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    Out of the Box
    Out of the Box
    Out of the Box
    Ebook98 pages1 hour

    Out of the Box

    By Ron Leifer

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    About this ebook

    The autobiography of Ron Leifer, MD, a dissident buddhist psychiatrists who spent his life opposing psychiatric coercion and the myth of mental illness.

    Ron Leifer was a student of professor Thomas Szasz, the famous critic of psychiatry and author of The Myth of Mental Illness. Inspired by his teachings, and by the dislike of coercive practises in psychiatry, Ron Leifer embarked on a life-long journey of research and practice as a psychotherapist working outside of mainstream psychiatric dogma.

    Combining the wisdom of buddhism with the principles of ethical psychology, Ron Leifer developed a non-coercive and non-medical approach to human sufferance. Leifer's method empowers the individual by guiding him toward awareness of his inner turmoils and mastering his emotions and thoughts.

    In this ebook, Ron Leifer relates his own life from childhood to the present day. A precious account of the major events that drove him through a life of research, of the great people he met and was inspired by.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOISM
    Release dateApr 15, 2014
    ISBN9781310558788
    Out of the Box

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      Book preview

      Out of the Box - Ron Leifer

      OUT OF

      THE BOX

      Ron Leifer, MD

      2014

      Edition 1.1

      — OISM Editions —

      Copyright 2013 by Ron Leifer, MD

      eBook Info

      This eBook was created by Tristano Ajmone on Ron Leifer’s request. Ron Leifer owns all rights on the contents of this eBook.

      Distribution

      You may freely distribute Out of the Box to your friends and/or publish it on your website or blog, provided you circulate the eBook in its original unaltered format, as found on Ron Leifer’s website. You might do so without requesting further permission provided you are distributing it for free. You may not sell this eBook nor distribute it within a commercial context.

      For further information and/or enquiries, please visit Ron Leifer’s website:

      http://ronleifer.zenfactor.org

      Jutoh Logo

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      was created with Jutoh:

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      Table of Contents

      My Father

      My Mother

      Early Life: Elementary School

      Judaism

      Middle School

      High School

      College

      Medical School

      Internship

      Residency And Szasz

      Ernest Becker

      The Sixties

      Rudy Lombard

      Agehananda Bharati

      Mexico

      The Farm

      Buddhism

      Stroke

      Books by Ron Leifer

      My Father

      In the religion in which I was raised, Judaism, one of the obligations, or mitzvahim, imposed on elders is to pass down to the next generation what they have learned, so the next generation may benefit and not have to invent the wheel. This is especially important for people who choose to live unconventional lives so they can have some idea of its triumphs and tragedies.

      As I reflect upon my life, I realize that I have tended to associate with and make friends with people who know more than me, people that I can learn from. In this book, I shall reflect on what I have learned and who I have learned it from – especially, who I have learned it from. So these recollections are more about others than they are about me. Some of these lessons I make explicitly. Others, you, the reader, can infer for yourself.

      I am an eighty year old heretical psychiatrist. The word heresy is derived from the Greek hairesis which means to choose. It must be understood in relation to its opposite, best expressed by the German word gleichschalten which means obligatory set up or forced agreement, a term used by the Nazis to impose agreement with their agenda, and is now appropriate to use in relation to conventional psychiatry, in which psychiatrists in training are obliged to accept the reality of mental illnesses, and to believe that they are brain diseases best treated with drugs, I have chosen not to believe this on rational grounds.

      The First person to whom I owe a debt of gratitude, my deepest gratitude, is my father.

      My father was a cvonventional man, an observant Jew and a good citizen. During the air raid alarm blackouts of World War II, he volunteered as an air raid warden who patrolled the streets to be sure that no one turned on their lights which would give the expected German bombers a clue about their location. My mother served hot coffee to the wardens out of the window of our first floor apartment. My father is my hero. Of all the people who influenced me, I was influenced most by my father. He taught me to be what I am, if not who I am, although they go hand in glove. He taught me how to be a warrior, not in the sense of an aggressive warrior against others, but in the sense of being bold and courageous in facing the problems of life. Although he lived a conventional life, it was clear to me that he did it by choice. He was not a sheep following the flock. His name was Jacob Leifer, known as Jack, or Jake to his family and close friends and blacky, or Lefty to people in our neighborhood. He was a handsome, strong man with black hair and blue eyes. My Hebrew name is R’euven ben Jakob, Ronald, son of Jacob and, often, I can feel him inside of me.

      My friends often asked each other, What kind of Jew are you? Everyone said Galiciana. Everyone in my neighborhood was Galiciana, which means Eastern Europe, as opposed to Spanish, or Sephardic. There were few of those because most were killed during the Inquisition. As I later learned, Galicia is an area in central Europe. It is beyond the pale. The Pale is a corridor between Berlin, Warsaw and St. Petersburg, as far away from Rome as the persecuted Jews could go. My father was born in a Jewish cultural center in Galicia called Radatz, or Rawa, located in the foot hills of the Carpathian mountains, not far from Western Ukraine where Hasidism was born.

      He and his family came here when he was two years old. He grew up on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen in the lower East side of Manhattan. His father ran a horse farm in Rawa, where he bought young and sick horses, healed and raised them and sold them at a profit. Due to the anti-Semitism in Europe, he was accused of stealing horses by people who resented his success.

      His father took his wife and five children and emigrated to this country, along with many other Galicians. He opened a fur shop on Twenty Seventh Street, where he bought and sorted fur skins from Russia off the boat and sold them to coat makers in the garment district. He died in nineteen twenty-eight, before I was born. My father took over the business with his brother, Myer, who died in surgery for a hernia. My father took us to visit his mother every Sunday. His mother lived on the other side of the Bronx. She was a majestic old lady with white hair piled high on her head, who sat on a throne in the middle of the living room with her adoring family seated on the floor all around her.

      I knew my father loved me. I could feel it. He enjoyed being with me. He took me to boxing matches in Harlem, and to baseball games in Giant and Yankee Stadiums. We listened to baseball games on the radio together. I saw Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, and Stan Musial play, and, once, Babe Ruth. One day, at a Yankee game, he took me by the arm, led me up the aisle to a very handsome man who smiled broadly, stood up, nodded his head slightly, and put his hand out to greet my father Jack! the man said, as if they were old friends. My father introduced me to Tony Martin. Seated next to him was a very beautiful woman, his then fiance, Cyd Charise.

      I had no clue who they were at the time, but I was pleased that my father felt proud to show me off. Later, I learned that Tony Martin (nee Morris) was a popular singer whose parents were born in the same town in Galicia as my father and that Cyd Charise (nee Finkl) was a movie star who had danced with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. Martin was very handsome, and I was struck by how he resembled my father a bit. His fiance was very beautiful. Later, as thought about this, I realized that my father mingled in high society and was well respected. As I think about how other men deferred to him, I realize that he was an alpha male, not through aggression or intimidation,

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