Medicine in the Family

When I was 13, my dad took me to work with him. We went together to the Educational Alliance, a social service agency for the poor located in a large drab building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. For 2 hours I sat with him while he listened to 8 or so men and women report on their lives, bicker, laugh, cry, lash out, and embrace. Dad was in the middle of the action, confronting and encouraging people as they talked. They paid little attention to me, but I was bug-eyed watching these adults go at each other with a bluntness that was both unfamiliar and, somehow, appealing.

My dad, Hugh Mullan, who died last year, was a psychiatrist and an early practitioner of group therapy. He was trained in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s—the halcyon days of the Freudian analytic movement. He spent many hours on the couch himself and learned a therapeutic model that called for lengthy one-on-one treatments. But he soon discovered groups to be a potent method for getting therapy to different kinds of people. In addition to his private practice, he took group therapy on the road to places like the Educational Alliance, where he held sessions for the staff with the intent of strengthening them as individuals and as a team. During his lifetime, he remained a psychiatric innovator and a strong voice for group therapy. The advent of biological psychiatry in more recent years and the use of medications to treat mental illness did not sit well with him. In his view, drugs were short-term short cuts. It was talking, interacting, and wrestling with yourself and your demons that would lead to growth and health.

I was proud to have a “talking doctor” for a father. I also enjoyed …