I treated him. He was a complicated patient. He saw reality too clearly. Faulty denial mechanism, failed to block out the horrible truths of existence. In the end, his inability to push away the awful facts of "being-in-the-world" rendered his life meaningless, or as one great Hollywood producer said: "Too much reality is not what the people want". Sandy Bates suffered a depression common to many artists in middle age. In my latest paper for the Psychoanalytic Journal, I have named it, "Ozymandias Melancholia".
