cover image Breakdown: Sex, Suicide, and the Harvard Psychiatrist

Breakdown: Sex, Suicide, and the Harvard Psychiatrist

Eileen McNamara. Pocket Books, $22 (304pp) ISBN 978-0-671-79620-4

McNamara's disturbing and impressive investigation into the case of Harvard Medical School student Paul Lozano, who committed suicide in 1991, nine months after Harvard psychiatrist Margaret Bean-Bayog severed her ties to him, reaches conclusions diametrically opposed to those of the author's Boston Globe colleague Gary S. Chafetz in Obsession (reviewed above). McNamara charges that Bean-Bayog erred badly in using an untested role-playing therapy that cast her as the ``mother'' and Lozano as her ``son.'' By passing along to her patient sexually explicit notes, letters, inscriptions in baby books and flash cards (``You can too feel like a three-year-old when you're twenty-five . . . You can breast feed and be cozy,'' wrote the psychiatrist on one card), Bean-Bayog, McNamara contends, reduced her patient to an infantile, dependent state. This ``mothering technique'' was also in conflict with Lozano's insistent sexual attraction toward Bean-Bayog, according to McNamara. She is highly skeptical of the portrayal by the former psychiatrist (Bean-Bayog has resigned her medical license) of Lozano's boyhood as one of mental torture, instability and possible sexual abuse by his mother. (Apr.)