Description:
Chance can change a life, and it certainly changed mine. As a third-year undergraduate at Harvard, I overheard a conversation about a college volunteer program in the local state mental hospital, and for the next two years I volunteered on the back wards of the hospital. Each week, I would talk with Mary, a gray-haired, tired woman who had been sitting quietly in a corner for three years. Over the academic year that we talked, she regained enough function to leave the hospital, and I believe our conversations were part of what made that happen. My experience with Mary would prove to change the course of my life.
After graduating from college, I went on to graduate study in academic psychology, but I changed direction as I realized how much I missed the experience with Mary and other patients. I went on to medical school and from there to psychiatry. Now, more than fifty years later, I have two stories to tell: my own, and how psychiatry changed during my working lifetime.
I spent my career as an academic psychiatrist working in a public hospital, where I taught young physicians and other trainees to take care of sick, poor people while also caring for patients myself. I loved my work; but at the same time, I saw how psychiatry was changing, and I was troubled by what I saw. When I trained in the 1960s, psychiatrists cared for patients as individuals. Now, they push pills and promise more than they can deliver. In this book, I describe that change and I offer a proposal for a different and better psychiatry-one that returns psychiatry to its roots and is more helpful to patients and more fulfilling for psychiatrists.
Brief description: Karen L. Fund (1947-2012) was the Publisher and a founder of L.A. Style, a lifestyle and fashion magazine. She was also Associate Publisher of The L.A. Weekly, subsequently serving as Chairperson of its Board of Directors. After a career in rock music and advertising, she emerged as a major figure in print media in Los Angeles. Married to psychoanalyst David James Fisher for thirty-one years before her untimely death, Karen Fund was the loving and devoted mother of Ben Fisher and Chloe Fisher.
Review Quotes:
Karen Fund's moving memoir of becoming a mother to two surrogate children tells a story of how new bonds of love and compassion can overcome some of the moral doubts and legal obstacles that have historically governed parenthood, gestation and birth. She invites the reader into the intimate details of her life, work, and marriage to reveal the agonies of infertility and the condescension and indifference of the medical establishment. Her personal relationship to the woman who agreed to be a surrogate birth mother to her children is beautifully and tenderly described. Karen Fund's story is a brilliant, life-affirming example of the power of a mother's love. My own historical scholarship on sexuality, gender, and the regulation of reproductive technologies has discussed the many countries and states that still ban or place strict limitations on human reproduction on religious or legal grounds. One hopes that accounts of surrogacy like this one will shrink that resistance.
Robert A. Nye
Emeritus Horning Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History
Oregon State University
Author of Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Oxford, 1993) and
Sexuality (Oxford, 1999).
Surrogate documents the compelling arc of Karen Fund's cumulative losses in the face of infertility until her courageous perseverance brings her to Sandra, the surrogate who enables her to become a mother. Candidly, the author shares the sorrow and heartbreak that lead to
the promise and leap of faith that ultimately celebrate the bond of two women whose lives become interwoven. Powerful on its own, Karen Fund's story is augmented by her husband's sensitive view point, his interview of Sandra many years later, and the remarkable perspective
of the young woman who was conceived and carried with Sandra's help. Anyone who has personally encountered challenges in family building or has been touched by someone who has, will find this riveting story to be honest and poignant. This family's multi-faceted and
emotionally authentic account addresses a vacuum in the scholarly and popular literature on surrogacy.
Linda Kanefield, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst with the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis in Washington, D.C. and has a private practice in Chevy Chase, Maryland. For over three decades, she has conducted psychological evaluations of women who want to be surrogate mothers and egg donors. She has published papers on the motives of surrogate mothers, the psychological bonds that link genetic, biological, and social mothers, reconciling feminism and psychoanalysis, the development of femininity, and the patient's curative capacities. Chase, Maryland. For over three decades, she has conducted psychological evaluations of women who want to be surrogate mothers and egg donors. She has published papers on the motives of surrogate mothers, the psychological bonds that link genetic, biological, and social mothers, reconciling feminism and psychoanalysis, the development of femininity, and the patient's curative capacities.