Brooklyn Zoo: The Education of a Psychotherapist

Advance Praise for Brooklyn Zoo

"The challenges facing a psychotherapist during a yearlong internship in a New York City public hospital.

Based on her own positive experience in psychoanalysis, Lockman pursued an education in the psychoanalytic tradition, which included supervised therapy with clients, one of whom she saw over a three-year period. She explains that this put her at odds with the mainstream of the profession today because of “the pernicious hostility toward the psychoanalytical way of working,” which often dismisses psychological problems as “nothing more than chemical occurrences in the brain.” She chronicles her initial frustration with her inability to put her education and skills to good use and her dawning understanding that the chaotic conditions at the hospital often made her skills irrelevant anyway. Her patients constantly struggled with the brutal conditions of inner-city life, job loss, random violence and more. The author eventually realized that the most important gift she could give them was her willingness to listen to their concerns and treat them with respect, while evaluating whether they should be released or sent to long-term care...

Before returning to graduate school Lockman worked as a magazine journalist, a skill she puts to good use in this insider's look at the practice of psychiatry in a poorly funded, understaffed public institution."—Kirkus


“‘Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here’ might well be the words above the door of Kings County Hospital’s notorious G Building.  Serial killer Son of Sam and rap legend Ol’ Dirty Bastard punched their tickets at this under-funded, over-crowded mental hospital; so does Darcy Lockman, a wet-behind-the-ears psych intern fresh out of graduate school. She can empathize with the human flotsam washed up on the outer edge of outer Brooklyn—the white folks get sent to Bellevue, in Manhattan—but more to the point, she can write. Brooklyn Zoo is a sorrowful and fascinating portrait of the institutional underworld where criminality and mental illness co-exist, and patients find themselves at the mercy of a medical-penal complex ill-equipped to either cure or punish them.”
—Alex Beam, author of Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America’s Premier Mental Hospital


“Reading Brooklyn Zoo is like getting a nightly e-mail from your best friend as she explores the far side of the moon.  I gasped at what she saw and alternately winced and cheered at her responses.  A smart, delightful surprise of a book.”
—Susan Baur, author of The Dinosaur Man: Tales of Madness and Enchantment from the Back Ward


“Brooklyn Zoo takes us to places where very, very few of us would ever go—or want to go. This interesting memoir deals with situations which might be considered hopeless with great compassion and clarity. For so many of these people, mental illness is the least of their worries but the most of their handicaps. An insight therapist is at a huge disadvantage, and Lockman feels it deeply. She cares about people in a way that few of us dare.”
—Joanne Greenberg, author of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
 

"Darcy Lockman left her journalism career to become a psychotherapist. Clearly a gifted writer, the decision could not have been easy. But she made it and stuck with it.... Brooklyn Zoo, to be released in July 2012, is expertly written: The prose flows, the pacing is even, and the structure is well crafted. As well, the content—the story—is utterly fascinating.... It is...an intelligently written, sobering look at what it takes to be a psychotherapist.... It’s the kind of book you don’t want to rush through; you want to dwell on each chapter, and meditate on Lockman’s experiences to get a fuller sense of what she saw. With a unique voice and a knack for painting verbal portraits, Lockman has delivered a rare gem."—Dan Berkowitz, Psych Central