A Case from Practice

Description of the nesting-doll novel about the mad world of 1960s psychiatry, based on real events.

“I decided to write down everything that’s happening right now, because it seems to me that I’m putting myself in danger,” — a young woman investigating her sister’s suicide writes. Having invented for herself an alter ego of a charismatic and mentally unstable girl named Rebecca Smit, she books an appointment with the scandalous psychotherapist Collins Bretewayt. She suspects that it was Bretewayt who pushed her sister to suicide and begins keeping a diary where she records the details of her communication with the psychotherapist.

However, when faced with the contradictory, mysterious, and in parts downright fraudulent world of 1960s psychiatry, the heroine begins to doubt not only its methods, but also her own sanity.