ABSTRACT
I was still in my early twenties by the time I had taken enough courses to be eligible for the clinical component of my psychoanalytic training: seeing chronically ill patients on the locked wards of a state mental hospital. Which is how I found myself on a fine midsummer’s day, walking the dingy halls of Ward B, searching for Anita, a fifty-four-year-old paranoid schizophrenic, assigned to me for observation. She had been living in and out of the hospital most of her life.
