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Did an Unorthodox Therapist Drive a Woman to Suicide?

“Case Study,” by Graeme Macrae Burnet, is a novel of found documents detailing troubled lives and shifting identities.

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CASE STUDY, by Graeme Macrae Burnet

To get to Primrose Hill from central London, you take the Tube to Chalk Farm Station, exit to your right toward a cafe and an off-license, and climb a path to an overpass above train tracks. The path is called, rather unassumingly, Bridge Approach, and a five-minute walk leads to Primrose Hill. I happened to live in these parts for three years, and I crossed the overpass twice a day most days. Just to the south is the Pembroke Castle pub, where Liam Gallagher of Oasis was once arrested, in 1998. Another neighborhood tippler, Kingsley Amis, favored the Queen’s at the corner of St. George’s Terrace, according to his biographer Zachary Leader, who printed his monthly tab. From my balcony I could see the phone box where Sylvia Plath would desperately call Ted Hughes at his lover’s flat in her last days. It is a quiet neighborhood, but one dense with intrigue and peopled by famous, messy and tortured artistic personages.

The events of Graeme Macrae Burnet’s fourth novel, “Case Study,” are set off by a suicide in the 1960s by a young woman named Veronica, who jumps from the Bridge Approach overpass and is struck by the 4:45 train to High Barnet. (I am not sure that High Barnet trains, rather than Edgware-bound ones, run on this track, nor that the overpass itself, rather than just the path that approaches it, is called Bridge Approach, but these are the sorts of possible slight inaccuracies that Burnet and his not entirely reliable narrators relish.) An investigation into Veronica’s death and the man who might have been responsible for it — her therapist, Arthur Collins Braithwaite, whose office is on Primrose Hill — forms the substance of the narrative. Like Burnet’s previous novel, “ His Bloody Project ” (2016), “Case Study” was nominated for the Booker Prize and consists largely of purportedly found documents.

The would-be Miss Marple of Burnet’s loopy detective story is Veronica’s unnamed younger sister, who, under the alias Rebecca Smyth, becomes Braithwaite’s patient to find out if he drove Veronica to take her own life. Rebecca details her five sessions in notebooks that decades later end up in the hands of a writer named GMB, our frame narrator, who is researching Braithwaite for a potential biography. Now cast into obscurity, the (fictional) therapist was once a figure of note, appearing on BBC chat shows and publishing the books “Untherapy,” a best seller, and “Kill Your Self,” which Rebecca calls “a jumble of incomprehensible sentences, each having no discernible relationship to its neighbors.” Still, we are told by GMB, “Kill Your Self” “captured the zeitgeist,” acquired for its author a cult following from which he drew a lucrative pool of patients, and “if anything, the impenetrability of certain passages only served to confirm the author’s genius.”

“Case Study” consists of a preface, in which GMB explains how he received the notebooks (from Rebecca’s cousin, who noticed a blog post by GMB on Braithwaite); the five notebooks themselves, one of which includes a chapter clipped from “Untherapy” about a patient who is clearly Veronica; five biographical chapters about Braithwaite by GMB, inserted between the notebooks; and a postscript, in which GMB ventures south to pay a visit to the Pembroke Castle. The elegant nested structure is one of the novel’s chief appeals. So is the contrast between Rebecca’s narrative voice, characterized by what GMB calls “a certain kooky élan,” and the cool tone of GMB’s Life of Braithwaite. What emerges is a comedy of identities tried on and discarded. Given the number of suicides that mark the story, it’s a comedy with dark underpinnings.

Rebecca lives with her father, a retired engineer, and their housekeeper, and works as a receptionist for a talent agent. Her mother died when she was 15, falling off a cliff before her eyes, during a family holiday in Devon. Given that Rebecca is the only witness to the fall, and that she admits to fantasizing about pushing someone off the cliff the sentence before recounting her mother’s death, we can’t help suspecting that she might have done it herself. But we have no more reason to doubt it than the rest of her story, and that’s part of the fun: The whole tale might be a hoax.

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Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet review – unstable identities

This wry look at 1960s counterculture focuses on an enfant terrible of the anti-psychiatry movement to explore the gaps between appearance and reality

T he Booker-shortlisted 2015 novel His Bloody Project employed a range of narrative techniques to prod at the truth surrounding a murder in a 19th-century Scottish crofting community. Graeme Macrae Burnet’s concern was not so much with who committed the crime – we know that from the outset – but with the moral ambiguity inherent in assigning blame. His new novel, Case Study, is different in tone, though an interest in exploring complex psychological dramas through intricate narrative structures takes centre stage once again.

One of the key voices in His Bloody Project belongs to the prison doctor, charged with determining whether the accused is mentally fit to stand trial. The narrative spotlight in Case Study is focused on psychiatry itself, and how those who practise it are not always best qualified to pass judgment on the sanity or otherwise of those they purport to treat. The novel presents itself as the work of one “GMB”, a writer who has become interested in Collins Braithwaite, enfant terrible of the 1960s anti-psychiatry movement. After stumbling on Braithwaite’s “salacious, iconoclastic and compelling” collection of case studies, Untherapy, in a Glasgow bookshop, GMB toys with the idea of writing his biography. Although the plan meets with little enthusiasm from his agent and publisher, GMB’s fascination with Braithwaite is redoubled when he is contacted by a Mr Martin Grey, offering him six notebooks containing the journal of his cousin, whom Grey claims was a patient of Braithwaite. The notebooks contain “certain allegations” he is sure GMB will find of interest.

The notebooks are presented in full, interspersed with GMB’s biographical commentary. After giving up his studies at Oxford, Braithwaite spends a brief period working under RD Laing before pursuing his own more unorthodox path, later accusing his mentor of stealing his ideas. Railing against Laing’s success and unearned celebrity, Braithwaite sets himself up in practice near Primrose Hill, north London, an enterprise that seems doomed to failure until a chance encounter with Dirk Bogarde brings him an ever-expanding roster of celebrity clients. Braithwaite’s success is not to last, however, as his increasingly outrageous behaviour and monstrous egotism put him on a collision course with the law.

The six “Grey” notebooks offer the first-person account of an unnamed narrator, a young woman from a comfortable middle-class background whose older sister, Veronica, has recently killed herself. She believes the ultimate blame for Veronica’s death must lie with her psychotherapist, notorious “quack” Collins Braithwaite. Under the name Rebecca Smyth, the young woman books herself a consultation with Braithwaite, determined to discover the truth.

In his preface to the main text, GMB puts forward certain minor inaccuracies in the notebooks as grounds for questioning their authenticity, and as readers we would be advised to be equally suspicious. Those already familiar with Burnet’s writing have met GMB before, not only as the writer and researcher who claims distant kinship with the teenage murderer Roddy Macrae in His Bloody Project, but also as the translator of Burnet’s two “Raymond Brunet” crime novels. The defining essence of Burnet’s work to date is to be found in this kind of literary gamesmanship, a brand of metatextuality that is as much about exploiting the possibilities of the novel form as it is about blurring the boundaries between appearance and reality. In throwing us into doubt about which – and more crucially whose – story we are supposed to be following, Burnet encourages us to look more closely at the inherent instability of fiction itself. The painstakingly assembled, predominantly mimetic fiction of the 19th century has trained us to trust the author; Burnet has always delighted in undermining such easy assumptions, and in Case Study he ups the stakes still further, providing a veritable layer cake of possible realities to get lost in.

“Rebecca Smyth” tells us that in her sessions with Braithwaite he constantly questions her account of things, accusing her not only of inventing whole tracts of her past, but presenting him with an identity that is itself a construction. We know that in this at least Braithwaite is right, but with only the fictitious GMB’s word to go on that Braithwaite exists, it would be foolish for us to trust his suggestions or his analysis. The harder we tug on Burnet’s narrative threads, the more Veronica, her sister, and even Braithwaite himself start to look like different aspects of an unsteady unity.

In his rendering of the six notebooks, Burnet has cited the copious amounts of research he has undertaken, looking to the women’s magazines and journals of the 1950s and 60s in search of authenticity. While such publications might well reflect the moral tone and societal attitudes of the time, they are not necessarily an accurate representation of how young women in postwar England thought and felt. If we take the notebooks at face value, their shallowness and internalised misogyny quickly become irritating as well as unconvincing. If we choose to see them as satire, as part of the novel’s plot in a larger sense, they become something rather different.

As the notebooks progress, their unnamed narrator becomes ever more confused about her own identity. In wishing she was more like her invented alter ego, she begins to see Rebecca almost literally as a separate person, an uncanny simulacrum who can usurp her position and control her behaviour. In the biographical segments, GMB augments this with some interesting discursions on doubles in literature and Braithwaite’s Kierkegaard-inflected theories on the self. As the notebooks’ narrator slides further towards dissociation and depression, Case Study finally becomes a genuinely affecting discourse on mental health, the gulf between societal expectations and inward reality.

In pointed contrast to the gritty true-crime ambience of His Bloody Project, Case Study is above all a very funny book, a wry look back at 60s counterculture in which Burnet’s inventions rub shoulders with real personalities. But much as Braithwaite’s outlandish behaviour and performative rudeness might raise a knowing smile, his theories on identity and selfhood, appearance and reality are never as bonkers as we pretend they are. If Burnet’s aim in writing Case Study was to force us up against the contradictions of our conflicted selves, he has surely succeeded. This is a novel that is entertaining and mindfully engrossing in equal measure.

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by Graeme Macrae Burnet ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2022

A brisk and engaging novel that wears itself thin on the grindstone of its own conceit.

A provocative send-up of midcentury British mores and the roots of modern psychotherapy.

Toward the end of 2019, GMB, a character with the author's initials, receives an email from one Martin Grey, who has in his possession several notebooks he believes GMB might find of interest. Mr. Grey asserts that the notebooks were written by his cousin about Collins Braithwaite, the notorious and now largely forgotten “ enfant terrible of the so-called anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s,” on whom GMB has recently published a blog post. According to Grey, the notebooks contain evidence of near-criminal misconduct concerning Braithwaite’s involvement in the suicide of the diarist’s older sister, Veronica. GMB’s research assures him of the notebooks’ authenticity, if not their veracity, and he presents their contents verbatim, interspersed with sections of his own outline of Braithwaite’s salacious life and ignoble death. From the plinth of this metatextual introduction, the book dives into the “kooky élan” of a thoroughly middle-class young woman—the diarist—as she infiltrates Braithwaite’s office under the nom de guerre Rebecca Smyth. Rebecca is bent on uncovering the truth about Braithwaite’s therapeutic practice though she’s unsure what purpose this truth would serve. However, over the course of the five notebooks, Rebecca’s rapid descent into true depression coupled with her increasing difficulty in keeping her original identity separate from her assumed self become the driving narrative. As the novel progresses, the author’s layering of his fictional characters’ unverifiable testimony, frank deception, and self-aggrandizing half-truths with significant historical figures of the time—like R.D. Laing and Dirk Bogarde—and GMB's omnipresent frame narrative overlap to the extent that it's hard to tell not just whose perception to trust, but which among all these counterfeit identities is real. As beguiling as Rebecca’s wry domestic critique can be, the book’s star is clearly the carefully constructed unreliability Burnet imbues at every level of his writing. This results in a novel that strives toward the biggest of questions—in the absence of the Cartesian ego Braithwaite seeks to slay, is there anything at all underneath our masks?—but lacks the character-driven empathy that would encourage us to care about the answer.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-77196-520-0

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Biblioasis

Review Posted Online: July 25, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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Longlist for the Booker Prize Is Announced

by Elin Hilderbrand ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 11, 2024

Though Hilderbrand threatens to kill all our darlings with this last laugh, her acknowledgments say it’s just “for now.”

A stranger comes to town, and a beloved storyteller plays this creative-writing standby for all it’s worth.

Hilderbrand fans, a vast and devoted legion, will remember Blond Sharon, the notorious island gossip. In what is purportedly the last of the Nantucket novels, Blond Sharon decides to pursue her lifelong dream of fiction writing. In the collective opinion of the island—aka the “cobblestone telegraph”—she’s qualified. “Well, we think, she’s certainly demonstrated her keen interest in other people’s stories, the seedier and more salacious, the better.” Blond Sharon’s first assignment in her online creative writing class is to create a two-person character study, and Hilderbrand has her write up the two who arrive on the ferry in an opening scene of the book, using the same descriptors Hilderbrand has. Amusingly, the class is totally unimpressed. “‘I found it predictable,’ Willow said. ‘Like maybe Sharon used ChatGPT with the prompt “Write a character study about two women getting off the ferry, one prep and one punk.”’” Blond Sharon abandons these characters, but Hilderbrand thankfully does not. They are Kacy Kapenash, daughter of retiring police chief Ed Kapenash (the other swan song referred to by the title), and her new friend Coco Coyle, who has given up her bartending job in the Virgin Islands to become a “personal concierge” for the other strangers-who-have-come-to-town. These are the Richardsons, Bull and Leslee, a wild and wealthy couple who have purchased a $22 million beachfront property and plan to take Nantucket by storm. As the book opens, their house has burned down during an end-of-summer party on their yacht, and Coco is missing, feared both responsible for the fire and dead. Though it’s the last weekend of his tenure, Chief Ed refuses to let the incoming chief, Zara Washington, take this one over. The investigation goes forward in parallel with a review of the summer’s intrigues, love affairs, and festivities. Whatever else you can say about Leslee Richardson, she knows how to throw a party, and Hilderbrand is just the writer to design her invitations, menus, themes, playlists, and outfits. And that hot tub!

Pub Date: June 11, 2024

ISBN: 9780316258876

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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New York Times Bestseller

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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Read the 2022 longlist: an extract from Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet

Graeme Macrae Burnet offers a dazzlingly inventive – and often wickedly humorous – meditation on the nature of sanity, identity and truth itself. Read the opening chapter here

London, 1965. An unworldly young woman believes that a charismatic psychotherapist, Collins Braithwaite, has driven her sister to suicide. Intent on confirming her suspicions, she assumes a false identity and presents herself to him as a client, recording her experiences in a series of notebooks. But she soon finds herself drawn into a world in which she can no longer be certain of anything, even her own character.

Read more extracts from this year’s longlisted titles here .

Read an interview with Graeme Macrae Burnet here .

Written by Graeme Macrae Burnet

The First Notebook

I have decided to write down everything that happens, because I feel, I suppose, I may be putting myself in danger, and if proved to be right (a rare occurrence admittedly), this notebook might serve as some kind of evidence.

Regrettably, as will become clear, I have little talent for composition. As I read over my previous sentence I do rather cringe, but if I dilly-dally over style I fear I will never get anywhere. Miss Lyle, my English mistress, used to chide me for trying to cram too many thoughts into a single sentence. This, she said, was a sign of a disorderly mind. ‘You must first decide what it is you wish to say, then express it in the plainest terms.’ That was her mantra, and though it is doubtless a good one, I can see that I have already failed. I have said that I may be putting myself in danger, but there I go, off on an irrelevant digression. Rather than beginning again, however, I shall press on. What matters here is substance rather than style; that these pages constitute a record of what is to occur. It may be that were my narrative too polished, it might lack credibility; that somehow the ring of truth lies in infelicity. In any case, I cannot follow Miss Lyle’s advice, as I do not yet know what it is I wish to say. However, for the sake of anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves reading this, I will endeavour to be clear: to express myself in the plainest terms.

In this spirit, I shall begin by stating the facts. The danger to which I have alluded comes in the person of Collins Braithwaite. You will have heard him described in the press as ‘Britain’s most dangerous man’, this on account of his ideas about psychiatry. It is my belief, however, that it is not merely his ideas that are dangerous. I am convinced, you see, that Dr Braithwaite killed my sister, Veronica. I do not mean that he murdered her in the normal sense of the word, but that he is, nonetheless, as responsible for her death as if he had strangled her with his bare hands. Two years ago, Veronica threw herself from the overpass at Bridge Approach in Camden and was killed by the 4.45 to High Barnet. You could hardly imagine a person less likely to commit such an act. She was twenty-six years old, intelligent, successful and passably attractive. Regardless of this, she had, unbeknown to my father and me, been consulting Dr Braithwaite for some weeks. This I know from his own account.

Graeme Macrae Burnet

I remember less of what he actually said than his manner of delivering it. He had the air of a man to whom it would be futile to offer resistance. He spoke with a weary authority, as if tired of explaining himself to his inferiors.

Unfeasibly thrilled to find Case Study on @TheBookerPrizes longlist! Equally delighted for everyone at the brilliant @SarabandBooks & my agents at @BlakeFriedmann Huge congrats to all the longlistees! Gin fizz and blancmange all round! 🍸🍧🍸 pic.twitter.com/rcPXuG9Klg — Graeme Macrae Burnet (@GMacraeBurnet) July 26, 2022

Like most people in England I was familiar with Dr Braithwaite’s uncouth Northern drawl long before I encountered him in person. I had heard him speaking on the wireless, and had even once seen him on television. The programme was a discussion of psychiatry hosted by Joan Bakewell.* Braithwaite’s appearance was no more attractive than his voice. He wore an open-necked shirt and no jacket. His hair, which reached to his collar, was dishevelled, and he smoked constantly. His features were large, as if they had been exaggerated by a caricaturist, but there was something, even on television, that drew one’s eyes to him. I was only vaguely aware of the other guests in the studio. I remember less of what he actually said than his manner of delivering it. He had the air of a man to whom it would be futile to offer resistance. He spoke with a weary authority, as if tired of explaining himself to his inferiors. The participants were seated in a semi-circle with Miss Bakewell in the centre. While the others sat up straight, as if attending church, Dr Braithwaite slouched in his seat like a bored schoolboy, his chin slumped on the palm of his hand. He appeared to regard the other contributors with a mixture of contempt and boredom. Towards the end of the programme, he gathered up his smoking materials and walked off the set, muttering an expletive that there is no need to repeat here. Miss Bakewell was taken aback, but quickly recovered her composure and remarked that it was an admission of the poverty of her guest’s ideas that he was unwilling to engage in debate with his peers.

The following day’s newspapers were filled with condemnation of Dr Braithwaite’s behaviour: he was the embodiment of everything that was wrong with modern Britain; his books were filled with the most obscene ideas and displayed the basest view of human nature. Naturally, the following day I visited Foyle’s during my lunch hour and asked for a copy of his most recent book, which laboured under the unappealing title of Untherapy . The cashier handled the volume as though it carried the danger of infection, and gave me a disapproving look I had not experienced since I acquired a copy of Mr Lawrence’s disreputable novel. My purchase remained under wraps until I was safely ensconced in my room after supper that night.

I should say that, prior to this, my knowledge of psychiatry was exclusively derived from those scenes in films in which a patient reclines on a settee and recounts her dreams to a bearded physician with a Germanic accent. Perhaps for this reason, I found the opening part of Untherapy difficult to follow. It was full of unfamiliar words, and the sentences were so long and convoluted that the author would have benefited from following Miss Lyle’s advice. The only thing I gleaned from the introduction was that Braithwaite had not even wanted to write this book in the first place. His ‘visitors’, as he called them, were individuals, not ‘case studies’ to be paraded like sideshow freaks. If he now set out these stories, it was for the sole purpose of defending his ideas against the scorn poured on them by the Establishment (a word he used a great deal). He declared himself to be ‘an untherapist’: his task was to convince people that they did not need therapy; his mission was to bring down the ‘jerry-built edifice’ of psychiatry. This struck me as a most peculiar position to adopt, but, as I have said, I am not well versed in the topic. The book, he wrote, could be seen as a companion to his previous work, and consisted of a series of narratives based on relationships he had entered into with troubled individuals. Naturally, the names and certain identifying details had been changed, but the fundamentals of each story were, he insisted, true.

Having got past the baffling opening section, I found these stories frightfully compelling. I suppose there is something reassuring about reading about those duds who make one’s own eccentricities pale by comparison. By the time I was halfway through I felt positively normal. It was only when I came to the penultimate chapter that I found myself reading about Veronica. The most sensible thing, I think, is simply to insert these pages here.

* This edition of Late Night Line-Up aired on BBC2 on Sunday 15th August 1965. The other participants were Anthony Storr, Donald Winnicott and the then Bishop of London, Robert Stopford. R.D. Laing had been invited to take part but refused to share a platform with Braithwaite. There is, unfortunately, no surviving footage of the programme, but Joan Bakewell later wrote that Braithwaite was ‘one of the most arrogant and unpleasant individuals’ she had ever had the misfortune to meet.

Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet is published by Saraband, £9.99

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Book review: Case Study, by Graeme Macrae Burnet

Graeme Macrae Burnet PIC: John Devlin / The Scotsman

Graeme Macrae Burnet is a master of the false but apparently authentic document. There are five lengthy ones in this, his fourth novel, intercut by a likewise credibly invented biographical sketch of a briefly famous, or rather notorious, psychotherapist, Collins Braithwaite, “a contemporary of RD Laing, and something of an ‘enfant terrible’ of the so-called anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s.” Braithwaite’s historical authenticity is filled out not only by notes of his jealousy of Laing, and Laing’s contempt for him, but by mention of his relationships with other celebrities of the time. It is very well done, and it is tempting to believe that the dreadful and dangerous shrink really existed.

The unnamed author (ie. Macrae Burnet), having written something about Braithwaite, is sent a package of five notebooks which “contained certain allegations about Braithwaite which [the sender] is sure would interest him.”

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The notebooks are written by a young woman whose elder sister, Veronica, a brilliant Cambridge academic, committed suicide by throwing herself off a bridge. After reading a case study in Braithwaite’s book Untherapy, the writer of the notebooks is sure that the patient described is Veronica, and, having read its successor Kill Your Self, is also convinced that Braithwaite was responsible for Veronica’s death. She resolves to investigate, being all the more determined because she has been the rather dim, unconsidered younger sister, while Veronica was Daddy’s girl.

Naturally she can’t make an appointment under her own name with Dr Braithwaite; it would arouse suspicion. So she calls herself Rebecca Smyth, and Rebecca proves to be very different from her own timid self. Rebecca is clever, striking and eager for the experience that the narrator’s hitherto shy and unambitious self has shunned. Will she take over? I was reminded of the ventriloquist’s malignant dummy in that 1945 classic film Dead of Night.

Meanwhile, the unnamed author follows the course of Braithwaite’s headlong career, one that is both destructive of others and of himself, as he presents himself as the hard, working-class Northern Boy who has cast off all inhibitions as he pursues his self-appointed “mission to bring down the jerry-built edifice of psychiatry.” But, one finds oneself wondering: is Braithwaite in his arrogance and jealously as much of a phoney construct as that which he discerns in his clients? Is he wicked or merely stupidly careless in his approach to others? Do they indeed exist for him?

This is a novel which, like Macrae Burnet’s previous ones, holds the attention, develops an insidious narrative interest, and poses questions about the nature of the self and the authenticity of identity. There is comedy here too. Indeed, depending on the angle of view, Braithwaite is a comic character, if also a disturbing one. Certainly in his depiction of him, Macrae Burnet catches the self-satisfied idiocy of one strand of 1960s culture. Indeed, he is done so well and seems so authentic in his inauthenticity that you might be surprised to find no mention of him in the index of John Clay’s admirable biography of Ronnie Laing.

For the most part, though Macrae Burnet finds different voices for the writer of the notebooks and the unnamed author of the biographical Braithwaite chapters, his style is plain, lucid, very readable and rich in irony. There are fine comic passages, for instance the notebook writer’s visit to a pub with a young man who has been attracted by her assumed self, Rebecca, who insists that she should ask for gin as the non-Rebecca never would. But it is the appalling and yet ultimately rather pathetic Braithwaite who gives the book its momentum, and it is through him that the tone and temper of the times are captured. As in his other novels, Macrae Burnet writes with an admirable lucidity, at the same time being able to probe and shed light on the dark places of the mind. Writing in a prose that is spare, deadpan and yet alive, he poses questions about the nature and perception of what we choose to call reality. He is an uncommonly interesting and satisfying novelist.

Case Study, by Graeme Macrae Burnet, Saraband, 276pp, £14.99

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Written by Graeme Macrae Burnet Review by Jessica Brockmole

An author researching a notorious and now-forgotten British psychotherapist unexpectedly receives a series of notebooks written by a former patient. Thus begins Graeme Macrae Burnet’s metafictional novel, presented as the footnoted second edition of a biography written by the slyly named G.M.B. The unnamed writer of the notebooks is a young London woman looking for explanations two years after her sister’s suicide in 1963. Blaming the unconventional psychotherapist Collins Braithwaite for her sister’s death, she goes undercover as a patient named Rebecca Smyth. She worries that she looks too neat and collected to be “a nut,” but through her sessions with Braithwaite, “Rebecca” becomes less and less certain of that, as her real self and her undercover self vie for control. The five notebooks alternate with G.M.B.’s detailed biographical chapters on the forgotten—and, it should be said, wholly fictional—Collins Braithwaite.

Case Study is a dizzying dive into British counterculture of the 1960s and the radical anti-psychiatry movement. This short novel is wildly inventive and slickly written. The notebooks feel so casually and authentically from the period, with “Rebecca’s” word choices and the details she includes saying as much about 1960s British society as they do about her place in it. “Rebecca” is deliciously unreliable as a narrator and seems as constructed as her undercover persona, leaving the reader to wonder at the honesty in either her initial self-assuredness or her later descent into instability. Through both “Rebecca’s” notebooks and G.M.B.’s biography, Braithwaite comes across as arrogant, dismissive, manipulative, but also undeniably magnetic and brilliant. I must stress the “fictional” again, as Burnet writes so convincingly that I found myself looking up Braithwaite, more than once, sure that I had just failed to find him in the last search. An excellent and imaginative novel, well deserving of its place on the Booker Prize longlist.

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Case Study: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022

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Case Study: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022 Kindle Edition

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 BOOKER PRIZE

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 GORDON BURN PRIZE

'A page-turning blast.' Times

'Genuinely affecting … a very funny book.' Guardian

'Burstingly alive and engaging.' Telegraph

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE BOOKER PRIZE-SHORTLISTED HIS BLOODY PROJECT.

'I have decided to write down everything that happens, because I feel, I suppose, I may be putting myself in danger.'

London, 1965. An unworldly young woman suspects charismatic psychotherapist Collins Braithwaite of involvement in a death in her family. Determined to find out more, she becomes a client of his under a false identity. But she soon finds herself drawn into a world in which she can no longer be certain of anything.

In Case Study, Graeme Macrae Burnet presents both sides: the woman’s notes and the life of Collins Braithwaite. The result is a dazzling, page-turning and wickedly humorous meditation on the nature of sanity, identity and truth itself, by one of the most inventive novelists writing today.

Print length 280 pages
Language English
Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
Publisher Saraband
Publication date 7 Oct. 2021
File size 3676 KB
Page Flip Enabled
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Enhanced typesetting Enabled
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'Brilliant, bamboozling … Burnet captures his characters’ voices so brilliantly that what might have been just an intellectual game feels burstingly alive and engaging.'

“Sinister and cleverly done … punctures the myth-making of the period.”

About the Author

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ASIN ‏ : ‎ B08Y5YL1V3
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Saraband (7 Oct. 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3676 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 280 pages
359 in Humourous Dark Comedy
658 in Psychological Literary Fiction
1,145 in Historical Literary Fiction

About the author

Graeme macrae burnet.

Graeme Macrae Burnet is the author of the 'fiendishly readable' His Bloody Project, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Booker Prize and the LA Times Book Awards. It won the Saltire Prize for Fiction and has been published to great acclaim in twenty languages around the world.

His 2021 novel Case Study was longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Ned Kelly International Crime Prize and Gordon Burn Prize. Hannah Kent (Burial Rites) called it 'a novel of mind-bending brilliance.'

He is also the author of a trilogy of novels set in the small French town of Saint-Louis and featuring detective Georges Gorski: The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau (2014) and The Accident on the A35 (2017) and A Case of Matricide (October 2024).

"If Roland Barthes had written a detective novel, this would be it," was the Literary Review's verdict on The Accident on the A35

Born and brought up in Kilmarnock in the west of Scotland, Graeme now lives in Glasgow.

You can find him on twitter at @GMacraeBurnet.

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Case Study Paperback – November 1, 2022

Shortlisted for the 2022 Gordon Burn Prize • Shortlisted for the 2022 Ned Kelly Awards • Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize • Longlisted for the 2022 HWA Gold Crown Award • Longlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award

SELECTED BY NEW YORK TIMES AS ONE OF 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2022

The Booker-shortlisted author of His Bloody Project blurs the lines between patient and therapist, fiction and documentation, and reality and dark imagination.

London, 1965. 'I have decided to write down everything that happens, because I feel, I suppose, I may be putting myself in danger,' writes an anonymous patient, a young woman investigating her sister's suicide. In the guise of a dynamic and troubled alter-ego named Rebecca Smyth, she makes an appointment with the notorious and roughly charismatic psychotherapist Collins Braithwaite, whom she believes is responsible for her sister's death. But in this world of beguilement and bamboozlement, neither she nor we can be certain of anything.

Case Study is a novel as slippery as it is riveting, as playful as it is sinister, a meditation on truth, sanity, and the instability of identity by one of the most inventive novelists of our time.

Print length 288 pages
Language English
Publisher Biblioasis
Publication date November 1, 2022
Dimensions 5.25 x 0.65 x 8.25 inches
ISBN-10 1771965207
ISBN-13 978-1771965200
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Editorial Reviews

Praise for Case Study

" Case Study has a lot in common with the novels of Vladimir Nabokov and Roberto Bolaño, in which invented characters pass through tumultuous episodes of literary history that never quite happened, though it seems as if they should have ... Case Study is a diverting novel, overflowing with clever plays on and inversions of tropes of English intellectual and social life during the postwar decades." —New York Times

"A mystery story—or is it?—that takes us into the heart of the psychoanalytical consulting room. Or does it? Interleaving a biography of radical '60s 'untherapist' Collins Braithwaite with the notebooks of his patient 'Rebecca', a young woman seeking answers about the death of her sister, 'GMB' presents a forensic, elusive and mordantly funny text(s) layered with questions about authenticity and the self." —2022 Booker Prize Jury Statement

"A twisting and often wickedly humorous work of crime fiction that meditates on the nature of sanity, identity and truth itself." —Gordon Burn Prize Jury Citation

"With its layers of imposture and unreliability, the novel suggests that our personhood is far more malleable than we believe." —New Yorker

"The parallel tracks of Case Study are deeply satisfying because they encompass a sense of how we live day-by-day in doubt, often unaware of our own motivations." —NY Sun

"Macrae's novel works on various levels. It is an elaborate, mind-bending guessing game; it is a blackly comic and quietly moving study of a nervous breakdown; and it is a captivating portrait of an egomaniac ... Macrae has reliably delivered another work of fiendish fun." —Star Tribune

"Burnet is the ultimate unreliable narrator, and Case Study serves as a worthy addition to his oeuvre." —Chicago Review of Books

"The fictional author and Burnet share the same initials, which should be a clue as to how close the book will come to breaking the fourth wall ... The matryoshka-style layering of narratives, each dependent on the other, is engaging and disorienting. Case Study is an immersive novel that stretches its fiction to fact-like proportions." —Foreword Reviews (starred review)

" Case Study is a dizzying dive into British counterculture of the 1960s and the radical anti-psychiatry movement ... wildly inventive and slickly written. The notebooks feel so casually and authentically from the period, with 'Rebecca’s' word choices and the details she includes saying as much about 1960s British society as they do about her place in it. 'Rebecca' is deliciously unreliable as a narrator." —Jessica Brockmole, Historical Novels Review (Editors' Choice)

"Darkly funny and, at times, deeply weird, Case Study is a dense, complicated, singular work of meta-fiction. It asks deep and important questions without ever shoving them down your throat. Most importantly, though, it tells an interesting and engaging story—three of them, in fact. It’s a ride well worth taking, even if it is sometimes quiet and subtle. Case Study is well-deserving of its praise." —Spectrum Culture

"Ironical, intelligent and intriguing from first page to last, the fourth novel from Glasgow-based Graeme Macrae Burnet ... questions the tricky nature of identity." —Winnipeg Free Press

"Burnet evokes a place and an era very nicely, in pitch-perfect prose ... Case Study is an artfully twisted and presented fiction about identity and the stories we tell, and a wonderful evocation of 1960s London." —Complete Review

"Burnet weaves together 'found' documents and the biography of a controversial psychologist to create an indelible portrait of a power struggle in 1960s London." —Vol 1. Brooklyn

" Case Study reflects on relationships of power: the physical power of abusive men over women, the lingering power of memory over oneself." —The Michigan Daily

"It is a truly riveting novel, entertaining as it makes you question everything about it, and beautifully written. There are no wasted words in this book." —Miramichi Reader

"What decidedly it is is an enticing piece of metafiction that is impossible to put down, but not because it offers generated tension that is happily released when order and safety are restored. Instead it tempts us down one fascinating path after another without promising or providing any solutions." —Reviewing the Evidence

"A provocative send-up of midcentury British mores and the roots of modern psychotherapy … brisk and engaging." —Kirkus

"Burnet's deployment of multiple narrative structures, his finely tuned depiction of Braithwaite, and the fascinating revelations of the diarist result in an unforgettable story, one that will rattle readers long after its startling, disorientating ending." —Shelf Awareness

“Encourages us to look more closely at the inherent instability of fiction itself … genuinely affecting … a very funny book.” —Nina Allan, The Guardian

"Burnet propels readers through the novel with his fierce, hilarious intelligence." —Crime Reads

“Brilliant, bamboozling … Burnet captures his characters’ voices so brilliantly that what might have been just an intellectual game feels burstingly alive and engaging.” —Telegraph

“A riveting psychological plot ... tortuous, cunning ... clever. ” —Times Literary Supplement

“Burnet’s triumph is that it’s a page-turning blast, funny, sinister and perfectly plotted so as to reveal—or withhold—its secrets in a consistently satisfying way … Rarely has being constantly wrong-footed been so much fun.” —The Times

“Such is Burnet’s skill that he immediately convinces the reader that everything he is about to say is based on historical fact … brilliantly depicted … intriguing … compulsive reading.” —Irish Times

“You’ll be completely beguiled by this sly, darkly comic offering, with its unreliable narrator and its equally unreliable author.” —Mail on Sunday

“What’s real and what’s not is beside the point in this skillful portrait of a disturbed woman and her encounters with an experimental 1960s psychotherapist … Both strands quickly become compelling … I was hooked like a fish.” —Spectator

"Macrae Burnett has created a dynamic work that has excellent characterisation with acute observation. The writing is layered but there is no use of superfluous words. While the themes are profound, the style is both intriguing and playful. He has created a book that is thought provoking and a compulsive read." —Limerick City and County Libraries, Ireland

Praise for Graeme Macrae Burnet's His Bloody Project

"It’s only a story—or is it? Graeme Macrae Burnet makes such masterly use of the narrative form that the horrifying tale he tells in His Bloody Project ... seems plucked straight out of Scotland’s sanguinary historical archives.”

—New York Times Book Review

“Both a horrific tale of violence and a rumination on the societal problems for poor sharecroppers of the era.” —TIME

“[A] powerful, absorbing novel … Authors from Henry James to Vladimir Nabokov to Gillian Flynn have used [an unreliable narrator] to induce ambiguity, heighten suspense and fold an alternative story between the lines of a printed text. Mr. Burnet, a Glasgow author, does all of that and more in this page-turning period account of pathos and violence in 19th-century Scotland … [A] cleverly constructed tale … Has the lineaments of the crime thriller but some of the sociology of a Thomas Hardy novel.” —Wall Street Journal

“Recalls William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner in the way it portrays an abused people and makes the ensuing violence understandable … His Bloody Project shows that the power held by landowners and overseers allowed cruelties just like those suffered by the Virginia slaves in Confessions . Halfway between a thriller and a sociological study of an exploitive economic system with eerie echoes to our own time, His Bloody Project is a gripping and relevant read.” —Newsweek

“A thriller with a fine literary pedigree ... His Bloody Project offers an intricate, interactive puzzle, a crime novel written, excuse my British, bloody well.” —Los Angeles Times

From the Back Cover

The Booker-shortlisted author of His Bloody Project blurs the lines between patient and therapist, fiction and documentation, and reality and dark imagination.

About the Author

The First Notebook

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Biblioasis (November 1, 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1771965207
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1771965200
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 0.65 x 8.25 inches
#2,096 in Historical British & Irish Literature
#4,307 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
#25,751 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Graeme macrae burnet.

"If Roland Barthes had written a detective novel, this would be it," was the Literary Review's verdict on The Accident on the A35

Born and brought up in Kilmarnock in the west of Scotland, Graeme now lives in Glasgow.

You can find him on twitter at @GMacraeBurnet.

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Case Study: A Novel Summary & Study Guide

Case Study: A Novel by Graeme MaCrae Burnet

(approx. 3 pages at 400 words per page)

Case Study: A Novel Summary & Study Guide Description

The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Burnet, Graeme Macrae. Case Study . Saraband, 2022.

Graeme Macrae Burnet's novel Case Study is written from the first and third person points of view and employs an unconventional, meta-narrative structure. The auto-fictional author GMB presents a series of notebooks written by an unnamed first person narrator. These notebooks appear interspersed on the page with sections from GMB's biographical writings about the controversial psychotherapist Dr. Collins Braithwaite. GMB begins their text with a preface, describing their introduction to the notebooks, and ends with a postscript, detailing their first encounter with the notebook's author. The following summary relies upon the past tense and a more streamlined narrative structure.

While GMB was working on their biography of Braithwaite's life and career, they received an email from a person named Martin Grey. Grey had discovered a series of notebooks allegedly written by his cousin in his uncle's attic. Understanding that GMB was writing about Braithwaite, Grey thought the notebooks, which heavily featured Braithwaite, might be of interest to GMB. Although Grey refused to meet with GMB and GMB struggled to authenticate the notebooks' provenance, they decided to include them in their biographical text.

The narrator decided to devote her notebooks to a new project she had recently designed. Following her sister Veronica's suicide, she became interested in Veronica's former psychotherapist, Braithwaite. She read his works and became convinced his controversial ideas led Veronica to kill herself. Determined to prove Braithwaite's culpability, the narrator planned to pose as one of Braithwaite's new patients, a character she had designed named Rebecca Smyth. She would detail Rebecca's sessions with and impressions of Braithwaite in her books.

Before her first session with Braithwaite, the narrator carefully crafted her Rebecca persona. She believed Rebecca would have to appear and act slightly unhinged, but not entirely slovenly. While waiting for her appointment, she encountered a young man named Tom on the street, on whom she tried out her new Rebecca identity.

Over the course of her sessions with Braithwaite, the narrator became increasingly enthralled by her new identity. She loved playing the part of Rebecca. At first, Rebecca was a mask of her creation. Over time, Rebecca became increasingly autonomous. On a date with Tom one afternoon, the narrator marveled at how bold and unabashed Rebecca was. She was unafraid of flirting or speaking her mind.

Although the narrator was always inhabiting Rebecca while meeting with Braithwaite, she feared he could see through her disguise. The more stories, anecdotes, and memories she shared with him, the more Braithwaite discerned about her true nature. She became increasingly confused as to who she actually was.

After a particularly trying session with Braithwaite, the narrator found the courage to go out with Tom by becoming Rebecca. When she and Tom finally kissed, however, the narrator burst out with the truth. She insisted Rebecca was fake and that she wanted him to see and kiss the real her. Unnerved, Tom scurried out of the bar.

In the weeks following, the narrator fell into a depression. Realizing that Rebecca would not survive if she died, she decided to discard her old self and to become Rebecca permanently.

In GMB's biographical writings, he details Braithwaite's early life, academic career, growing interest in philosophy and psychology, and rise to cultural prominence. After his father's suicide and his mother's death, Braithwaite distanced himself from his family, his home, and his former life. As a student at Oxford, he freed himself to the cultural changes abounding around him. He was not only delighted by his academic pursuits, but empowered by his sexual escapades.

After completing his thesis and graduating, Braithwaite lived an aimless life until he decided to write a book. The book, Kill Your Self , won Braithwaite increasing amounts of attention. His early followers were almost all actors. This was the start of Braithwaite's career as a psychotherapist.

After an actor named Richard Aaron discovered his wife Susanne Kepler had had sex with Braithwaite, he became convinced Braithwaite had raped her. He rushed to Braithwaite's, and attacked the doctor, who was engaged in sexually illicit behavior with two other young women. Braithwaite was later brought to trial, found guilty, and sentenced to a brief stint in prison. He lost his practice and was eventually forced to move back to his family's abandoned estate. He devoted the latter years of his life to writing his memoir, My Self and Other Strangers . He ultimately hanged himself in the family home, indicating the memoir as his suicide note.

Following the publication of their book, GMB received numerous letters insisting that the notebooks included in their text were dubious. In a final attempt to prove their provenance, GMB arranged a meeting with Grey. He soon learned that Grey was in fact another persona the narrator had donned in order to win GMB's trust and help.

The Line Between the Original and the Imposter in “Case Study”

“Who is to say which is the original and which is the imposter?” queries Graeme Macrae Burnet in his 2022 Booker-Prize-nominated novel, Case Study . The question is applicable to a character in the novel, to documents reproduced within the novel and, most intriguing, to the author himself.

Burnet is the ultimate unreliable narrator, and Case Study serves as a worthy addition to his oeuvre; however, defining that oeuvre is a challenge.

His 2015 novel, His Bloody Project , brought his work to an international readership with its Booker-Prize shortlisting. Burnet researched His Bloody Project at the Highland Archive Centre in Inverness, Scotland; inspired by a prisoner’s 1869 memoir, Burnet presents articles, police and witness statements, post-mortem reports, and excerpts from a memoir by a man who interviewed Macrae (the prisoner’s patronym). Burnet invites readers to examine “discrepancies, contradictions and omissions” in the archival documents, but international readers depend exclusively on Burnet’s book to assemble an understanding of the crime.

His Bloody Project inserts itself into the tradition of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996) and Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites (2013). Such novels explore questions of interpretation via events in the historical record: central characters are accused of violent crimes against higher-status individuals, whose stories are prioritized because of their socio-economic privilege. In contrast, Burnet credibly presents documentation—all of which he has invented—with enough nuance and detail to position His Bloody Project as historical true crime.

But before all of that, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s name appeared on the 2014 novel The Disappearance of Adèle Bardeau, as the translator. In the foreword, Burnet marvels that Raymond Brunet’s cult classic hasn’t previously been translated into English; it’s been “almost continuously” in print since 1982 in France, buoyed by the subsequent film’s success. In the afterword, Burnet examines the alignment between various events and characters in Raymond Brunet’s novel and specific biographical details and prominent figures in the French author’s life. Burnet notes that Raymond Brunet died troubled and alone, having struggled to accept the film—“It was not a fictional character he was watching on screen, but a projection of himself.”

Raymond Brunet’s mother apparently outlived him, and after her death, a litigation firm dispatched an envelope containing a manuscript titled The Accident on the A35 . Burnet’s foreword to this 2017 novel describes how amused and guilty the author’s solicitor felt, actually possessing the second manuscript after the author’s death, amidst rumors of its existence. Burnet’s afterword provides additional intersections between fact and fiction in Raymond Brunet’s second novel. “So the premise and central characters of the novel were clearly rooted in reality, but what of the narrative?” Burnet asks, before explaining how one of the novel’s plotlines is seemingly drawn from the life of the man who directed the film based on Raymond Brunet’s first novel.

In the first of these translations, Burnet’s supplementary material spirals around a quotation from Georges Simenon’s autobiographical novel Pedigree : “Everything is true while nothing is accurate.” In Burnet’s commentary on Raymond Brunet’s posthumously published work, he draws attention to this passage from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Words : “What I have just written is false. True. Neither true nor false.” It’s more important for all of this to be believable than for it to be true, and Burnet creates a framework in which readers can believe, using his “expertise” on an imagined novelist (Raymond Brunet) to increase readers’ trust in Burnet. Despite positioning this duology in reality, however, Raymond Brunet is a fictional author.

But what of the author’s responsibility? In His Bloody Project ’s “Historical Notes,” Burnet indicates “any inaccuracies, whether by design or error, are entirely my own responsibility”. In Case Study ’s acknowledgements, Burnet accepts responsibility for a portion of the work, but “any inaccuracies” from the excerpted notebooks are that author’s responsibility. As Burnet’s fictions increase in complexity, he appears to distance himself further from his creative work.

Make Your Visit Short at the Dream Hotel

In Case Study , Burnet presents two additional authors, whose documents are made available to readers. Most compelling are the private notebooks of a woman who is preoccupied by a young woman’s suicide; she believes that she has recognised the dead woman in a psychotherapist’s published work, despite that author’s having concealed the woman’s true identity. The author of the notebooks presents evidence of the psychotherapist’s misconduct and excerpts his publications; this complex structure allows questions about selfhood and identity, confusion and delusion, to proliferate.

Case Study is not a unique narrative; novels as diverse as Jesse Ball’s Silence Once Begun , Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke , and Kwon Yeo-Sun’s Lemon (translated by Janet Hong) require that readers construct their own understandings, based on incomplete or conflicting accounts, of tragic events.Graeme Macrae Burnet stands apart, however. He not only presents different iterations of narratives, but different versions of authorship. Like a character in Case Study , Burnet has “a flexible relationship with the truth.” In translation? Not one word he writes is true.

FICTION Case Study By Graeme Macrae Burnet Biblioasis Published on November 1, 2022

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The Woman Behind Freud’s First Case Study

The case of anna o. showed that psychoanalysis worked. did freud tamper with it.

There is perhaps no one more devoted to the cause than a convert, and there is no one more violent toward it than a person who has lost their faith. The faithful turned faithless take up the act of crusade, but in reverse: new atheists confronting the world with secular eyes, children who learn that their parents aren’t omnipotent. They have suffered the loss of an organizing principle, the very thing they built their life around. Now, they may seek revenge on the object that caused an earlier delusion. The commitment doesn’t end—it just takes on new guises.

Beyond the reactions of former lovers and former zealots, we see this in the history of psychoanalysis, perhaps because the practice attracts and demands those same qualities of immersion and devotion. Many have justly loved psychoanalysis, and many have justly despaired of it. This includes the very founders of rational emotive behavioral therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy, who brought about a sea change in mental health care, and the critics Frederick Crews, Jeffrey Masson, and Philip Rieff, who turned against Freud even after he had been unthroned as king of the twentieth century. This hatred can feel quasi-personal, aimed at the originator, their father figure, Sigmund Freud.

This loss of faith looms over Gabriel Brownstein’s book, The Secret Mind of Bertha Pappenheim: The Woman Who Invented Freud’s Talking Cure . On its face, the book is a study of the first analytic patient (although she didn’t exactly receive psychoanalytic treatment), Bertha Pappenheim. Pappenheim, who was treated by Freud’s mentor Josef Breuer in Vienna, was the subject of one of Breuer’s case studies and was much discussed by Freud throughout his own career. The book’s stated aim is to offer a full portrait of someone flattened and circulated as a specimen. For Pappenheim is best known by another name—Anna O.—and is best known not as her full person, who left a legacy of feminist and activist patronage, but as the world’s most famous hysteric.

But quietly, this is also a book about the birth and death of psychoanalysis—which is to say that the narrative of Freud’s ascendance and betrayal is the engine that drives the book. Brownstein argues, sometimes contradictorily, that Freud’s brilliance and his drive to make his way as a medical doctor propelled him to tamper with Bertha’s story.

Given that Pappenheim’s stunning cure is the origin story of psychoanalysis, Brownstein seeks to denigrate the whole endeavor on these grounds. If the Anna O. case was a fraud, so, too, would the cure be that she discovered.

Hysteria, much like psychoanalysis, has a storied past, one with a powerful crescendo followed by a caesura. Though the term “hysteric” is now assumed in common speech to be either a pejorative epithet, synonymous with performative hyper-emotionality ( he was hysterical ), or a historical diagnosis made up by misogynistic doctors (like, some argue, Breuer and Freud), the condition was once quite common. For the uninitiated, hysteria is an illness where the body speaks, where neurotic symptoms appear in and on it. It was treated by an array of cures, from gynecological massage (prescribed orgasm), hypnotism, rest, and drugging, to change of scenery, and, yes, for a very few patients, starting in the late nineteenth century, Breuer and Freud’s cathartic method. This eventually became psychoanalysis. This was, it must be said, a treatment that seems preferable to the other options.

Bertha Pappenheim was in many ways a typical hysterical patient, and an extraordinary woman. When she went to see Breuer in 1880, she presented with the typical hysterical complaints: partial paralysis, disturbances of appetite and language, pain. She couldn’t recall her native German and only spoke in English. She wouldn’t drink water. She had fallen ill while nursing her father, and her condition deteriorated upon his death. She was treated both in her home and in an asylum, often with high doses of drugs. What marks her case as special is that Pappenheim was the first person on Earth to be treated by the cathartic method, in large part because she invented it. Anytime you hear someone say “talking cure,” they’re using the very term Pappenheim ascribed to the yearslong experiment she undertook, morning and night, with her doctor. As she chattered on, as she engaged in the “chimney sweeping” of her mind—so the story goes—she felt better.

Freud and Breuer went on to co-write the groundbreaking Studies on Hysteria , published in 1895. The two doctors, one senior and one junior, open the book with a co-written introduction and end it with a pair of stand-alone essays (Freud’s undermining Breuer’s) in which the nascent theories of repression, defense, catharsis, and abreaction first appear. Each supplied case material of hysteric women treated by this nascent cathartic method. Freud wrote up four cases, and Breuer only contributed the case of Pappenheim, now disguised and named “Anna O.” The two detailed the symptoms of their patients and how each was aided, if not outright cured, by this new talking protocol.

In Breuer’s write-up of Anna O., which only runs about 25 pages, he elaborates on the case study, telling his readers how ill Anna was, when, and why. He then goes on to describe his therapeutic practice of sitting with her at night, and how, while Anna O. was under hypnosis, the two came to “develop a therapeutic technique” of linking each of her symptoms to the moment it appeared. The water she will not drink, for instance, is linked to a moment she saw her English ladies’ companion let a little dog drink from her glass. After the connection is revealed under hypnosis, Breuer tells us, Anna O. drinks water once more. The process repeated until there were no symptoms left, and Anna O.’s mental state presumably returned to normal.

The problem is—and basically all historians of psychoanalysis agree on this point—that even though Breuer and Freud reported a miracle cure, Anna O. didn’t get better. In fact, she got worse and was put in a sanatorium. The question is why. Brownstein, following the anti-Freud tradition, attributes this failure to the treatment. Freud, of course, attributed this failure to the person who offered the treatment—Breuer—not because he couldn’t cure her, but because he didn’t finish doing so.

Like all origin myths, the case has been subject to endless interpretation and reinterpretation. Even the original case study is retrospective: Breuer didn’t write up the Anna O. case at the time of treatment. He did so at Freud’s urging, so that the two might document this new technique of psychotherapy. Anna O. thus became the first patient of psychoanalysis only after the fact, and even though her treatment has just about nothing in common with psychoanalysis today, she is celebrated as such. Freud then revised the case multiple times across his life (in private letters, then in publications in 1910 and 1914), often to diminish Breuer’s role in the origin of psychoanalysis. This is in part due to what Freud thought of privately as Breuer’s failure: When Anna O. showed Breuer she had transferred onto him—by fantasizing about having his baby—Breuer ran away. Breuer could have invented psychoanalysis had he stayed in the room—but he didn’t dare. And thus Anna remained ill, but, in Freud’s understanding, psychoanalysis was not at fault.

Once Freud died, others revised the case in their own ways. Stacks of books can be called up in any research library by those who either defend or revile Freud—and nearly all of them, at one point, turn to Anna O. These studies often seek to collate and correlate Breuer’s flattened write-up of the case with historical reality, trying to reconstruct both Anna O.’s illness and her medical treatment. Some are feminist rereadings of the case, arguing that Anna O. was sick with patriarchy; others center squarely on Freud’s obsession with the case, excavating his letters about Anna O. to various ends.

What’s plain as day: Pappenheim has become the Rorschach test for the field. What we see in her case tends to be run through our feelings about psychoanalysis. The great historian of psychoanalysis John Forrester has argued that the baby that Anna O. spoke of wanting to have with Breuer was psychoanalysis—something she conceived with Breuer, even though he wouldn’t stick around and take responsibility for it. Anti-Freudian Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen sees Anna O.’s case as entirely fabricated, a young woman taken in by her handsome doctor and given huge quantities of drugs; if she invented psychoanalysis, she was the first to be duped by it. As the late Peter Gay observed, “There are contradictions and obscurities in successive versions of the case, but this much is more or less beyond dispute: In 1880, when Anna O. fell ill, she was twenty-one.”

But because very little besides Breuer’s documents is known of her life at the time of treatment, we project what we want onto her, and we can, for her history is a mere fragment. That we continue to do so makes exquisite sense: Psychoanalysis teaches us we must go back to our origins to go forward. And the treatment of Anna O. by Breuer is one way—a decent way—to conceptualize the start of Freud’s theory of mind.

Brownstein’s main critique of Freud’s use of Anna O. is this: that he took her case for his own material ends (though, by the same token, we might ask after Brownstein’s book advance). Freud was a broke young doctor; he needed to get married, and, to do so, he needed to press Breuer into writing Studies on Hysteria so that he could practice this new treatment with a kind of paternal authorization, styling himself as a doctor of “the cathartic method of J. Breuer.”

Brownstein agrees with anti-Freudians like Borch-Jacobsen and Crews that Anna O.’s treatment was a dismal failure. And even though that would make the lie—that Anna O. was cured—Breuer’s, Brownstein argues it was Freud who metaphorically had a gun to his mentor’s head and forced him to write it. More softly, Brownstein argues that Anna O. obscures Bertha Pappenheim, whom Brownstein now promises to deliver to us. Here’s the problem: Brownstein wants to make Freud the (very) bad guy of a story that had little to do with him, even if he had a great deal to do with the case becoming a story. So much so that Brownstein treats the possibility of Freud seeing Bertha Pappenheim at a party years after the treatment as corroborating evidence for some kind of misdeed.

Brownstein thus rewrites up the notorious case, with his chatty, negative asides and interpretations taking center stage. His first close reading from the book is, appropriately, from the first page. He argues that, though Studies purports to be “about the sex lives and sex drives of young bourgeois women,” it “begins by announcing that, for the purposes of propriety, any discussion of their actual intimate lives will be avoided.” Brownstein argues that this is a cover—that Breuer and Freud are maliciously withholding evidence for their theory because there isn’t any and because the doctors wanted to appear respectable. But if we read the first page of Studies , here’s what Breuer and Freud actually wrote: “It would be a grave breach of confidence to publish material of this kind, with the risk of patients being recognized and their acquaintances becoming informed of facts which were confided only to the physician.” There is a deep truth to what Freud and Breuer argue: They were working in a small coterie of largely wealthy Viennese Jewish patients. Everyone knew one another (hence, the great possibility of Freud running into Pappenheim). If you circulated reports of the ills of a young woman’s “marriage bed” or lack thereof, it would have meant no father would refer his daughter to Breuer or Freud, let alone the greater ethical considerations Brownstein says are gestured to half-heartedly.

Elsewhere, Brownstein accuses Freud of having a faulty memory and disguising the patient (despite the authors’ own opening warning to the reader not to go looking for biographical information of Pappenheim). To cover over the lack of details about her, Brownstein freely narrativizes the case, turning it into a historical fiction. At other times, Brownstein seems furious that Freud tends to write beautifully—Brownstein takes this as a sign of fudging the facts—while he then turns to close reading it like a literary critic.

By the end, we know from Brownstein that we’re supposed to find Breuer largely unobjectionable, but in the grips of a young Freud. The cardinal sin for Brownstein, though, is that Anna O. wasn’t made better. (Brownstein believes that she was in fact suffering from a functional neurological disorder, a contemporary diagnosis that overlaps with hysteria.) She was transported back to the asylum, so ill that Breuer reportedly told Freud his beloved patient might be better off dead, so that she might be free of suffering. Yet we might pause and say something did indeed happen in that treatment: Pappenheim was ultimately able to recover enough. By 1889, at 29 years of age, she was able not only to get out of bed, to talk, but to work in a soup kitchen. From this year on, she published—first anonymously and then pseudonymously, under the name Paul Berthold. Soon, Pappenheim was finally known not as Anna O., not as Berthold, but as herself. She also became famous as herself, a powerful, feminist leader, founding the Jewish Women’s Association and centralizing Jewish women’s organizing toward both employment and charity.

Why a book about Bertha Pappenheim now? One answer: With its claim that it will deliver readers Pappenheim in full, Brownstein’s book sits on that ever-expanding shelf of nonfiction books that seek to tell the stories of women who have been relegated to the margins of history, returning them to their larger, unobfuscated import. The book, too, in trying to bring Pappenheim’s story up to the present by rediagnosing her with functional neurological disorder, joins the book market for explorations of contested illness. Yet this book isn’t exactly proper to either of these subgenres. Instead, we might make sense of it as a work of backlash: Just as a range of analysts and writers have turned once more to Freud (as The New York Times proclaimed in an article not quite aptly titled “Not Your Daddy’s Freud”), so have others returned to maligning him. Brownstein has offered us, perhaps, the first book of the Freud Wars 2.0.

Brownstein, in fact, inherits the role of Freud skeptic from an earlier generation. His father, Dr. Shale Brownstein, was a prominent New York psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with a Rolodex of famous patients. Sometime in the 1980s, Dr. Brownstein became disillusioned with psychoanalysis and became an anti-Freudian—though we are never quite told why. One night, when Brownstein went to visit his father, he found him in his underwear, speaking wildly. The subject: Bertha Pappenheim. His father held a thick envelope filled with scientific and historic papers, newspaper clippings, reviews of books, and his own essay on the subject.

His father gave him the manila envelope. The younger Brownstein went home to Brooklyn, and the next day his father was dead. As if in a novel, Brownstein then becomes fixated on the envelope and its contents only to discover he has misplaced it. His own book is as much an attempt to decipher his father’s theory about Bertha Pappenheim as to understand his father’s turn against Freud. Brownstein makes clear that his father was a devoted doctor, and treated queer luminaries in downtown New York, including Peter Hujar and Richard Serra. Dr. Brownstein tended to babies with HIV in the 1980s who languished otherwise in their cots, when others wouldn’t dare go near. Dr. Brownstein gave everything to psychoanalysis, but then something changed. We don’t quite know what, but his father became so disillusioned that he burned all 24 volumes of Freud’s Standard Edition .

Was it the homophobia of mainstream psychoanalysis that rightfully made him repudiate his training? Was it indeed the legacy of Anna O.? I wish we knew what Brownstein felt as he wrestled with Freud via his father. As author and son, Brownstein is overwhelmed by the research subject he must now try to understand and, more importantly, terribly overwhelmed by the pain of being alive when life is most brutal. Shortly after his father’s death, his wife is diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, and when the global pandemic arrives, Brownstein must weather it without them.

While Brownstein seemingly hates Freud, he, like many others, can’t escape him. Early in the book, he disparages two Freudian terms: “secondary gain,” which can be described as the unconscious advantage patients acquire through their illness (stereotyped here as attention), and “ la belle indifférence ,” a calm character in the face of crisis. But toward the book’s close, Brownstein suddenly tips his hand: He comes to a form of self-understanding through these concepts. In not getting treated for a heart problem, he says he has a case of la belle indifférence . In writing the book, he self-analyzes, he can be understood as having a case of secondary gain—after all, Brownstein was quite literally paid for producing it.

But Brownstein uses these concepts defensively—to show his reader he is in on the joke. The book itself, more movingly, is a testament to yet another set of Freudian concepts: the return of the repressed, as evidenced by his return to the use of Freud; working through (here, loss of his father, his wife); and, indeed, sublimation. Writing the book then might be an act of Freudian sublimation; it is also an act of devotion.

Hannah Zeavin is an assistant professor of history at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy .

Tom Van Lent who resigned from the Everglades Foundation in February 2022.

Dr. Vivekanand Yadav Receives Noah’s Bandage Project Grant to Study Novel CAR T Cell Therapy to Treat Childhood Brain Tumors

June 27, 2024.

Vivekanand Yadav, PhD

Assistant professor of pediatrics, university of missouri-kansas city school of medicine; research assistant professor of cancer biology, university of kansas school of medicine.

Vivekanand Yadav, PhD , Hematology/Oncology/BMT, received a three-year, $250,000 2023 Noah Wilson’s Fund for Pediatric Cancer Research ( Noah’s Fund ) grant from Noah’s Bandage Project.

The funding is being used for Dr. Yadav’s study, “Determining the Therapeutic Efficacy of Novel Bi-specific CAR T Cells (anti-B7H3-GD2) in H3G34R/Vmutated Pediatric High-Grade Gliomas (pHGGs).” The study looks to test a novel CAR T cell therapy to treat childhood brain tumors, specifically a type called pediatric high-grade gliomas (pHGGs) with H3K27M and H3G34R/V mutations.

As Dr. Yadav explains, pHGGs are aggressive brain tumors that are difficult to treat, and traditional treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation therapy have limited success.

Dr. Yadav and his team are exploring a new approach with CAR T cell therapy, which involves modifying a patient's immune cells to fight the tumor.

“In this study, we focused on two specific proteins found on the surface of pHGGs cells, called B7-H3 and GD2 and designed special CAR T cells that can recognize and attack these proteins,” explains Dr. Yadav. “We found that the CAR T cells effectively killed the tumor cells and produced immune signals to fight the cancer.”

The research team is investigating the role of the tumor environment in affecting the CAR T cell response using a novel immunocompetent experimental model of pHGGs. The tumor environment can sometimes make it difficult for CAR T cells to work effectively. By understanding how the tumor environment influences CAR T cell activity, they hope to find ways to improve the therapy and make it more successful.

“Our research has transformative potential for childhood brain tumor treatment, specifically DIPG pHGGs, by utilizing CAR T cell therapy to target B7-H3 and GD2 proteins,” said Dr. Yadav. “This approach could provide better outcomes and hope for children and families affected by these devastating tumors. Furthermore, the study's outcomes may extend to other cancer types, broadening the scope of CAR T cell therapy in the future.”

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Deep learning for flash drought detection: a case study in northeastern brazil.

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Barbosa, H.A.; Buriti, C.O.; Kumar, T.V.L. Deep Learning for Flash Drought Detection: A Case Study in Northeastern Brazil. Atmosphere 2024 , 15 , 761. https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos15070761

Barbosa HA, Buriti CO, Kumar TVL. Deep Learning for Flash Drought Detection: A Case Study in Northeastern Brazil. Atmosphere . 2024; 15(7):761. https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos15070761

Barbosa, Humberto A., Catarina O. Buriti, and T. V. Lakshmi Kumar. 2024. "Deep Learning for Flash Drought Detection: A Case Study in Northeastern Brazil" Atmosphere 15, no. 7: 761. https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos15070761

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HHS Publishes First Round of Inflation Reduction Act Case Studies on Health Sector Climate Investments

The HHS Office of Climate Change and Health Equity highlights safety net health care providers using Inflation Reduction Act funds and tax credits to decarbonize their communities and protect patients

The HHS Office of Climate Change and Health Equity (OCCHE) published two case studies today highlighting how Boston Medical Center and OhioHealth, a pair of nonprofit safety net health care providers, are using the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to reduce carbon emissions. The case studies are meant to offer health organizations in similar situations a roadmap to use the IRA to serve their core mission, reduce climate-related health impacts and advance health equity.

One case study explains Boston Medical Center’s creation of a pilot program providing solar energy credits to patients. The other highlights OhioHealth’s decision to use IRA tax incentives to fund electric vehicle charging stations that offer free charging to residents in a rural area.

The case studies are part of OCCHE’s Catalytic Program on Utilizing the IRA, an ongoing effort to connect safety net health care providers to the billions of dollars the IRA makes available for energy efficiency, sustainability, and environmental justice. IRA funding opportunities help providers make investments that allow them to stay open before, during, and after emergencies and reduce their own pollution levels.

The case studies explore Boston Medical Center’s Clean Power Prescription and OhioHealth’s charging station infrastructure to help providers consider how they might successfully plan a project leveraging IRA funding to support their community. Both providers also share key lessons learned from their processes and advice for pitching a similar project to organizational leadership.

In addition to the new case studies, the Catalytic Program features more than two dozen hours of rewatchable, free-to-access webinars with experts from across the federal government and health sector, as well as a Quickfinder tool summarizing key IRA programs and policies.

“Boston Medical Center and OhioHealth are showing their peers the power of the Inflation Reduction Act to save hospitals money and reduce environmental health burdens at the same time,” said ADM Rachel L. Levine, MD, Assistant Secretary for Health. “The law offers unprecedented opportunities for health care providers and other nonprofits to make long-term investments that reduce their climate impact and protect public health. OCCHE’s work to educate safety net health care providers is vital to meeting our overall climate goals, and I look forward to seeing many more success stories in the months and years ahead.”

“The IRA is the most significant climate legislation in our country’s history, but it didn’t come with a roadmap telling the health sector where to plug in,” said John M. Balbus, MD, MPH, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Climate Change and Health Equity. “The health sector offers crucial support for frontline communities and also contributes about 8.5 percent of US carbon emissions, which is why it needs to reduce its own impacts as much as possible. The Catalytic Program is crucial to promoting health equity and a green energy economy, and I hope more health care providers take advantage of these opportunities.”

Many providers, including Boston Medical Center and OhioHealth, presented on their plans to use the IRA as part of the Catalytic Program’s webinar series over the summer. All previous sessions are recorded and available online. OCCHE will roll out new case studies over the course of this year.

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A memoir about Chicano studies, intertwined with a history of Compton

Albert M. Camarillo, author of "Compton in My Soul."

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Book Review

Compton in My Soul: A Life in Pursuit of Racial Equality

By Albert M. Camarillo Stanford: 312 pages, $28 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

After learning about racial injustice firsthand in his hometown of Compton, where he was born in 1948, Albert M. Camarillo spent more than four decades pursuing racial equality as a professor of history at Stanford University. His new memoir moves back and forth between his story and Compton’s, illuminating both.

Camarillo relays the history of Compton in the decades following World War II, when it became increasingly Black and increasingly under-resourced, and he traces his remarkable academic career as one of the founders and shapers of the field of Chicano history, which was in its infancy in 1975 when he graduated as the first Mexican American to obtain a doctorate in U.S. history with this specialization. Ever the historian, Camarillo also frequently inserts episodes of Chicano and U.S. history in tandem with his own life story, which he relates in his own unflappable way.

The result is a drama-free mix of memoir and historical survey aimed at multiple audiences. Throughout, Camarillo makes clear that his Chicano identity is intertwined with his scholarly agenda: expanding the standard narrative of U.S. history to include folks like himself.

FILE - In this Jan. 30, 2012, file photo, a poster of novelist Rudolfo Anaya announcing an April, 2011 Latino book event hangs in the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, N.M. Anaya, 82, who helped launch the 1970s Chicano Literature Movement with his novel "Bless Me, Ultima," died Sunday, June 28, 2020. (AP Photo/Russell Contreras, File)

Op-Ed: The stories I needed as a Chicano boy were silenced. Now I tell them

Chicano representation was nowhere in my Los Angeles upbringing. A football coach’s racist remark set me down the path to becoming a writer.

June 6, 2022

The Compton in Camarillo’s soul predated the city that became infamous in the 1980s for gang violence. The first part of the book traces the history of Compton from the 1910s, when both his father’s and his mother’s families first arrived, to Camarillo’s decision in 1966 to attend UCLA, 20 miles and a world away. He grew up “Chicano style,” meaning brown, poor and subject to what he calls “Jaime Crow.” As a youth, he also witnessed the sudden transformation of Compton from a white-majority city to a Black one, a dramatic demographic change that soon triggered, as elsewhere in the country, white antagonism and flight, and the eventual gutting of the tax base. Camarillo details familiar precursors to urban decline while sharing his generally positive memories of Compton during the 1950s and 1960s. Attending public schools, he enjoyed Black, white and Latino friends. Tapped for leadership by his high school teachers, Camarillo headed his high school’s effort to cultivate multicultural understanding in the wake of the Watts riots in 1965. The complex landscape of post-World War II Los Angeles informed his commitment to diversity once he became a professor.

Invitations to complete the 2020 census have been mailed out.

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April 3, 2024

Because the K-12 education that he received only minimally prepared him for college, the second part of the book explains how a young man who ended his freshman year at UCLA on academic probation nonetheless became a tenured professor at one of the nation’s top universities. Key here was discovering his love of history in conjunction with a political awakening inspired by the protest politics of the era, including the anti-Vietnam War movement, the civil rights movement and, above all, the Chicano movement.

Camarillo felt a sense of “authentic freedom” in publicly declaring himself a Chicano, which by the 1960s emerged as a politicized ethnic identity that activists used to indicate their dedication to improving the lives of all Mexican Americans. This commitment flowed into Camarillo’s research and shaped his career. At a time when few academics studied Mexican Americans and those who did mostly characterized Mexican Americans as a problem, the idea that their lives and histories were not only significant but even integral to the American story was revolutionary. Even before he had finished his dissertation, Stanford University came knocking with a job offer.

Oct. 6, 1994: Two hundred UCLA students march in protest of prop 187. Protests were held at about 20 other college and university campuses in California.

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June 22, 2024

That dissertation became the 1979 book “Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848-1930,” still a classic text within the field of Chicano history for proving the long-lasting repercussions of the U.S. war against Mexico for the thousands of Mexican citizens who in 1848 suddenly found themselves living in the American Southwest.

Beyond securing tenure, the book also secured Camarillo’s platform to pursue racial equality in the academic arena. Highlights from his distinguished career mentioned in the book include helping found a center for comparative research on race and ethnicity at Stanford and fostering inter-university research beyond campus. Among his most enduring legacies, Camarillo mentored a pipeline of graduate students, who, in turn, have trained many more. Most recently, Camarillo testified before state legislators in favor of California’s 2021 law that mandated the inclusion of ethnic studies in California’s high school curriculum starting in 2026.

While these events are far removed from Compton, in the last part of the book, Camarillo “circles back to his origins,” inspired to counter sensational reporting about the city with stories of resilience and hope. Interested in the city’s history since graduate school, Camarillo shares some of the research that he has conducted in the years since, including oral history interviews with longtime residents. He also details how support for public education in the city became a family affair after his eldest son became a public school teacher in Compton.

The book is thus a hybrid narrative, specific portions of which are likely to appeal to different audiences. Administrative and teaching triumphs are probably most interesting to fellow academics, while the information he relays about Compton is likely to appeal to Angelenos and aficionados of Los Angeles history. As for the young people he mentions who might read the narrative one day, they are a group most likely to benefit from his short historical synopses that provide context for the events in his life.

Camarillo’s calm, confident and determined demeanor infuses the book, the same demeanor that once earned him a walk-on spot on UCLA’s freshman basketball team and no doubt contributed to his remarkable educational journey. Neither the upheavals that he and his hometown experienced nor the challenges he confronted as a young scholar are sources of much dramatic tension. Instead, Camarillo focuses on the positive, the importance of family and community, the benefits of multiculturalism for advancing research and building a more just nation, and the power of persistence. Tellingly, Camarillo credits his wife, Susan, as a constant source of support, while also taking comfort in the knowledge that, as he put it, “true societal and institutional change is a multigenerational project.” In keeping with that sentiment, he ends his account with the hope that the book might inspire future generations of changemakers.

We don’t have to wait. Camarillo’s impactful life, his decades of agenda-setting scholarship and extraordinary dedication to teaching showcase an academic career committed to political activism yet imbued with gentility and generosity. In an era of political polarization and a sloppy disregard for evidence among some partisans, his book provides a refreshing antidote and useful model.

Lorena Oropeza, a professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley, is the author, most recently, of “The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement.”

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Texas' anti-abortion heartbeat law aimed to save babies, but more infants died.

Texas lawmakers touted their heartbeat law as an effort to save lives , but the state's near-total ban on abortion appears to have triggered an increase in infant deaths, according to a new study published Monday .

The findings in JAMA Pediatrics show that infant deaths rose after Texas’ Senate Bill 8, which banned all abortion after about six weeks from conception. S.B. 8 became Texas law in September 2021 and U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion just over nine months later, on June 24, 2022. The high court ruling in the Dobbs case prompted more than a dozen states to issue near-total bans on abortion. Observers speculate that evidence will also show increases in infant deaths in those states, akin to what Texas has seen, the study said.

“It just points to some of the devastating consequences of abortion bans that maybe people weren't thinking about when they passed these laws,” Alison Gemmill, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health who authored the study, told USA TODAY. She called the deaths following the Texas heartbeat law its “spillover effects on moms and babies.”

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In the wake of the law's passage in Texas, more babies died before their first birthday, likely due to birth defects or genetic problems that wouldn't have allowed them to live, the study found. These pregnancies would typically have been terminated by abortion, according to researchers. The Texas heartbeat law does not provide exceptions for pregnancies involving such conditions. Mothers are legally obligated to carry these babies to birth under state law.

In the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association, Gemmill and researchers from Johns Hopkins and Michigan State University wrote that the Texas law was linked to "unexpected increases in infant and neonatal deaths" between 2021 and 2022. Prior research drew a correlation between the uptick in infant deaths and anti-abortion laws taking effect, however, no studies until now have attributed the fatalities directly to the laws prohibiting the termination of these pregnancies.

"Abortion care is an essential component of comprehensive healthcare, and when it is restricted, the human impacts are devastating," Wendy Davis, a senior adviser for Planned Parenthood Texas Votes, said in a statement. Davis, who filibustered for abortion rights when she was a Democratic state senator, noted that the study only covered 2022, not the results in 2023 and 2024 in the wake of a more restrictive abortion ban that came with the Dobbs decision. This "likely means the situation on the ground today is even more dire," Davis said.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's office did not dispute the study's findings but defended the Republican-controlled state's anti-abortion record. This effort included the 2021 heartbeat law "to save the innocent unborn, and now thousands of children have been given a chance at life," Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesperson for Abbott, said in a statement to USA TODAY. He said the governor has taken "significant action to protect the sanctity of life" and offered resources to expectant mothers "so they can choose life for their child."

Anti-abortion advocates also didn't contest the uptick in infant deaths cited in the study. Advocates for the heartbeat law and other legislation to restrict abortions say such bans protect life. They say terminating a fetus with a terminal illness is “choosing to kill that child intentionally.”

The overwhelming majority of such abortions happen before the fetus is viable. In Texas, legislation has dramatically reduced the number of abortions performed in the state.

Amy O’Donnell, a spokesperson for Texas Alliance for Life, said the study’s findings didn’t come as a surprise. She said babies born with disabilities and even fatal anomalies deserve a chance at life, even if that means a newborn dies after birth from a condition doctors anticipated would be lethal. The death of a child is not easy, she acknowledged. She noted that her nonprofit offers resources for families grieving from such losses.

“In Texas, we celebrate every unborn child's life saved. We treasure the fact that our laws are protecting women's lives,” she said. “We don't apologize for the fact that we don't support discrimination against children facing disabilities or fatal diagnoses in or out of the womb. And that's the line that we just believe should not be crossed.”

Gemmill, of Johns Hopkins, said babies that died shortly after being born with birth defects "probably caused a lot of unnecessary trauma to families."

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The researchers examined death records beginning after the heartbeat law went into effect. The study created a “synthetic Texas” that simulated outcomes that would have happened had the law not been in effect and compared the numbers to national trends during that period. In 2021, 1,985 Texas infants died before their first birthday. The next year, with S.B. 8 in effect, the fatalities jumped to 2,240, a 12.9% increase that came as the U.S. experienced an overall increase of less than 2%. Deaths attributable to congenital anomalies or birth defects spiked nearly 23% in Texas compared to a 3% decrease nationally.

“It suggests that, really, this policy was responsible for this increase in infant deaths in Texas,” Gemmill said.

The study is significant because of Texas’ role as a conservative state with urban and rural areas that may reflect what happens in the rest of the U.S., according to Dr. Tracey Wilkinson, an associate professor of pediatrics and obstetrics and gynecology at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Texas has been living under restrictions longer than other states that enacted abortion bans after the Dobbs ruling.

“When people ask me why this is happening, it’s really simple,” said Wilkinson, who was not involved with the new study. “When you take away people’s ability to make decisions (about) if and when they have pregnancies, you’re going to see outcomes like increasing infant and maternal mortality.”

The study did not examine the effects of infant deaths on the health of mothers who were legally required to deliver dead babies to term, nor did it look at the mental health effects of carrying infants and delivering them, only to see them die. The study also raises but does not tackle questions about the financial cost to families of carrying and delivering terminally ill newborns.

Gemmill is now working to understand the impact of abortion restrictions on parents of different races and ethnicities. Prior research has shown that Black mothers and babies face higher death rates than other groups.

The study reflects what Molly Duane, a senior staff attorney at the abortion rights advocacy nonprofit Center for Reproductive Rights, has seen in the courtroom arguing against Texas' laws. She recently represented women who sued the state after they were denied medical abortions. One of her clients, Samatha Casiano, was required by law to carry a child that developed without a brain. In late May, the Texas Supreme Court ruled pregnant patients must have a “life-threatening condition” in order to terminate a pregnancy.

Duane questioned the claim by anti-abortion activists that Texas is a “pro-life” state, given the study's findings. “Women are hurting, families are hurting, babies are dying, and no one in the state is taking responsibility for any of that real human suffering,” she said.

In late 2023, a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report found increases in infant deaths for the first time in more than 20 years. The states identified in the report with increased fatalities were states that restricted abortion access, however, experts cautioned at the time that they could not say what had caused the spike in fatalities.

The Texas study went one step further, finding one state where abortion restrictions resulted in more deaths.

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Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet
Case Study is the fourth novel by best-selling award-winning Scottish author, Graeme Macrae Burnet. Two years after her older sister suicides by throwing herself off a railway overpass in Camden, a young woman becomes convinced that notorious psychotherapist A. Collins Braithwaite is responsible for her death. Determined to prove his guilt, she ...
Book Review: 'Case Study,' by Graeme Macrae Burnet
"Case Study" is a diverting novel, overflowing with clever plays on and inversions of tropes of English intellectual and social life during the postwar decades. As such, it is not exactly an ...
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Case Study Kindle Edition
Case Study - Kindle edition by Burnet, Graeme Macrae. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Case Study. ... Case Study is a novel as slippery as it is riveting, as playful as it is sinister, a meditation on truth, ...
CASE STUDY
A brisk and engaging novel that wears itself thin on the grindstone of its own conceit. A provocative send-up of midcentury British mores and the roots of modern psychotherapy. Toward the end of 2019, GMB, a character with the author's initials, receives an email from one Martin Grey, who has in his possession several notebooks he believes GMB ...
Case Study
Case Study is a novel as slippery as it is riveting, as playful as it is sinister, a meditation on truth, sanity, and the instability of identity by one of the most inventive novelists of our time. ... Case Study: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022 Graeme Macrae Burnet Limited preview - 2022. Case Study
Case Study
Written by Graeme Macrae Burnet. Case Study was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022. Graeme Macrae Burnet offers a dazzlingly inventive - and often wickedly humorous - meditation on the nature of sanity, identity and truth itself. 'I have decided to write down everything that happens, because I feel, I suppose, I may be putting myself in ...
Read the 2022 longlist: an extract from Case Study by Graeme Macrae
London, 1965. An unworldly young woman believes that a charismatic psychotherapist, Collins Braithwaite, has driven her sister to suicide. Intent on confirming her suspicions, she assumes a false identity and presents herself to him as a client, recording her experiences in a series of notebooks. But she soon finds herself drawn into a world in ...
Case Study: Graeme Macrae Burnet: 9781913393441: Amazon.com: Books
In Case Study, Graeme Macrae Burnet presents these notebooks interspersed with his own biographical research into Collins Braithwaite. The result is a dazzling - and often wickedly humorous - meditation on the nature of sanity, identity and truth itself, by one of the most inventive novelists writing today. ...
Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet review: a brilliant, bamboozling
Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet review: a brilliant, bamboozling tale of secrets, suicide and madness ... but Graeme Macrae Burnet's fourth novel handles this trope so well that it may be the ...
Book review: Case Study, by Graeme Macrae Burnet
Writing in a prose that is spare, deadpan and yet alive, he poses questions about the nature and perception of what we choose to call reality. He is an uncommonly interesting and satisfying ...
Book Marks reviews of Case Study by Graeme MacRae Burnet
If Burnet's aim in writing Case Study was to force us up against the contradictions of our conflicted selves, he has surely succeeded. This is a novel that is entertaining and mindfully engrossing in equal measure. Case Study by Graeme MacRae Burnet has an overall rating of Rave based on 14 book reviews.
Case Study
Case Study is a dizzying dive into British counterculture of the 1960s and the radical anti-psychiatry movement. This short novel is wildly inventive and slickly written. The notebooks feel so casually and authentically from the period, with "Rebecca's" word choices and the details she includes saying as much about 1960s British society ...
Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet, Paperback
Case Study is an immersive novel that stretches its fiction to fact-like proportions." —Foreword Reviews (starred review) "Case Study is a dizzying dive into British counterculture of the 1960s and the radical anti-psychiatry movement ... wildly inventive and slickly written. The notebooks feel so casually and authentically from the period ...
Case Study: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022 Kindle Edition
His latest novel, Case Study has been longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Ned Kelly International Crime Prize and longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. Hannah Kent (Burial Rites) has called it 'a novel of mind-bending brilliance.' He is also the author of The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau and The Accident on the A35 both ...
Case Study: Burnet, Graeme Macrae: 9781771965200: Amazon.com: Books
Case Study is an immersive novel that stretches its fiction to fact-like proportions." —Foreword Reviews (starred review) " Case Study is a dizzying dive into British counterculture of the 1960s and the radical anti-psychiatry movement ... wildly inventive and slickly written. The notebooks feel so casually and authentically from the period ...
Case Study: A Novel Summary & Study Guide
The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Burnet, Graeme Macrae. Case Study.Saraband, 2022. Graeme Macrae Burnet's novel Case Study is written from the first and third person points of view and employs an unconventional, meta-narrative structure. The auto-fictional author GMB presents a series of notebooks written by an unnamed first person narrator.
Review of Case Study (9781771965200)
Case Study. Graeme Macrae Burnet. Biblioasis ( Nov 1, 2022) Softcover $18.95 ( 288pp) 978-1-77196-520-. A psychology enthusiast dives into writings by and about his favorite psychologist in Graeme Macrae Burnet's literary novel Case Study. Upon discovering that her sister had been seeing rogue psychologist Collins Braithwaite before ...
The Line Between the Original and the Imposter in "Case Study"
In Case Study, Burnet presents two additional authors, whose documents are made available to readers.Most compelling are the private notebooks of a woman who is preoccupied by a young woman's suicide; she believes that she has recognised the dead woman in a psychotherapist's published work, despite that author's having concealed the woman's true identity.
Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet
Buy Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet from Waterstones today! Click and Collect from your local Waterstones or get FREE UK delivery on orders over £25. ... 'A novel of mind-bending brilliance. Graeme Macrae Burnet is a master of muddying the waters, of troubling ideas of truth and identity, fiction and documentary, and Case Study shows him at ...
Case Study: Surely
Novel's wallet passes offered two essential features that aligned perfectly with Surely's needs: Offering a "Next Order" Bonus Post Purchase Surely's most significant use cases with NovelPass was through Novel's post purchase flow, which played a vital role in building a new push notification channel to engage with their customers and ...
The Woman Behind Freud's First Case Study
This loss of faith looms over Gabriel Brownstein's book, The Secret Mind of Bertha Pappenheim: The Woman Who Invented Freud's Talking Cure.On its face, the book is a study of the first ...
Dr. Vivekanand Yadav Receives Noah's Bandage Project Grant to Study
The funding is being used for Dr. Yadav's study, "Determining the Therapeutic Efficacy of Novel Bi-specific CAR T Cells (anti-B7H3-GD2) in H3G34R/Vmutated Pediatric High-Grade Gliomas (pHGGs)." The study looks to test a novel CAR T cell therapy to treat childhood brain tumors, specifically a type called pediatric high-grade gliomas (pHGGs) with H3K27M and H3G34R/V mutations.
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Evolve is a one-stop online portal for healthcare educators and students to access and purchase all of their Elsevier digital teaching & learning materials
Deep Learning for Flash Drought Detection: A Case Study in ...
This research introduces a novel 2D convolutional neural network (CNN) designed to identify spatial FDs in historical simulations based on multiple environmental factors and thresholds as inputs. ... and T. V. Lakshmi Kumar. 2024. "Deep Learning for Flash Drought Detection: A Case Study in Northeastern Brazil" Atmosphere 15, no. 7: 761. https ...
HHS Publishes First Round of Inflation Reduction Act Case Studies on
The case studies are meant to offer health organizations in similar situations a roadmap to use the IRA to serve their core mission, reduce climate-related health impacts and advance health equity. One case study explains Boston Medical Center's creation of a pilot program providing solar energy credits to patients. The other highlights ...
Ancient bone shows how Neanderthals cared for the vulnerable, study
The oldest known case of Down syndrome in Homo sapiens, our own species, dates back at least 5,300 years. Using ancient DNA, the authors of a study published in February identified six cases in ...
A memoir about Chicano studies, intertwined with a history of Compton
Book Review. Compton in My Soul: A Life in Pursuit of Racial Equality. By Albert M. Camarillo Stanford: 312 pages, $28 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from ...
First case of Down syndrome in Neanderthals documented in new study
A new study published by an international multidisciplinary team of researchers including faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York, documents the first case of Down syndrome ...
Texas anti-abortion heartbeat law led to more deaths after birth: study
Texas enacted its anti-abortion law before the U.S. Supreme Court's Dobbs ruling. Study found far more infants died in Texas than had before the ban.

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