After weeks of gibberish, he had finally given me something juicy for my conference paper. And, let’s face it, I was intrigued. It is not every day that Chicken Man walks into your office. Sigmund Freud had his Rat Man, an old Russian guy who fantasized about a rodent crawling up his anus, and that case made his career. I was thinking book contract, movie rights, lecture tours, the works. This was heavy stuff. It was much better than the stuff I was used to hearing: “I feel guilty for what I did to my father” or “my parents didn’t love me enough.” I could spin this into an endowed chair.

After several months away from my writing, I’m finally back. I had gotten myself bogged down for a month and a half working on a paper about one of my patients. I usually don’t talk about work in these blogs, but I might as well tell the world that I am a specialist in psychoanalysis, and I do occasional work in the field. I had taken on a client: a thirty-two year old obsessive-compulsive; his condition he had been diagnosed as neurotic by half a dozen psychiatrists, and was so acute that most of them had broken off their professional relationships with him.