A Thousand Camels for Your Gazelle: Narratives and Psychiatry by Daniel Rosen

From the Foreword by Daniel Rosen:
The stories collected here are not just about relationships. They are themselves what form and inform these relationships. Stories can sometimes be all that we have left to bring the past into connection with the present in ways that make a future possible. The stories in this book were all written during the first year of the Corona virus pandemic. Though the pandemic is often in the background, it only plays a part, directly or indirectly, in a handful of the stories, including one written in the form of an essay on the use of fictional narratives as a coping mechanism. Narratives, autobiographical or imagined can help as a therapeutic tool to prepare for an anticipated trauma, and integrate previously fragmented responses to traumatic experiences. Storytelling can foster connections by providing narrators with testimonies which can be witnessed and shared.
Many of the various stories presented here are reflections on relationships, from engaging in a new one, to mourning a lost one, or sharing a happy or sad experience, or trying to master and anticipate these experiences. These stories were gathered and, after meeting in this collection, they started communicating with each other without any authorial control, like a Golem living its own life after escaping from his creator’s grasp.
As in Butterfly Words,1 I am again so grateful to William S. Cohen for catching these internal conversations and disclosing meanings and connections I had not been able to grasp and even still cannot fathom. His insights are recorded in the afterword. I have been asked: “Who is this William S. Cohen¹  who seems to know you so well?” Yes, he has been with me all these years, a devoted observer, sometimes detached, sometimes ironic, analyzing the writings as a critic looks into a foreign text.
I thank my teachers and my colleagues and all the voluntary and involuntary participants or recipients of those stories. But above all, I thank my patients for sharing their lives with me and also for their teaching. I am thinking for example of a former patient hospitalized in a psychiatric ward for a chronic mental illness. He was homeless, jobless, with no money, no family or friends. He was not demented but had some cognitive impairment. He was able to walk but was unsteady on his feet. Once he got better, he said with a smile that he wanted to leave the hospital and go back to the shelter and “work.” What was his work? To collect empty cans of soda for recycling. “People give me money when they see me do that.” That was his job. I was amazed: How could he be in such good spirits when he had less than nothing? I am grateful for that lesson of life.
I am also grateful to the following clinicians who provided helpful comments and feedback upon the manuscript of chapters 7, 8 and 9: Mark J. Russ, M.D. and Michael B. Klein, Ph.D. I also wish to thank Matthew Bach for his close reading of the entire manuscript and for his insightful editorial comments.
I thank all those who inspired me, as I thank the muses, the amused muses who played with me and wrote these words. Daniel Rosen

1 See William S. Cohen introduction of my previous book: Butterfly Words: Relationships, A Psychiatrist’s Narrative. International Psychoanalytic Books, New York, NY. 2019.