A Psychiatrist's Life and the Emerging of Her Creative Eye

I am frightened. I will soon be 84. How much time do I have left to say all the things I want to say, to enjoy my active life and the peace that has come with partial retirement, to relish having breakfast on my sunporch overlooking the garden we created in the 27 years I have lived in this house, to have the freedom to ask myself, "What would you like to do today?" My brother Arthur and my sister Katharine are gone. Harvey, five years my senior, is in fragile health. Am I the one chosen, by chance, to live out the longevity inherited from my father, his grandmother, my mother's mother, and her grandmother? If I am given another 10 years, I must use them well. This awareness of life's limit has spurred me on to record vignettes from my life as a psychiatrist and photographer, and about my interest in creativity.

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In his 78th year, my father, W. Harvey Young, recorded the story of his life on an Iowa farm in the 1880s. My predecessors were aware of the value of passing on to children their histories, as well as their religious and moral heritage. As I transfer my father's manuscript to the computer, I see his arthritic fingers typing on the old Underwood. But even more alive is a 10-year-old boy taking pride as he plowed the field behind his mules, Nellie and Lucy. I can hear young Harvey's hero worship of his hard-working father who cared lovingly for the many animals, planted and cultivated the crops, taught Sunday School, and managed his finances frugally so he could buy more land and help each of the seven children with their education. The fifth of six boys, my father assisted his mother with her many tasks. From her, he learned to recognize the songs of the birds she had known as a girl in the mountains of Virginia.

When the wave of cedar waxwings passes chattering through the trees in my backyard in Baltimore, I think of young Harvey and his mother pausing in their work to listen. I think of his mother as a youngster, fishing for trout in Dunlap's Creek. In such specific emotionally laden interchanges, immortality is ensured.

Fifty years ago, I took two young friends, Cathy Doss and her brother Bob, to the woods each Sunday. Years later, Bob asked me to come to Australia to meet his children. As 10-year-old Sam and I sat visiting, a raucous noise erupted. "That's the kookaburra!" he exclaimed. Taking me gently by the hand and shushing me, he led me to the porch where we could see the gigantic kingfisher. I had taken his father by the hand the same way, a gesture that had passed through his father to him and no doubt had been passed to me from my father, as we glimpsed the indigo bunting perched on a plowed field in Illinois.

So now, in my family's tradition of recording history and for my own immortality, I take you, my readers, by the hand and share with you the outcome of those many years of training to become a doctor.

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In July 1951, I moved into a two-room apartment at The Latrobe, an elegant old building in Baltimore within walking distance of the Peabody Conservatory of Music and the Baltimore Psychoanalytic Institute, where I was a candidate. One room served as office during the day and living room at night; the other was bedroom and dining room with the kitchen essentials concealed in a tiny alcove. After 26 years of preparation, I was establishing myself professionally as a psychiatrist. And, for the first time, I was essentially on my own.

My parents had come from Illinois to facilitate my move from the...