It was my paternal grandmother’s mental health spiral that drew the whole family into a vortex of therapy for an array of mental health complaints. It is unclear what her diagnosis would have been nowadays, but back then, in the 1950’s, the mental health field was in its infancy, and I have heard an assortment of diagnoses attributed to her state: she was depressed, she was an alcoholic, she suffered from schizo-effective disorder. She was married to America’s favorite illustrator who insisted on living in the middle of nowhere (Arlington, Vermont), to get away from the social life expected of a celebrity artist. She was lonely, isolated, a mother of three in the woods. She was a Californian with a Stanford degree, married to a famous person with a singular compulsion to work relentlessly, day in, day out. She had to run the household, look after the children, manage the correspondence, and read aloud to the artist. My father recently told me that she read War and Peace aloud to my grandfather twice. Also, many works by Dickens, my grandfather’s favorite. Like Tony Last in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, who ends up in an Amazonian jungle reading Dickens aloud to his captor for the rest of his life, she was doomed to read the greats aloud to her spouse over and over.
The situation was untenable. Norman had to look up from his work and find a solution. In 1953 they moved from Vermont to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, home of the Austen Riggs Center, a psychiatric treatment center founded in 1919 by Dr Austen Riggs, who had developed what was then a unique approach to psychological healing that involved extensive talk therapy and therapeutic activities, such as tennis, pottery and botany. Riggs is located in a row of stately, white clapboard houses that line the main street of Stockbridge. The beautiful campus, with its wide lawns, majestic trees and attractive tennis courts, looks more like a prep school than a psychiatric hospital. Riggs’s innovations attracted many notable mental health professionals, most famously, Erik Erikson, the psychoanalyst trained by Anna Freud, who arrived two years before my grandparents, in 1951.