Fifty pages into her debut memoir, Men Have Called Her Crazy, multidisciplinary artist Anna Marie Tendler describes a recurring dream. In a small, low-lit room that “resembles a detective’s office from a 1940s noir film,” Tendler and a faceless man argue over whether or not she’s crazy. They go back and forth—he says yes, she says no—before he laughs and vanishes. Then, the door disappears, leaving her trapped inside. Tendler wakes in a psychiatric hospital where, a day earlier, she checked herself in for suicidal ideation, self-harm, and disordered eating. But when she recounts the dream, she describes it to the reader—not a therapist. The dream itself needs no interpretation. As Freud might say, all its latent content—the unconscious urges the dream stutters to express—is right there on the surface.
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