ABSTRACT
“I dance naked in my apartment,” she confessed. “Sometimes I even do it with abandon.” My air conditioner slightly muffled the last hesitant syllable as she spoke, turning what my patient had just said into an image so unexpectedly comic that I, equally unexpectedly, heard myself responding with a laugh, “You do it with a band? Are they naked too?” This was a woman who until that moment seemed to possess no available sense of identity other than that of a grimly pitiful misfit, without humor but ever ready to be laughed at, and ostensibly incapable of experiencing a difference between being seen as zany and being seen as ridiculous.
