Beyond Locked Doors: Insights and Reflections from My Year at Camarillo State Hospital
Robin B. Zeiger, Ph.D.
The unconscious is not just evil by nature. It is also the source of the highest good: not only dark, but also light, …superhuman, spiritual, and in the classical sense of the word “divine. Carl Jung
Sometimes we learn the most important lessons of life in the strangest of places.
Sometimes we learn life’s most important lessons in unexpected places. Forty years ago, I lived at Camarillo State Hospital, a renowned psychiatric facility. There, I discovered the power of keys, the keepers of the mysterious psychiatric wards.
Despite being a doctoral psychology intern, I arrived in Camarillo with naivety and fear, far from my childhood home of Chicago. The hospital’s locked wards protected individuals from their inner demons. Walking into those units for the first time was terrifying, as I encountered patients with delusions, hallucinations, and erratic behavior. It was easy to distance myself from their “craziness” and feel powerful with my badge and keys.
This perspective was not to last for long. I began my first rotation on a psychotic adolescent unit and was assigned “Hank” Henry Marshall, a coveted supervisor and head psychologist. His quiet, but powerful demeanor taught me humility and humanity that has accompanied me all my life as a professional and fellow human being.
Hank believed in avoiding the easy way out by categorizing psychotic behavior as fundamentally different. Over all else, he emphasized the importance of deep human connection between therapist and patient. Hank described a spectrum between sane and crazy behavior, recognizing that life experiences can shift our place along that line. He humorously illustrated this point with a dissertation scenario, highlighting the potential for anyone to experience psychosis under extreme stress.
To this day, I remember the stark paradoxes of the place. The sprawling green campus nestled among trees and hills appeared deceptively serene with Mission Style Revival Architecture and the famous bell tower. I lived in the volunteer dorms and woke up everyday to California greenery and fell asleep to the stars and the sounds of the crickets. Yet, just in case I forgot I was always confronted by the sign.
One arrived at the grounds only after driving down a long, winding tree-covered road. I suspect this long road was to help isolate the units and discourage easy AWOL.
As an Orthodox Jew, I typically left the dorms for the Jewish Shabbat (Sabbath) and spent it with the nearby Jewish community of Los Angeles. Sometimes I remained at “home” and on those Sabbaths, I might take a walk with a fellow intern or alone. Because of the laws of the Sabbath, I could not carry around my ID or keys. Sometimes the hospital security would stop and “chat” to make sure everything was okay. I suspect they were stopping to make sure we weren’t two adult patients attempting to escape.
When I walked alone on Shabbat, I had no proof of my identity and I worried I could be mistaken for a patient. As interns working with hospitalized patients, we constantly struggled with the meaning and causes of “crazy” behavior. We asked ourselves, as the holder of the keys, what made us different.
Over the year, I learned many lessons. With Hank’s help, I opened my heart to my patients and began to meet our shared humanity. Perhaps I learned more from them than they learned from me.
I learned it was okay for the security guard to stop me and make sure I wasn’t AWOL. In the early years of my own personal psychotherapy, I sometimes dreamt about Camarillo. It wasn’t always so clear if I was the therapist or the patient. This too was okay. It seemed to signal that I was doing very deep work of the soul.
I remember one more lesson from Hank. Because Camarillo was built in the middle of nowhere, at the edge of such a small town, I could climb a hill, look out over fields, and find wonder in the stars. Hank told me of how he would climb this same hill with a patient and gaze into the distance, both imagining a future. Hank communicated to the patients and to myself that together we can reach for the stars.
Please follow me and discover articles on mindfulness, finding peace in difficult times, Jung, longing and the Little Prince, Black Lives Matter, Amanda Gorman’s poetry and childhood nostalgia such as lighthouses and ice-cream trucks.One of my favorites is Dark Feet & Dark Wings: Wendell Berry’s Wisdom for Difficult Times.
Robin B. Zeiger is a practicing Jungian psychoanalyst, a certified Sandplay therapist, and a free-lance writer.
She is a member of the:
International Association of Analytical Psychology the Israel Institute of Jungian Psychology and president of the Israel Therapists Sandplay Association. She can be reached at rbzeiger@yahoo.com.
