Qualifying examinations came and went I conducted a completely uninspired doctoral study about heroin addiction and wrote a correspondingly uninspired dissertation based upon it then after two weeks of frantically cramming every bit of trivia that I could into my brain, I walked into a room filled with five unsmiling men seated around a table, sat down, and went through the ordeal that is politely known as a Final Oral Examination, or, more aptly, in a military sense, the defense of ones dissertation. None of this had any relevance whatsoever to anything else I was studying or doing, nor to anything I have done since, but they were far and away the most interesting classes I took in graduate school. It was learning for learning’s sake, and I loved it. These zoology courses focused on the biology of aquatic mammals and covered not only the biology and natural history of sea otters, seals, sea lions, whales, and dolphins, but also such esoterica as the cardiovascular adaptations made to diving by sea lions and whales and the communication systems used by dolphins. I particularly loved studying animal behavior and supplemented the courses offered by the psychology department with graduate courses given by the zoology department. Along the way, I completed the course work for my two minor fields, psychopharmacology and animal behavior. Most of my real education came from the wide variety and large number of patients that I evaluated and treated during my predoctoral clinical internships. This, too, needless to say, was obsessed over, dissected, and analyzed. Indeed, it was so ridiculous to me that, after having giggled uncontrollably for quite a long while, thus provoking even further wrath-and, worse yet, further interpretations-I half stormed, half laughed my way out of her office and refused to write up the test report.

All because he had done something different on a test. My now former husband, whom I have never, in almost twenty-five years, known to lie, was being labeled a sociopath a man who was quite singularly straightforward and gentle was interpreted as deeply disturbed, conflicted, and filled with rage. She was an entirely humorless and doctrinaire psychoanalyst who spent more than an hour interpreting, in the most fatuous and speculative manner, the primitive and repressed rage of my husband, his intrapsychic conflicts, his ambivalences, his antisocial nature, and his deeply disturbed personality structure. I thought it was marvelous and took the results of his WAIS, Rorschach, and Draw-A-Person to my psychological-testing supervisor.

An unquiet mind jamison