Breakdown: Sex, Suicide, and the Harvard Psychiatrist

McNamara's disturbing and impressive investigation into the case of Harvard Medical School student Paul Lozano, who committed suicide in 1991, nine months after Harvard psychiatrist Margaret Bean-Bayog severed her ties to him, reaches conclusions diametrically opposed to those of the author's Boston Globe colleague Gary S. Chafetz in Obsession (reviewed above). McNamara charges that Bean-Bayog erred badly in using an untested role-playing therapy that cast her as the ``mother'' and Lozano as her ``son.'' By passing along to her patient sexually explicit notes, letters, inscriptions in baby books and flash cards (``You can too feel like a three-year-old when you're twenty-five . . . You can breast feed and be cozy,'' wrote the psychiatrist on one card), Bean-Bayog, McNamara contends, reduced her patient to an infantile, dependent state. This ``mothering technique'' was also in conflict with Lozano's insistent sexual attraction toward Bean-Bayog, according to McNamara. She is highly skeptical of the portrayal by the former psychiatrist (Bean-Bayog has resigned her medical license) of Lozano's boyhood as one of mental torture, instability and possible sexual abuse by his mother. (Apr.)