On July 3, 1986, following his second year at Harvard Medical School, Paul Lozano sought out prominent Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Margaret Bean-Bayog for treatment for depression. On April 2, 1991, twenty-eight-year-old Paul Lozano committed suicide, nine months after Dr. Bean-Bayog terminated an intense and unorthodox therapy regimen. A brilliant young man had been reduced to a state of infantile dependency, without, apparently, any further will to live.

Here is a revealing look into the imprecise world of psychiatry - a closed society that rigorously protects its eminent practitioners, while doing little to police itself, and that sometimes fails to distinguish between innovative therapy and potentially dangerous experimentation.

It was a tabloid triple-header starring the ambitious son of an immigrant Mexican bricklayer and a distinguished Harvard psychiatrist whose groundbreaking work with alcoholics was winning national acclaim. The true story - and the legal case it spawned - go beyond a promising student's tragic death. It lies somewhere in the reams of material discovered in Paul Lozano's apartment and written in Dr.

Bean-Bayog's own hand: including shocking journal entries full of sadomasochistic fantasies, intimate notes, and flash cards, all suggesting a complex, erotic interplay between doctor and patient. In this chilling excursion to the outer limits of therapy, award-winning reporter Eileen McNamara probes a toxic interdependency that goes to the heart and hubris of psychiatry itself.

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A gifted student who taught himself to read at the age of three and won an appointment to West Point, Paul Lozano's ambitions led him finally to Harvard Medical School, a bastion of privilege. Feeling inadequate and isolated in that fiercely competitive environment, he sought the help of Dr. Bean-Bayog, who soon admitted him to a private psychiatric hospital.

Following his discharge from the hospital, she improvised a reparenting therapy in which she regressed Lozano to the age of three and assumed the role of his mother. Dr. Bean-Bayog maintained that his problems stemmed from childhood sexual abuse, but Paul Lozano had no recorded history of abuse or mental illness before he entered Harvard Medical School.

Whatever the facts of Paul Lozano's brief life, in the end he committed suicide; the Lozano family filed a lawsuit against Dr. Bean-Bayog; and Harvard's analytic community closed ranks around its besieged colleague. Faced with scrutiny of her techniques by a jury and her peers, Bean-Bayog ultimately decided to resign her medical license, and the case was settled out of court for $1 million. To this day, she refuses to accept responsibility, and steadfastly maintains that she was the victim in this case.

After a storm of publicity, Dr. Bean-Bayog declared: "No male therapist has ever been the subject of such an assault."

1. At the heart of these scandalous revelations, which offer rare insight into the confidential relationship between therapist and patient, are questions both profound and troubling regarding the accountability of Harvard Medical School and the medical profession, and about the nature, practice, and limitations of psychiatry itself.