Wednesday 14

[Accounts]

Dr. Edward Harnick* Psychiatrist supplied one set of books Bhagawatam through Keith

Dr. Edward Harnick

c/o Einstein Psychiatric Institute

11 West 73rd Street

N.Y.C.

Allen Ginsberg: "Peter Orlovsky and I met Harnick at a group that I knew called the GAP, Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry. We had been to their conference. They had invited us to talk about hippies and they wanted to know what was this generation thing. It was like a breakthrough between the poets and the new culture and the psychiatry groups. So we'd given a big poetry reading and made friends with a lot of them, and sang Hare Kṛṣṇa with them, the whole thing.

"Over the years Harnick and I developed a pleasant friendship and worked out an arrangement that if I knew anybody particularly gifted among the younger generation that was getting screwed up in the Lower East Side for drugs or busts or madness or whatever, that rather than have them go through the whole horror mill of Bellevue and not know what to do, to put them in touch with him and the Einstein Clinic, so he could intervene to make sure that they had a safe refuge. When Kīrtanānanda's case came up, at that time he wasn't the only one in trouble. There were a lot of hippies going through the same problem, wandering the street, flipping out. It was a question of finding a psychiatrist who had a little political clout in the New York psychiatric community among the hospitals, whom we could talk to and explain what the situation was, that this guy was a devotee practising traditional Vaiṣṇava practice, and that's why he looked so funny in the American context, but it was all right, he wasn't crazy, he was just doing his thing. Harnick was good. He picked up fast and could intervene.