Inspiration
The character of Dr. Fried is based closely on Greenberg's real doctor Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and the hospital on Chestnut Lodge in Rockville, Maryland. While at Chestnut Lodge, Greenberg described a fantasy world called Iria to her doctors, quoting poetry in the Irian language. However, some of Greenberg's doctors felt that this was not a true delusion but rather something Greenberg had made up on the spot to impress her psychiatrist. One doctor went so far as to state that Irian was not an actual language, but was a form of bastardized Armenian. Fromm-Reichmann wrote glowing reports focusing on Greenberg's genius and creativity, which she saw as signs of Greenberg's innate health, indicating that she had every chance of recovering from her mental illness.
In both real life and in the novel, Greenberg was diagnosed with schizophrenia, but this does not necessarily correspond to a modern schizophrenia diagnosis. At the time, undifferentiated schizophrenia was a trashcan diagnosis which could cover any mental illness from anxiety to depression. A 1981 article in the New York Times cites two psychiatrists who examined Greenberg's self-description in the book and concluded that she was not schizophrenic, but suffered from extreme depression and somatization disorder.
Read more about this topic: I Never Promised You A Rose Garden (novel)
Famous quotes containing the word inspiration:
“Poets should be lawgivers; that is, the boldest lyric inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead, the civil code, and the day’s work. But now the two things seem irreconcilably parted.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)