THE KING OF GATH UNTO HIS SERVANT: MAGAZINE INSANITY
For one who has devoted a considerable portion of his life to a study
of the human mind in dissolution there are few things more diverting
than popular disquisitions on the subject of insanity. If popular
comments and interpretations regarding other subjects--world politics,
for instance--are as apropos and penetrating as are those on mental
disorder, the less readers are guided by them the more instructed they
may expect to be.
I have recently read in an important magazine an article entitled
“Up from Insanity” which has all the qualities that a contribution
intended to be instructive and helpful should not have. It reeks
with misinformation, not only misstatement of facts, but unwarranted
inferences and unjustifiable and illogical conclusions.
The Editor of that distinguished and dignified periodical says: “It
is a revealing narrative, genuine down to the latest detail.” And so
it is. It reveals the writer's incapacity to grasp the fundamental
principles of psychology, established experimentally and empirically,
and which have taken their place amongst the eternal truths of the
world; and it reveals that the writer, whether because of his previous
mental disorder, or willfully, is quite ignorant of what has been
accomplished by countless students and innumerable workers in the field
of psychiatry by way of throwing some light upon the mysteries of the
normal mind.
“I am almost a pioneer in the field of written experience of insanity,”
he writes; and yet Mr. Clifford Beers' book, “A Mind that Found
Itself,” and “The Autobiography of a Paranoic,” two comparatively
recent works that are most illuminating and have had a great effect
in concentrating the attention of the public on insanity as a social
problem, must have been known to him.
“It is a privilege conferred upon few men in the world to return
from the dark and weird adventure [meaning insanity] to live a
normal life.”
Considering that upward of one-third of all insane individuals recover,
there is no other interpretation to be put upon this statement than
that the writer of it does not know whereof he speaks.
“A friend of mine lost his mind from thinking too much about his
income tax.”
This may be an attempt at facetiousness on the part of the writer.
No physician who has dealt with the insane has ever encountered an
individual made insane by “thinking too much.” If so, he has been
silent about it.
“I suppose, first of all, you would like to know how it feels to
be insane. Well, it is indeed a melancholy situation.”
It is, indeed, a melancholy situation if you have melancholia, but if
you have mania, and especially if you have certain forms in which your
self-appreciation is enhanced and your belief in your potencies and
possessions quickened to an immeasurable degree, it is far from being a
melancholy sensation. It is a sensation of power and possession which
renders its possessor incapable of believing that any such thing as
depression exists in the world.
“Lately a movement has arisen to change the name of insane
asylums to 'mental hospitals.' We now recognise former madmen
as merely sick people. We used to think of insane people
as wild-eyed humans gnawing at prison bars or raving in a
straight-jacket.”
The casual reader might infer from this that “lately” means within
the past few years, and yet three generations have come and gone
since Conolly, Hack, Tuke and others initiated the movement which
accomplished this.
“It was inconceivable to a well-known New York publisher that
an insane man could play golf, go to Africa, or talk about his
experiences.”
The mental and emotional make-up of “well-known New York publishers” is
enigmatic. There is general agreement on that point, but if there is
one amongst them who believes that an insane man cannot play golf, he
could readily divorce himself from the conviction by driving past any
hospital for the insane. There he will see a golf course and some of
the patients playing, though he will not be able to distinguish them
from “regular” golfers. As for an insane man talking about his golf
or his experiences in Africa, no New York publisher, well-known or
otherwise, would need proof to convince him that an insane man can do
that.
“On my way through New York I called on a celebrated specialist
who told me that I had only six months to live and told me to go
out and hunt, roam the world and make the best of the passing
hours. Six months later that great physician died insane.”
It is to be assumed that the celebrated specialist was a specialist
in diseases of the mind. If that is so, the writer is in error. No
celebrated alienist of New York has died insane within the past quarter
of a century. In the second place, there has never been a celebrated
alienist in New York who would fit the description,
“forty, rich, famous, living in an elegant home amid exquisite
surroundings on University Heights with his wife, one of the
most beautiful women I ever looked upon, a statuesque blonde of
astounding loveliness.”
save in the last qualification. Each one of them has had a beautiful
wife, but none “a statuesque blonde of astounding loveliness.”
If the writer consulted a physician who made that statement to him,
he had the misfortune not only to be insane himself but to seek the
counsel of a physician who was also insane.
The writer of the article says that he will attempt seriously to show
that the centre of the will is distinct from the centre of the mind,
and is a separately functioning organ; but in the stress of relating
his experiences he forgot to do so. In fact, there would be no more
satisfactory way of estimating his mental possessions and equilibrium
than from an examination of this written document.
Those who are experienced with the insane give great diagnostic weight
to their writings, not only the orthography and the syntax, but the
sequence of thought, the rhythm of expression, the continuity of
narrative, the pertinency of reference, the credibility of citation or
example, the discursiveness of the narrative, and the way in which the
writer develops and finally presents the central thought or idea. All
these and other features of the written document are evidences to which
he gives great weight. “Up from Insanity” is neither sequential in
thought nor in narrative. Nearly every paragraph furnishes evidence of
the distractibility of the writer's mind, and the discursiveness of the
entire article amounts almost to rambling. It is marked with journalese
jargon which reminds me of the newspaper accounts of the kidnapping or
spiriting from Cuba of Señorita Cisneros.
The pith of the human document that we are discussing is that “every
man's strength wells up from some centre deeper in him than the brain.”
It does. A man's personality at any moment is the sum total of all
the reactions of every cell or physiological unit in his body; but
acceptance of this fact does not alter the universally accepted belief
that the brain is the organ of mind. To have it said by a psychopathic
individual that his restoration to a normal mental state came after
he had observed “that a double nerve centre at the base of the spine
had been aroused and the function of these centres brought balance and
poise and strength, which was instantly reflected in every movement
and thought, and that these basic nerve centres are the centre of the
will,” neither proves that there is such a centre nor makes it at all
probable that it exists.
Why such humanistic and scientific puerilities as these should have
been taken seriously is not easy to understand.
Our knowledge concerning the human mind is not by any means complete
or satisfactory, but there are certain things about it which we know.
For instance, we know that there is a conscious mind and a subconscious
mind. The discovery in 1866 of the “subliminal consciousness” of the
psychologist (the “unconscious mind” of the psychoanalyst), was called
by William James the greatest discovery in modern psychology. We know
that the person the individual thinks he is is the equivalent of his
conscious mind. The man that he really is is the man his unconscious
mind makes him. The face that he sees when he looks in the glass is the
face that goes with his conscious mind. The face that others see is
the one that fits his unconscious mind. Anyone who would observe the
revelations of that unconscious mind in literature can readily gratify
his wish by reading the “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” that
remarkable presentation by James Joyce.
Many believe today that a man's ego or individuality is the equivalent
of this unconscious mind; that therein lies the power of genius,
the source of vision, the springs of inspiration that gush forth in
prophecy, in artistic creation, in invention.
We are now engaged in investigating this subliminal consciousness,
or unconscious mind, with every means at our disposal, and year by
year we are making headway. Our progress is not adequate, perhaps,
to satisfy the impatient and the impulsive, but with each succeeding
decade there is a distinct achievement. Nevertheless, in the
half-century during which we have been working at the matter in a
methodical--perhaps one might almost say a scientific--way, we have
discovered things about the mind which are truly epoch-making.
It is evident that the writer of the article, “Up from Insanity,”
has never been insane. He is a psychopathic individual who has had
distressing episodes. At times these episodes have parallelled with
considerable closeness the features of definite mental diseases such as
manic depressive insanity, at other times they seem to have resembled
the features of dementia præcox; but he never was the victim of either
one. He inherited an unstable nervous system which displayed itself in
youth as a shut-in, markedly sensitive, anti-social personality. Like
the majority of individuals so burdened, he was subject to periods of
excitation, at which times he did things at top speed. Neurologists
call this a “hypo-manic state,” that is, a state that resembles mania
in miniature. Such states would be followed by periods of inadequacy,
of retardation of mental and physical activity, and of depression.
After a severe attack which he suffered when he was twenty-one, he
had what is called in polite circles a “nervous breakdown,” the chief
symptoms being abortive delusions of reference. He thought that certain
parts of his body had changed so materially that it was necessary to
hide them from the gaze of onlookers. It made him sick to look at his
own face. He had to wear coloured glasses in order that others might
not read his secret from his eyes, and his sense of relationship with
everything constituting the external world was disordered disagreeably.
Accompanying this there were a series of symptoms which constitute
“feeling badly,” and all the functions of the body that were concerned
with nutrition were disordered, so that he became weak and lost flesh.
Oftentimes his depression of spirits was so great that he convinced
himself he wanted to die, but he did not embrace a good opportunity to
accomplish this end when it was offered to him. In fact, he struggled
so valiantly with the run-away horse that he checked him and “slid from
his back ingloriously,” physically exhausted. It would be interesting
to know why sliding off the back of a horse who has run away and
whose frenzy has been subdued by the rider should be an inglorious
dismounting. Of course it might be more glorious to tame him to such
a degree that his master could stand upon his back and direct his
capriciousness with a glance or a silken cord, but surely there is
nothing inglorious about any kind of dismount from the back of a horse
who has been transformed from a gentle to a wild animal.
Nevertheless, the experience was a beneficial one. When he reviewed
his prowess he realised that he had imposed his will-power, mediated
by muscle, upon the animal, and it occurred to him, a victim of
aboulia like the majority of psychopathic individuals, that to impose
a similar will-power upon himself would be a salutary procedure. With
this discernment came other revelations. One was that he had always
been lacking in concentration and was easily distracted--psychopathic
hallmarks which can be effaced to a remarkable degree, in many
instances, by training. The first fruit of his labour in this direction
was the discovery that Dr. Cook had been understudying Ananias,
Munchausen, _et al._
In another part of his article he says, with consummate familiarity,
“You are from Missouri when it comes to asking you to accept new
thoughts.” He may be assured that one of his readers is not. New
thoughts are as acceptable to this reader as breath to his nostrils;
but he would claim citizenship in that State if asked to accept it as
an indication of perspicacity to have discovered that Dr. Cook was a
fake.
Despite the fact that the writer of the article had “developed the
sixth sense to a startling degree,” which assured him success as a
journalist, he was chafing under his impotencies when he met a former
medium who “had given up that life since her marriage.” Unlike the
celebrated specialist's wife, who was the most beautiful creature
he had ever seen up to the time he met his own wife, this one was
“the most insignificant little woman I ever saw.” Whether it was her
experience gained as a medium, or as the wife of a rich lumberman of
the Middle West, that prompted her to shy the alleged lunatic, fearing
he would bore her with a narrative of his troubles, or whether she
did not want to rake up her past, cannot be gathered from the meagre
narrative. However, he got from her this nugget of wisdom:
“To be really successful you must get in touch with the great
reservoir of experience.”
From “one of the country's greatest physicians,” the like of which are
his personal friends, he got a paraphrase of the Scripture:
“Learn a lesson from the flowers of the field, be humble and
modest, be natural and play a man's part.”
It was then that calm repose settled upon him, and his nervous energy
returned to the old channels and nourished him.
If Mr. E. J. had only appended a few of his dreams to his human
document, there would be very little difficulty in pointing out the
emotional repression that was at the bottom of all his mental symptoms.
That he conforms to a certain well-known type of psychic fixation
there is very little doubt. He has always been bereft, because he has
a feeling of being spiritually or mentally alone. He never learned to
be independent in mind, but always looked for an uncritical, soothing,
maternal sort of love from people who were not ready or willing to give
it. He has not changed materially. Now that his so-called recovery has
come, and being unable to find what he demands, he takes refuge in the
next best thing, and plays at obtaining it vicariously; he convinces
himself that he is going to devote himself to doing for others “all the
little kindnesses that life offers.”
The layman who would get some knowledge of insanity should avoid such
confessions as that of E. J. If he would make acquaintance with the
self-coddling of a neurotic individual who delights in self-analysis,
self-pity, and exaggeration of his symptoms, and who is a fairly
typical example of juvenile fixation, his purpose will be accomplished
by reading this and similar articles. There is, however, a safer and
more satisfactory way of securing such information, and that is by
reading the writings of Pierre Janet. There he will find the obsessed,
the hysteric, the aboulic, the neurasthenic individual discussed in
masterly fashion, and he will find the presentation unmixed with
mediæval mysticism and puerile platitudes, unflavoured with specious
“uplift” sentiment and psychological balderdash.
On the other hand, he may get real enlightenment from “The Jungle of
the Mind,” published recently in the same magazine, providing he closes
his eyes to the editorial comment and refuses to read the letter “of a
physician of reputation” which sets forth that “according to all our
text-book symptoms of dementia præcox she was surely that.”
The purpose of such editorial comment must be either to suggest that
the enigmatic dissolution of the mind to which Schule gave the name
“precocious dementia” may eventuate in recovery, or to show that
doctors make mistakes. If it is the former, it needs a lot of proof; if
the latter, none whatsoever. Though students of mental pathology know
little or nothing of the causes of the mental disorders of hereditarily
predisposed individuals who get wrecked on the cliffs of puberty, or of
the alterations and structure of the tissues that subserve the mind,
they know, as they know the temperaments of their better halves, the
display, the types, the paradigms of the disease. And the lady who has
recently contributed some notes on a disfranchisement from the state of
_non compos mentis_ to the _Atlantic Monthly_ with such subtle display
of proficiency in the literary art, may be assured that the doctors who
averred she had dementia præcox added one more error to a list already
countless. With the daring of one who hazards nothing by venturing an
opinion, I suggest that she merely made a journey into a wild country
from whose bourne nearly all travellers return. The country is called
“Manic-Depressive Insanity.”
A young woman of gentle birth develops, while earning her bread in
uplift work, “nervous prostration,” that coverer of a multitude of
ills. Her sister's home, to which she goes, brings neither coherence
nor tranquillity. In fact, she gathers confusion rapidly there, and
seeks to get surcease of it in oblivion. After three attempts at
suicide, she is sent to a sanitarium. Six months of that exhausts
her financial resources. This, with increasing incoherency and
fading actuality, necessitate transfer to a state hospital, and
there she remains three years, going through the stages of violence,
indifference, tranquillity, resignation, and finally the test of work
and recreation, culminating happily in probational discharge and
resumption of previous work.
This is the record of thousands in this country and in every civilised
country. The variety of insanity which she had (and it is the commonest
of all the insanities) nearly always terminates in recovery--that
is, from the single attack. There is, of course, the likelihood of
recurrence. How to avoid that is what we are keen to learn from mental
hygienists and from those taught by experience. If this disenfranchised
lady will tell us ten years hence what she has done to keep well and
how her orientation has differed from that of the ten years following
puberty, she will make a human document of value intellectually, not
emotionally, as this one is. Meanwhile, should she be disposed to do
something for future psychopaths, she may record the experiences
of her life from childhood to the period of full development, and
particularly of the decade following her fifth year. If she will do
this with the truthfulness of James Joyce, the chasteness of Dorothy
M. Richardson, and the fullness of Marie Bashkirtseff, it may be said
of her: “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected
praise.”
It may be literature to describe one's fellow inmates of a psychopathic
hospital, to portray their adult infantilisms, to delineate their
schizophrenias, to recount their organised imageries, but it does not
contribute an iota to our knowledge of insanity, how to prevent it, and
how to cure it.
We need intrepid souls who will bare their psychic breasts and will
tell us, without fear or shame, of their conventionalised and primitive
minds: how the edifice was constructed, the secrets of the architect,
and of the builder. If Dostoievsky had been insane, not epileptic, the
literature of psychiatry would today be vastly more comprehensive.
THE END