Going crazy: An inquiry into madness in our time

by Otto Friedrich

Who is crazy? A president who spies on imaginary enemies/ An astronaut who sees God on the Moon. A businessman who rehearses his suicide? (from back cover)

Genres: Nonfiction, Psychology, Mental Illness

390 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Otto Friedrich was born in Boston and graduated from Harvard, where his father was a political science professor. He took a while to find his literary stride. His career took him from the copy desk at Stars and Stripes to a top writing job at Time, with stops in between with the United Press in London and Paris and with The Daily News and Newsweek in New York.

But it was the seven years he spent with The Saturday Evening Post, including four as its last managing editor, that established Mr. Friedrich as a writer to be reckoned with.

When the venerable magazine folded in 1969, Mr. Friedrich, who had seen the end coming and kept meticulous notes, delineated its demise in a book, 'Decline and Fall," which was published by Harper & Row the next year. Widely hailed as both an engaging and definitive account of corporate myopia, the book, which won a George Polk Memorial Award, is still used as a textbook by both journalism and business schools, his daughter said.

From then on, Mr. Friedrich, who had tried his hand as a novelist in the 1950's and 60's and written a series of children's books with his wife, Priscilla Broughton, wrote nonfiction, turning out an average of one book every two years.

They include "Clover: A Love Story," a 1979 biography of Mrs. Henry Adams; "City of Nets: Hollywood in the 1940's" (1986); "Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations," (1989); "Olympia: Paris in the Age of Manet," (1992), and "Blood and Iron," a study of the Von Moltke family of Germany that is being published this fall.

He wrote his books, as well as reams of freelance articles and book reviews, while holding down a full-time job with Time that required him to write in a distinct style far different from the one he used at home.

Mr. Friedrich, who joined Time as a senior editor in 1971 and retired in 1990 after a decade as a senior writer, wrote 40 major cover stories, the magazine said yesterday, as well as hundreds of shorter pieces, all of them produced on an old-fashioned Royal typewriter that he was given special dispensation to continue using long after the magazine converted to computers.

Mrs. Lucas, portraying her father as a New England moralist whose life and literary interests reflected his disenchantment with much of 20th-century culture, noted that his aptitude for anachronism did not end with typewriters. "We have five rotary telephones in this house," she said.

In addition to pursuing his eclectic interests into print, Mr. Friedrich also had a knack for turning his own life into art. When he tried to grow roses, the record of his failure became a book, "The Rose Garden" (1972). When relatives were stricken with schizophrenia, his frustration drove him to produce an exhaustive study of insanity, "Going Crazy" (1976).

Reviews

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Going nuts was the best thing that ever happened to me. Whoever heard of any of my fellow ballplayers who stayed sane?". Jimmy Pearsall, FEAR STRIKES OUT. What is it like to go mad? To live in a world where everything is the inverse of what is touted as normal? Otto Friedrich examined the lives of the famous (Charlie Parker, Van Gogh) and not so famous to dissect the inner world of the schizophrenic. These are personal accounts of madness, drawn from letters, interviews, biographies and memoirs. Some crazies are highly creative; poets Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell, both institutionalized, come to mind. Others are destructive, of themselves and their families. Lord Byron, phone home. Friedrich blasts psychologist R.D. Laing's theory of madness as liberation, and, at the other extreme, the psychiatric profession for forcing patients to adjust to their oppressive environment. Are there more mad people now than in the past? Probably, because the illusions that kept people sane but dumb, above all religion, have faded away. Friedrich quotes Ezra Pound: "I don't know how humanity stands it/With a painted paradise at the end/Without a painted paradise at the end". Friedrich concludes there is no pattern to madness. To paraphrase Tolstoy, everyone who goes mad goes mad in his or her own way. We must not glorify schizophrenia but neither should we demonize its sufferers.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 4 out of 5]

one of the most awkward reviews i've seen of the book in a shrink journal

"This is a disappointing book, the author is biased. It is, of course, fashionable to throw stones at psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy, and the rest of the mental health field... Friedrich's particular biases seem to be against psychotherapy and chemotherapy, and for megavitamin therapy."


I think that wins an award for one of the most clunky and backward sentences in book review history.

Written at a time when psychotherapy was in decline with the exception of the Bob Newhart Show, and when all the hopes of psychology and the mind were ending in that 1975-1985 era, where all that's left seems to be pop psychology.

[Ram · Rating 5 out of 5]

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