route. What a pleasure. The roads were uncluttered, the sunny sky was cloudless, the top hundred tunes of the day were pouring smoothly from the car radio and passing unobstructed onto the moving landscape and it's hapless occupants. To top it all off I had a wide open parking lot waiting for my arrival at the hospital.

The portly bearded professor with a pipe and elbow patches was a clinical psychiatrist who worked a limited schedule in the Psychiatric unit at the hospital, . We, there were twelve of us, gathered torpidly in a medical classroom and were just initiating muffled greetings, half awake grunts and introductions to one another when in walked a truly lovely dark haired young lady wearing a most flattering deep blue dress and things suddenly became interesting as each guy in the room stopped in his tracks to observe this entrancing students approach and hoped against hope she would continue her elegant gliding movement over to a seat near him.

Well, as it turned out, she stopped in the front of the room near the professor. She wasn't a student, she was a schizophrenic patient at the hospital and was to be the sole focus of our first class in Psychopathology. Mouths agape, we took our seats. That was only the beginning of a series of jarring, yet intriguing, realizations that lay before us that summer.

Both the patient and the professor stood behind his desk and in soft non judgmental tones he questioned her. I felt embarrassed for her. Were we not reluctant, yet eager, voyeurs observing him verbally striping her defenses to reveal her innermost passions. Strangely, she seemed not to mind at all. Her responses (and what responses they were) flowed without hesitation and without taking notice of her attentive audience, uniformly perched, as we were, at the edge of our pastel plastic seats.

She spoke with words as lovely as she. They flowed profusely from her barely painted lips. She seemed eloquent with a limitless array of descriptive images. I believed I was witnessing some sort of wonderful artist drawing from an inner palette of verbal paints dabbing colors and feelings on the canvas of space between us. What a talent she seemed. She sounded positively poetic and I was enthralled.

We later learned that what we had heard was an example of "word salad". It describes the confused usage of words with no apparent meaning or relationship attached to them. In this context, it is considered to be a symptom of a formal thought disorder and is a diagnostic indicator of schizophrenia. The wind had been taken from my previously billowing sail. My assessment of what we had just witnessed was all wrong. I felt deflated but suddenly hungry to know more.

That was the summer that I put the Bronx, stickball games in the streets, the school yard where I hung out, behind me. My eyes and ears were being opened to a whole new take on the world. I would have to discard many things I had always taken for granted and pursue the unknown.