Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

by Rachel Aviv

She came to resemble the sort of patient described in Love in the Ruins, Walker Percy’s 1971 novel about a small-town psychiatrist. “Every psychiatrist knows the type,” Percy writes. “The well-spoken slender young man who recites his symptoms with precision and objectivity—so objective that they seem to be somebody else’s symptoms—and above all with that eagerness, don’t you know, as if nothing would please him more than that his symptom, his dream, should turn out to be interesting, a textbook case. Allow me to have a proper disease, Doctor, he all but tells me.” A patient like this, Percy observes, “has so abstracted himself from himself and from the world around him, seeing things as theories and himself as a shadow, that he cannot, so to speak, reenter the lovely ordinary world.”