At the Frontal Lobe

By R.Z. Sheppard

GOING CRAZY: An Inquiry into

Madness in Our Time

by OTTO FRIEDRICH 384 pages. Simon & Schuster. $9.95.

Otto Friedrich is a writer who has specialized in chronicling collapses. Decline and Fall was a revealing autopsy of the late Saturday Evening Post. Before the Deluge recaptured the dying phosphorescence of the Weimar Republic. Now he looks at the psychological walking wounded about him and concludes that "madness is part of all of us, all the time, that it comes and goes, waxes and wanes." His book is an artful patchwork of historical vignettes, autobiography and interviews with articulate people who have returned to tell what it was like around the bend.

The author, a TIME senior editor, believes that he himself has been there, momentarily on occasion, and those fleeting losses of control and orientation lead him to trust his feelings because his intellect has convinced him that insanity cannot be usefully defined, only described. He goes even further: "Those who have actually gone crazy seem to me to have a more earthy and concrete understanding of insanity than do the psychiatrists who pose as experts." Seymour Krim, for example, a New York author and journalist, pungently remembers that during one psychotic episode he smelled different--"something like burning rubber ... as if my mind were smoking, going so hard that there was some kind of friction."

Pent-Up Rage. Many of Friedrich's sources are victims of upbringings during which honest displays of emotion were thought irrational. A woman named Celia was taught by her mother, "Don't touch anybody, and they won't touch you." Celia learned to be very quiet, very passive and very, very depressed --a symptom of her pent-up rage. In therapy, her first step on the road to mental health was to start screaming at strangers on the street. "Was that insanity?" she asked her doctor. The answer: "No, that was anger."

In the book's most harrowing section, Anthony Tuttle, an unsuccessful novelist who was born to wealth but now scrapes by as a waiter, tells how he al most became the original Mr. Goodbar.

"One night, I had a date with Diane, who was a dear woman, a movie actress, and the inner voice said, 'Pick up that knife, and drive over and kill Diane!' . . . Eight-tenths of me wants to kill and two-tenths doesn't want to, and it's terrifying, the most confusing horror on earth." Fortunately for Diane and other women--including Tuttle's own mother--that two-tenths prevailed at the last moment.

These pure and unadorned voices come from the nerve center of the book.

Friedrich succinctly retells the pathetic stories of such diverse victims of aber ration as Robert Schumann, the Mar quis de Sade, Edgar Allan Poe, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Scott Joplin, James Forrestal and Joe Louis, who suffered from delusions that gangsters were trying to kill him.

Friedrich surveys the field of cure from traditional psychoanalysis to vitamin therapy. He treats such ravagers of the mind as alcohol, stress, loneliness and time. But he deliberately avoids the ruts of "quasi-scientific categories." He is more comfortable in the humanities, where the trail of insanity fades into the mysteries of man's relationship with nature and his gods. Friedrich is also up on the inhumanities: for example, the Soviet Union's practice of treating some political dissidents as psychotics.

If readers cannot find answers in Going Crazy, it is because the author confesses that he cannot find them either.

Instead he modestly offers the varied colors and textures of an age in which the worship of the rational has frequently led to madness.

R.Z. Sheppard

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