Medicine: Psychiatric Recordings

• Share

"I always liked everybody," said the mildly diffident voice, "and then suddenly it seemed that they all hated me . . . and about 1941 . . . I just started to run away from everything. I used to go away and hide."

"How did you succeed in hiding yourself?"

"I took off into the fourth and fifth dimensions. ... To get into the fourth dimension you did like this [a sound of fingers snapping]. To get into the fifth dimension I just raise my hand like this. . . . The fourth dimension, that means you can wander all over the world . . . and the fifth dimension, that's all times."

"Can you tell me about your adventures in the fifth dimension?"

". . . I saw Christ, going up the hill, where he was crucified. . . . I was St. Mark."

This is a sample, amusing if it were not over the border of sanity, of the psychiatric interviews with mentally sick soldiers that Major Albert A. Rosner of the Army Air Forces has recorded in the last six months. He believes that his unique record library, which will eventually be filed in the Army Medical Library in Washington, may be helpful in teaching psychiatry. Hitherto a student psychiatrist's acquaintance with his chief technique, the psychiatric interview, has had to be at second hand—an observer makes the patient too self-conscious to talk freely. The recording machine, says Dr. Rosner, bothers his patients not at all.