The Vicar of Towson or Another Shrink with a Blog

Roger Lewin is a psychiatrist/writer with a blog. He writes fiction and poetry and about psychiatry. I like people like this.

Roger's blog is so much simpler, quieter, and more elegant than Shrink Rap. His home page has a single word: Welcome. Nowhere on his website is there a picture of his feet.

I'll link to a really gentle, non-fiction piece called The Vicar of Towson, where Dr. Lewin talks about the vicarious life he lives listening to his patients:

Proust wrote that “the only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes, in seeing the universe with the eyes of another, of hundreds of others, in seeing the hundreds of universes that each of them sees.” Psychotherapy is an art of such listening that the other can world forth a world, this world being his world - and have it shared, not statically, but so that it can live and breath, declare itself and grow. Psychotherapy is a partnership in presence. A good psychotherapist is a gifted story listener.

He goes on:

Each patient is a dream. Every way of living is a way of dreaming. Part of what language makes possible is that this waking dreaming should be able to be made sociable. I listen to my patient talk about how hard his conscience makes life for him, finding fault with him wherever he goes. I see a lonely little boy, one who does not know what he can count on. I see myself as a lonely little boy.