Women and Madness

by Phyllis Chesler

  And what of Persephone and Psyche and the Virgin Mary? Why, they became Cinderella, Snow White, the Sleeping Beauty, struck dumbly domestic by a Demeter turned stepmother. They all turned to princes and white knights to rescue them from this rather incomprehensible turn of events.

  In our time, Psyche has three children but is very depressed. Lately, she never gets up before noon. The Virgin Mary is an alcoholic, hiding behind drawn shades. Persephone is frigid—and worries about it. Cinderella is anxious, paces back and forth a great deal, and has twice tried to kill herself.

  In our time, the stepmother wander still—exiles, with no memory of what has gone before. Demeter has been known to curse at passing airplanes, to dress in shapeless mourning costumes, to talk to herself, to talk nonsense…. Often these days, when Demeter gives birth to a child, she abandons her then and there, turning her own face to the hospital wall. Sometimes, as in a trance, Demeter tries to keep her daughter at home with her again forever.

  What of Artemis and Athena? Some say that Artemis and her daughters drowned in a flood—or, like angels, left earth in sorrow, before their work was done. Others say that after losing some very great battle, they killed themselves. Still others claim to have heard them decide to retreat, break up, and wait for better times. Even Athena, that most exceptional woman, had eventually to put away her shield and helmet, and take up books, rosaries, knitting needles, and gossip—and occasionally a royal crown or a university post.

  Today both Artemis and Athena have increasingly been caught at violence—at crimes of passion, greed, even of honor. Most often, they do whatever is required of them, these proud and lonely two, do their jobs well, too well. Sometimes Athena, sometimes Artemis, is well known for some accomplishment—envied, admired, misunderstood—until she turns on the gas, poisons herself, drowns—and is done with it once more.

  Demeter is only one face of the many-faced Great Mother archetype. And, Persephone is not always willing to compliantly merge with her mother, to repeat her mother’s life. Many women may want but may also fear a relationship with a powerful, (over)protecting mother. The reunion of Demeter and Persephone requires a transformation in both mother and daughter: Demeter must overcome her rage and grief; Persephone must return—different, but still the same.

  According to classical scholar Erich Neumann, “The Eternal Feminine” never lets anything go—in his words, it “tends to hold fast to everything that springs from it and to surround it like an eternal substance.” Thus, the union and reunion of mother and daughter are fraught with peril and require enormous psychological generosity in each woman.

  Nevertheless, most daughters long for their mothers’ love, approval, support, wisdom, and protection. Maternal absence is suffered far more than maternal abuse. According to British psychoanalyst Nini Herman, a mother remains the object of her daughter’s “deepest passion.” Nini Herman believes that a “secure” and “fulfilled” mother can let her daughter grow, both intellectually and sexually. But, if she envies this “young competitor,” her daughter may

  linger at the stage where she has a need to please, in order to obtain reassurance that her destructive phantasies and her hostile impulses have not caused lasting harm [to her mother.] Then she may turn out to be excessively preoccupied with making herself beautiful, because a beautiful body is felt to serve as evidence that all is well inside too.

  The repetition of the maternal destiny is what terrifies many contemporary women who also want to enact paternal-heroic destinies. A daughter needs to differentiate herself from her mother, but the smallest difference is often experienced by both mother and daughter as a profound betrayal. Mother-daughter differences are maddening, but so are the similarities.

  Some Demetrian mothers refuse to let their daughters go. They bind them with maternal envy, disapproval, anger, insecurity, depression; they remain merged together in embattled relationships.

  It is important not to demonize mothers, but it is equally important not to deny the realities of maternal-daughter abuse. To escape the danger of being incorporated or destroyed by her mother, a daughter might have to “kill” her. This is precisely what the mythic Queen Clytemnestra’s daughter, Electra, does.

  According to Greek myth and drama, Queen Clytemnestra is the mother of three children: Iphigenia, Electra, and Orestes. She is also the wife of Agamemnon and the sister of Helen of Troy, who is married to Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus. Helen runs off with Paris, a prince of Troy. The two brothers mount an expedition, ostensibly to win Helen back, but also to win the riches of Troy. For more than a decade, the warrior-brothers lay siege to Troy, which some say was an earlier, matriarchal civilization.

  Agamemnon tricks Clytemnestra into sending their daughter Iphigenia to visit him, presumably to betroth her to a great prince. Instead, her father ritually sacrifices her in full view of his troops as an offering to the gods. Agamemnon captures and destroys Troy, kills and enslaves its people, and sets sail for home. He brings his slave mistress, the Trojan visionary and princess Cassandra, back with him. His abandoned queen, Clytemnestra, has taken a lover, Aegisthus. Electra is wild with rage and grief. In her view, her mother has cheated her of everything: a father, a royal marriage, respectability. Clytemnestra insists, cruelly, on remaining the only sexual woman; Electra feels doomed to chastity and childlessness.

  Clytemnestra refuses to yield to her daughter’s inevitable sexual ascent. Electra is one of our earliest, patriarchal heroines. She is a daughter who does not identify with her mother; she hates her mother. Electra is a quintessential “Daddy’s Girl.” Like mother, like daughter. In different ways, both women prefer men, not women. This is precisely what they most hold against each other.

  But, Electra is not merely competing with her mother for the same man: her father; she is also competing with her father/brother/sisters/mother’s male lover, for the same woman: her mother.

  Clytemnestra’s daughter, Electra, conspires to kill her mother for having murdered Agamemnon. Electra plans her mother’s murder; Orestes commits the matricide. Electra kills her mother “indirectly”; technically, her hands remain clean. Orestes is haunted and pursued by the (female) Furies. The tormented Orestes demands and receives a divine jury. The Gods are deadlocked. Athena, a male-identified goddess, casts the deciding vote in Orestes’ favor. Henceforth, husband-murder is viewed as a more serious crime than matricide. The Furies do not pursue Electra. Her postmatricidal torment, if any, remains unknown to us.

  To escape being swallowed alive by one’s mother, many women psychologically enact the mythic Electra role: they psychologically murder their mother in order to replace her, to become her, to stand in her place. These primal psychological dramas take place in the theater of the unconscious. Just as women are all Persephone, merged, they are also all Electra, defiant and murderous; certainly, women are all Persephone/Electra’s daughters. Like Electra, women are not necessarily haunted by the Furies afterward. What is amiss between Electra and Clytemnestra is what they already symbolize: The Fall, the end of (childhood’s) mother-rule.

  I have turned to these myths here and in other books because they embody tabooed, unconscious, psychological processes that are, nevertheless, normal, and because I need to find a way to pierce the amnesia that accompanies many female conversations about the “shadow side” of relationships between mothers and daughters and between women in general.

  Nini Herman believes that the unresolved issues “which are active at the core of the mother-daughter dyad” are, to some extent, what psychologically holds women back and accounts for women’s unconscious collusion with patriarchal edicts. I agree. Herman believes that the unexamined mother-daughter relationship is precisely where women are “obstinately marking time” rather than moving toward freedom.

  This is a book about female psychology—or, if you will, about the many faces of Demeter and her four daughters. It is also about Clytemnestra, her daughter Electra, and about what has happened to them in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, and how it has been viewed and treated in psychiatric settings. Certain myths reveal a great deal about the origins and models of contemporary female personality. I draw upon them often, as I describe the relationship between the female condition and what we call madness—that divinely menacing behavior from whose eloquence and exhausting demands society protects itself through “reason” and force.

  This is a book about the dramatically increasing numbers of American girls and women of all classes and races, who are seen, or who see themselves, as “neurotic” or “psychotic,” and who seek psychotherapeutic help and/or are psychiatrically hospitalized. This is a book about the many “whys” of such help-seeking behavior; about “what” is experienced and viewed as in need of help; and about “how” these women are or aren’t—helped.

  Chapters One and Ten discuss the basic psychological dimensions of female personality in our culture. Chapter One presents the lives and psychiatric histories of women, based on autobiographical, biographical, and case history material. These, and modern women in general, are viewed in terms of what growing up female in the family means. The mother-daughter relationship is analyzed, as is the role played by mythological or historical heroines, such as the Virgin Mary or Joan of Arc, in female experiences of “normality” and “abnormality.” Chapter One describes how female reproductive biology, patriarchal culture, and the modern parent-daughter relationship have so combined as to insure such characteristically female behaviors—and ideals as self-sacrifice, masochism, reproductive narcissism, compassionate “maternality,” dependency, sexual timidity, sexual frigidity and sexual promiscuity, father-worship—and the overwhelming dislike and devaluation of women.

  Chapters Two and Three view both the mental asylum and private therapy as recapitulations or mirrors of the female experience in the family. Clinicians all too often treat their patients, most of whom are women, as “wives” and “daughters,” rather than as people: treat them as if female misery, by biological definition, exists outside the realm of what is considered human or adult. A double standard of mental health—and humanity—one for women, another for men, seems to good-naturedly and unscientifically dominate most theories—and treatments—of women and men. Traditional and contemporary clinical theories and practices are reviewed in Chapter Three. A new definition or, rather, a different way of understanding female “psychiatric” symptoms (such as depression or frigidity), male “psychiatric” symptoms (such as alcohol and drug addiction, or sociopathic personality), and what we call madness (or schizophrenia) is presented in Chapter Two. The types of behaviors that are hospitalized in America are also related to caste (sex and race), age, class, and marital status.

  Chapter Four presents an analysis of our nation’s “mental illness” statistics. These chapters document the extent to which women, more than men, and in greater numbers than their existence in the general population would predict, are involved in “careers” as psychiatric patients: women who are depressed, anxious, agoraphobic, and who are having “nervous breakdowns,” crying fits, temper tantrums, paranoid delusions; women who attempt suicide, who under- or overeat and who take unknown quantities of drugs to smother their anxieties, their hostilities, their ambitions, their panics, their sexual unhappiness—and their visions.

  Chapters Four through Nine describe the patient “careers” of women whom I interviewed about their experiences in psychiatric hospitals and private or clinic outpatient therapy. The women I spoke with were of European, Latin-American, and African descent. Their ages ranged from seventeen to seventy. Their sexual, marital, maternal, and political involvements were as far-ranging. Only a minority of these women experienced what I would call genuine states of madness. Most were simply unhappy and self-destructive in typically (and approved) female ways. Their experiences made it very clear to me that help-seeking or help-needing behavior is not particularly valued or understood in our culture. Help-seekers are pitied, mistrusted, tranquilized, physically beaten, given shock therapy, lied to, yelled at, and ultimately neglected—and all “for their own good.” Many women in American state mental asylums participated in sex-role-typed slave labor, i.e., they worked as domestics for no or token payment. Many were also medically abused—or neglected; sexually repressed—or exploited; ridiculed and abandoned—by family and professional establishments alike; and given very little “therapy,” verbal or otherwise. Many women who were lucky or rich enough to buy the best verbal treatment therapists could offer were not always or often understood or helped.

  It has never been my intention to romanticize madness, or to confuse it with political or cultural revolution: certainly because of the pain our mistreatment of it insures, certainly because of the pain that it may intrinsically involve. (Such pain is to be understood and respected—but never romanticized.) Most weeping, depressed women, most anxious and terrified women are neither about to seize the means of production and reproduction, nor are they any more creatively involved with problems of powerlessness, evil, and love than is the rest of the human race.

  I speak in many voices throughout this book: as a psychological researcher, theoretician, and clinician—and as a literary and philosophical person, a lover of poetry and myths.

  In bringing you this book, I feel like a time-traveler turned messenger, a bearer of bad news. I wonder how you will receive it, I wonder what will you do?

  I first wrote about Demeter and Persephone in 1972. (I did not write about Clytemnestra and Electra until the mid-80s). I was indeed treated as a “bearer of bad news” by many, but as a visionary and truth-healer by many more. Women and some men responded to this work in many ways. Some quit their psychiatric residencies on the spot; I know, they told me. Others signed themselves out of mental asylums, left psychotherapy treatment, sued oppressive employers, and exited abusive marriages; some entered “feminist”-oriented therapies.

  Many women joined feminist groups and began to understand that many of their personal problems were due to collective political realities. Some women discovered that they were lesbians, or celibate, or that they truly loved the husbands they already had. Some readers left feminist groups due to female-female hostility and bullying that some of us wrote about and called “trashing.”

  Most of my readers went on to become physicians, lawyers, judges, clergywomen, and mental health professionals. They did research and presented and published their findings. They saved and enhanced the quality of many lives. Many continue to battle entrenched patriarchal biases in their fields.

  As I re-read this volume for the first time in many years, I was struck by how relevant it still is. I so much enjoyed visiting with my interviewees whose words remain as fresh and as haunting as when I first heard them. As you will see, I have, to some extent, expanded and updated each chapter. Now, I stand on the shoulders of all of those who came after me and who have continued the work, as I have also done.

  I wonder how much more I will have to say for the fiftieth anniversary edition of this book?

  CHAPTER ONE

  WHY MADNESS?

  ATHENA:

  For I did not have a mother who bore me.

  No, all my heart praises the male.

  Aeschylus, The Oresteia

  Sigh no more, ladies

  Time is male

  and in his cups dr inks to the fair.

  Bemused by gallantry, we hear

  our mediocrities over-praised,

  indolence read as abnegation,

  slattern thought styled intuition,

  every lapse forgiven, our crime

  only to cast too bold a shadow

  or smash the mould straight off.

  For that, solitary confinement,

  tear gas, attrition shelling.

  Few applicants for that honor.

  Adrienne Rich1

  CHARLOTTE CORDAY:

  Now I know what it is

  like when the head is

  cut off the body….

  In my room in Caen
on

  the table under the

  open window lies open

  the Book of Judith.

  Dressed in her legendary beauty

  she entered the tent of the enemy

  and with a single blow,

  slew him.

  Peter Weiss2

  “The first time a boy hurt me” said Lillian to Djuna “it was in school. I don’t remember what he did. But I wept. And he laughed at me. Do you know what I did? I went home and dressed in my brother’s suit. I tried to feel as the boy felt. Naturally as I put on the suit I felt I was putting on a costume of strength…. I thought that to be a boy meant one did not suffer. That it was being a girl that was responsible for the suffering…. Then there was another thing…. I discovered one relief, and that was action…. I felt if only I could join the war, participate, I wouldn’t feel the anguish and the fear … if only they would let me be Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc wore a suit of armor, she sat on a horse, she fought side by side with the men. She must have gained their strength.”

  Anais Nin3

  The surprising thing about the myths of Demeter … is her restless search for her [raped and abducted] daughter [Persephone] … a great Goddess could … in a single figure which was at once Mother and Daughter … represent the motifs that recur in all mothers and daughters.

  C. Kerenyi4

  Perhaps the angry and weeping women in mental asylums are Amazons returned to earth these many centuries later, each conducting a private and half-remembered search for her Motherland—a search we call madness. Or perhaps they are failed Goddess-Mothers, Demeters, eternally and miserably unable to find their daughters or their powers….

  (A romantic thought of my own)

  There is nothing wrong with me—except I was born at least two thousand years too late. Ladies of Amazonian proportions and Berserker propensities have passed quite out of vogue and have no place in this too damned civilized world … here I sit—mad as the hatter—with nothing to do but either become madder and madder or else recover enough of my sanity to be allowed to go back to the life which drove me mad.