The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book began with a talk I gave at New York Presbyterian Hospital as part of a series of Grand Rounds lectures hosted by Columbia University’s Program in Narrative Medicine. Rita Charon, the director of the program, invited me to speak. Her enthusiasm and generosity about what I had to say acted as a vital catalyst for this book. The now-disbanded neuropsychoanalysis discussion group I attended for two years, led by Jaak Panksepp and the late Mortimer Ostow, not only introduced me to the vast field of neuro-science research, it allowed me to listen to (and sometimes participate in) the complex debates that surround the integration of two disciplines that have entirely different vocabularies. The neuro-science lectures, hosted by the Neuropsychoanalysis Foundation at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, were crucial to increasing my understanding and inspiring directions for my reading. I want to thank Dahelia Beverle, my supervisor at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in New York City, where I volunteer as a writing teacher for the in-patients. The writers in my classes provided me with invaluable insights about the personal meanings of their illnesses, without which this book couldn’t have been written. I would like to thank Mark Solms, George Makari, and Asti Hustvedt for their careful reading of and commentary on the manuscript of The Shaking Woman, and, finally, I am grateful to my husband, Paul Auster, not only for reading this text, but for his patience. For years, he has kindly tolerated my passionate immersion in the brain/mind problem and listened to me think aloud (sometimes for hours) about many of the issues I address in this book.