Leah

Leah’s life trajectory—spanning different cultures and continents—appeared to be constantly moving toward freedom, similarly to but also far from the reality of some of the patients in the psychiatrist’s care. In what ways would Leah’s upbringing in a dictatorship inform her account, especially her reflections about the use of coercion as part of her professional role? How would the patients’ protests or compliance, when faced with her decision to apply coercion, resonate with her own experiences of being at the mercy of others? The chapter is a careful reading of her narrative account. Part of the rationale for the lengthy and detailed individual case write-up is to honor the sequence and manner of telling of the narrator, but also to demonstrate the richness and complexity in a single professional’s narrative account. Hence, there are many quotes included. This is both to ensure transparency and idiosyncrasy and to privilege the phenomenological aim of the study. The latter calls for an eliciting of the complexities evident in the account, before subjecting it, together with all cases, to interpretation and theoretical discussion in later chapters.