The anthro training was interesting, suggesting interests that stretched beyond private practice. But he’d had no academic appointments and his fields of specialty were psychoanalysis and the treatment of impaired physicians and health professionals. His birthdate made him sixty-five. Old enough to have retired–the move to Ojai from Beverly Hills and the lack of a phone listing implied a yearning for the quiet life.
I flipped forward to the R’s and found Harvey Rosenblatt’s citation, complete with the NYU affiliation and an office on East Sixty-fifth Street in Manhattan. Same address as the Shirley I’d been trying to reach. Had she ignored my call because they were no longer together–divorced? Or something worse?
I read on. Rosenblatt had graduated from NYU, done his clinical training at Bellevue, the Robert Evanston Hale Psychoanalytic Institute in Manhattan, and Southwick Hospital in England. Fields of specialty, psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Fifty-eight years old.
He was listed in the next volume of the directory, too. I worked my way forward in time, until his name no longer appeared.
Four years ago.
Right between the Paprock and Shipler murders.
You’re wondering if they’ve been visited, too.
One way to check: like most house organs, the Journal of the American Medical Association ran obituaries each month. I went up to the stacks and retrieved bound copies, four and five years old for Rosenblatt, ten and eleven for Harrison.
There were no notices on either psychiatrist. But maybe they hadn’t bothered to join the AMA.
I consulted the American Journal of Psychiatry. Nothing there, either.
Perhaps neither man had been a member of the specialty guild.
Bound copies of the American Psychological Association Directory were just a few aisles over. The five-year-old listing on Katarina de Bosch that I’d found in my volume at home was indeed her last.
No death notice on her, either.
So maybe I was working myself up for nothing.
I thought of another possible way to locate addresses–bylines in scientific publications. The Index Medicus and Psychological Abstracts revealed that Katarina had coauthored a couple of articles with her father, but nothing since his death. One of them had to do with child rearing and contained a reference to “bad love”: The process of mother-child bonding forms the foundation for all intimate relationships, and disruptions in this process plant the seed of psychopathology in later life.
Good love–the nurturant, altruistic, psychosocial “suckling” by the mother/parenting figure, contributes to the child’s sense of security and, hence, molds his ability to form stable attachments. Bad love-the abuse of parental authority–creates cynicism, alienation, hostility, and, in the worst cases, violent acting-out that is the child’s attempt to seek retribution from the breast that has failed him.
Retribution. The abuse of parental authority. Someone had been failed. Someone was seeking revenge.
I checked for articles by Harrison and Rosenblatt. Neither had published a word.
No great surprise, most practitioners never get into print. But it still seemed odd that I couldn’t locate any of them.
One therapist to go: the social worker, Mitchell Lerner.
He’d been last counted a member in good standing of the national social work organization six years ago. I made a note of his office address on Laurel Canyon and the accompanying phone number. BA from Cal State Northridge, MSW from Berkeley, clinical training at San Francisco General Hospital, followed by two years as a staff social worker at the Corrective School.
Another disciple. Under specialties he’d listed family therapy and substance abuse.
Not hoping for much, I took the stairs back up to the stacks and pulled out six- and seven-year-old bound volumes of the social work journal.
No obits on him either, but a paragraph headed “Suspensions” just below the death notices in a December issue caught my eye. A list followed.
Thirteen clinical social workers dropped by the organization because of ethics violations. Dead center among the names, “Lerner, Mitchell A.”
No details were given about his or any of the others’ sins. The State Board of Behavioral Science Examiners was closed for the weekend, so I jotted down the date he’d been expelled and made a note to call first thing Monday morning.
Figuring I’d learned as much as I could from books, I left the library.