Women and Madness

by Phyllis Chesler

  Phillip Slater, describing the mythological Atalanta, says:

  … like Artemis, she is a virgin huntress, and punishes the attentions of would-be suitors with cruel death. Furthermore, her own history reveals the origin of this attitude, for it is said (Apollodorus: iii 9.2) that her father had wished for a boy, and had exposed her on a mountain top, where she was suckled by a bear which the goddess sent to her aid. In her refusal to marry, in her competitions with men (beating them at racing and at wrestling), and in her general masculine demeanor, Atalanta both complies with this wish and expresses her resentment of it.27

  After women psychologically, unconsciously, and collectively grasp the meaning—and limitations—of Joan of Arc, they seek protection and redemption—from the Catholic Mary, the compassionate and powerful mother. Unfortunately, Mary is no Demeter. Catholic mythology has not granted Mary either a daughter or Demeter’s bartering power with men and gods. Nevertheless, women in madness wish to give birth to the world (and to themselves) anew. They wish to avoid Joan’s crucifixion and can do so only by becoming Virgin-Mothers. They also wish to become their own much-needed mothers. The women whom I spoke with who did have Virgin Birth experiences all gave birth to sons. However, some experienced their own rebirth at the same time.

  Mary avoids crucifixion, but she is condemned to asexuality and piercing sorrow.

  Joan and Mary are very painful experiences for those women who psychologically incorporate their meaning. They are the modified (and tragic) Christian equivalents of the pagan Demeter and her daughter Persephone. However, Joan and Mary are separated in time and biology. Joan, unlike Persephone, is not kidnapped; Mary, unlike Demeter, gives birth to a son and not a daughter. Neither of these Christian figures gives rise to or symbolizes a Mother-Daughter religion. C. G. Jung understood the effect of this. He says:

  It is immediately clear to the psychologist what cathartic and at the same time rejuvenating effects must flow from the Demeter cult into the feminine psyche, and what a lack of psychic hygiene characterizes our culture, which no longer knows the kind of wholesome experience afforded by the Eleusinian emotions.28

  However, it is important to realize that the “Eleusinian emotions” are rooted in an acceptance of nature and biology’s supremacy. Demeter’s world is one in which women, despite their fecundity, do not initiate sexual contact with either men or women. Only heterosexual rape exists—and only for procreative purposes. Neither Demeter nor Persephone act. They react—to rape or to the loss of a daughter or virgin self. Demeter and Persephone are not Amazon figures. Their cult is essentially one of Earth-Mother-worship: mothers who produce more mothers to nurture and sustain mankind with their miraculous biological gifts of crops and daughters. The inevitable sacrifice of self that biology demands of women in most societies is at the heart of the Demetrian myth. Even so, or precisely because this is so, modern women, deprived of both maternal nurturance and dignity, would be very comforted by Eleusinian rituals: after all, we live in a culture in which science and Christianity have increasingly devalued female biology, without yet freeing women from being defined solely in biological terms.

  While it is true that Demeter rescues Persephone from isolation in a male world, she also condemns her to a universally female fate: an identity no different from her mother’s. As Kerenyi notes:

  To enter into the figure of Demeter means to be robbed, raped, to fail to understand, to rage and grieve, but then to get everything back and be born again. And what does all this mean, save to realize the universal principle of life, the fate of everything mortal? What, then, is left over for the figure of Persephone? Beyond question, that which constitutes the structure of the living creature apart from this endlessly repeated drama of coming-to-be and passing-away, namely the uniqueness of the individual and its enthrallment to non-being.29

  This “uniqueness” and “heroism” are precisely what define Persephone’s male mythological counterpart—the divine male child and male adult hero.

  Persephone does not wish to be raped, nor do most contemporary women necessarily wish to recapitulate their mother’s identity. But the modern Persephone still has no other place to go but into marriage and motherhood. Her father (men in general) still conforms to a rape-incest model of sexuality. And her mother has not taught her to be a warrior, i.e., to take difficult roads to unknown and unique destinations—gladly. Her mother and father neither prepare her for this task nor rejoice in her success. They do not mourn or comfort her in crucifixion, be it as a warrior (as Joan of Arc) or as a mother (as the Virgin Mary).

  Any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.

  Virginia Woolf30

  Virginia Woolf was herself a victim of childhood sexual abuse and ultimately a suicide. Is she telling us that her own “dark spells” were due to the thwarting of her genius?

  Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, and Ellen West, for example, want and need mother love—but not at the price of “uniqueness” or glory. They are probably as maddened by the absence of maternality in their lives as they would be by the demands it would eventually place upon their freedom. The combination of nurturance-deprivation and restrictions upon their uniqueness or heroism is deadly. They cannot survive as just “women,” and they are not allowed to survive as human or as creative beings—male creativity is usually so valued that eccentricities, cruelties, emotional infantilism, alcoholism, promiscuity, even madness are usually overlooked, forgiven, or “expected.”

  All women who bear children are committing, literally and symbolically, a blood sacrifice for the perpetuation of the species. In this sense, female sacrifice in patriarchal and prescientific culture is concretely rooted in female biology. To the extent to which the interaction of human biology and culture produces myths that shape our personalities, so too will female sacrifice (and psychological self-sacrifice) continue to exist.

  Women are impaled on the cross of self-sacrifice. Unlike men, they are categorically denied the experience of cultural supremacy and individuality. In different ways, some women are driven mad by this fact. Their madness is treated in such a way as to turn it into another form of self-sacrifice. Such madness is, in a sense, an intense experience of female sexual and cultural castration and a doomed search for potency. The search often involves “delusions” or displays of physical aggression, grandeur, sexuality, and emotionality—all traits which would probably be more acceptable in pro-woman or female-dominated cultures. Such traits in women are feared and punished in patriarchal mental asylums.

  * (I was unable to obtain permission to quote directly from Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s letters and conversations with each other and with Zelda’s various psychiatrists. However, the material is completely available in Nancy Milford’s book.)

  CHAPTER TWO

  ASYLUMS

  The entire existence of madness, in the world now being prepared for it, was enveloped in what we may call, in anticipation, a “parental complex.” The prestige of patriarchy is revived around madness … henceforth … the discourse of unreason will be linked with … the dialectic of the family … the madman remains a minor and for a long time reason will retain for him the aspect of the father…. He [Tuke, a psychiatrist] isolated the social structure of the bourgeois family, reconstituted it symbolically in the [mental] asylum, and set it adrift in history.

  Michel Foucault1

  THE MENTAL ASYLUM

  AS EARLY AS THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY, women were “shut up” in madhouses (as well as in royal towers) by their husbands.2 By the seventeenth century, special wards were reserved for pros
titutes, pregnant women, poor women, and young girls in France’s first mental asylum, the Salpêtriére.3

  The impoverished and prostituted women must have been the victims of extraordinary chronic violence both sexually and physically. Their eventual breakdowns were not understood as normal human responses to persecution and trauma. In fact, many of the hysterics whom Dr. Breuer hypnotized were prostitutes who had led endangered lives.

  By the end of the nineteenth and throughout the twentieth centuries, the portraits of madness executed by both psychiatrists and novelists were primarily of women.

  Today, more women are seeking psychiatric help that at any other time in history. We must not forget: (1) that more men are too; (2) that both the number of clinicians and therapeutic promises have also increased.

  Some critics insist that “therapism”—the belief that the human condition can be “cured” by a paid healer—renders people, both women and men, increasingly passive. These critics prefer self-sufficiency and religious, moral, and cognitive-rational approaches to human problem-solving. Other critics insist that only the “talking cure” can help people understand themselves and take charge of their lives.

  However, it is clear that women, more than men, do seek “help” and are comfortable talking about their feelings and problems with a sympathetic expert. An increasing number of girls and women wish to break free of abuse, find salvation.

  This increase may be understood, not only in the context of the “help-seeking” nature of the female role or the objective oppression of women, but in the context of at least three recent social trends. Traditionally, most women performed both the rites of madness and childbirth more invisibly—at home—where, despite their tears and hostility, they were still needed and kept. While women live longer than ever before, and longer than men, there is less and less use, and literally no place, for them in the only place they “belong”—within the family. Many newly useless women are emerging more publicly as depressed, anxious, phobic, or as suffering from an eating disorder.

  The patriarchal nature of psychiatric hospitals has been documented by M. Foucault, T. Szasz, E. Goffman, and T. Scheff.5 Journalists, social scientists, and novelists have described, deplored, and philosophized about the prevalence of overcrowding, under-staffing, and brutality in America’s public mental asylums, jails, and medical hospitals. It is obvious that state mental asylums were and still are the “Indian reservations” for America’s non-criminally labeled poor, old, black, Latino, and female populations. It is also obvious that the state hospital, much like the poor or workhouse of old, functions as a warning specter, particularly to those women involved in earlier or more part-time phases of their “careers” as psychiatric patients.

  Mental asylums rarely offer asylum. Both their calculated and their haphazard brutality mirrors the brutality of “outside” society. The “scandals” about them that periodically surface in the media are like all atrocities—only everyday events, writ large. Madness—as a label or reality—is not conceived of as divine, prophetic, or useful. It is perceived as (and often further shaped into) a shameful and menacing disease, from whose spiteful and exhausting eloquence society must be protected. At their best, mental asylums are special hotels or collegelike dormitories for white and wealthy Americans, where the temporary descent into “unreality” (or sobriety) is accorded the dignity of optimism, short internments, and a relatively earnest bedside manner. At their worst, mental asylums are families bureaucratized: the degradation and disenfranchisement of self, experienced by the biologically owned child (patient, woman), takes place in the anonymous and therefore guiltless embrace of strange fathers and mothers. In general, psychiatric wards and state hospitals, “therapy,” privacy, and self-determination are all either minimal or forbidden. In such settings, I have heard legitimate and pitiful patient requests for cigarettes or spending money, or complaints about overmedication and all-too-real medical problems “interpreted” psychodynamically by student psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, nurses, and orderlies. Experimental or traditional medication, surgery, shock, insulin coma treatment, isolation, physical and sexual violence, medical neglect, and slave labor are routinely enforced. Mental patients are somehow less “human” than either medical patients or criminals. They are, after all, “crazy”; they have been abandoned by (or have abandoned dialogue with) their “own” families. As such, they have no way—and no one—to “tell” what is happening to them.

  The mental asylum closely approximates the female rather than the male experience within the family. This is probably one of the reasons why Erving Goffman, in Asylums, considered psychiatric hospitalization more destructive of self than criminal incarceration. Like most people, he is primarily thinking of the debilitating effect—on men—of being treated like a woman (as helpless, dependent, sexless, unreasonable—as “crazy”). But what about the effect of being treated like a woman when you are a woman? And perhaps a woman who is already ambivalent or angry about just such treatment?

  Adjustment to the “feminine” role was the measure of female mental health and psychiatric progress. The American Adeline T. P. Lunt (1871) wrote that the patient must “suppress a natural characteristic flow of spirits or talk … [she must] sit in lady-like attire, pretty straight in a chair, with a book or work before [her], ‘inveterate in virtue’, and that this will result in being patted panegyrically on the head, and pronounced ‘better.’” Margaret Starr (1904), of Maryland, wrote: “I am making an effort to win my dismissal. I am docile; I make efforts to be industrious.”

  Some women felt they were helped in the asylum, and afterward, by a private physician. For example, Lenore McCall (1937–1942) wrote that she recovered because of the insulin coma therapy. She also attributed her recovery to the presence of a nurse, who had “tremendous understanding, unflinching patience (and whose) sole concern was the good of her patient.” After Jane Hillyer (1919–1923) was released from the asylum, she consulted a private doctor whom she feels rescued her from ever having to return. Hillyer wrote:

  I knew from the first second that I had made harbor. I dropped all responsibility at his feet…. I need not go another step alone. I perceived at once the penetrating quality of his understanding…. He said afterwards he felt as if he were the Woodsman in the fairy tale who finds the lost Tinker’s daughter in a darkly enchanted forest…. I am sure the necessity of intelligent after-care cannot be sufficiently stressed…. My relief was indescribable. If ever one human being went down into the farthest places of desolation and brought back another soul, lost and struggling, that human being was the Woodsman.

  McCall and Hillyer were in the minority. Most psychiatrically hospitalized women who wrote documented that power was invariably abused; that fathers, brothers, husbands, judges, asylum doctors, and asylum attendants did anything that We, the people, allowed them to get away with; and that women’s oppression, both within the family and within state institutions, remained constant for more than a century in the United States.

  Perhaps one of the reasons women embark and re-embark on “psychiatric careers” more than men do is because they feel, quite horribly, at “home” within them. Also, to the extent to which all women have been poorly nurtured as female children, and are refused “mothering” by men as female adults, they might be eager for, or at least willing to settle for, periodic bouts of ersatz “mothering,” which they receive as “patients.” Those women who are more ambivalent about or rejecting of the female role are often eager to be punished for such dangerous boldness—in order to be saved from its ultimate consequences. Many mental asylum procedures do threaten, punish, or misunderstand such women into a real or wily submission. Some of these women react to such punishment (or to a dependency-producing environment) with increased and higher levels of anger and sex-role alienation. If such anger or aggressiveness persists, the women are isolated, strait-jacketed, sedated, and given shock therapy. They certainly aren’t recruited by the Marines—or by an Olympic
committee. One study published by four male professionals in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases describes how they attempted to reduce the aggressive behavior of a thirty-one-year-old “schizophrenic” woman by shocking her with a cattle prod whenever she “made accusations of being persecuted and abused; made verbal threats; or committed aggressive acts.”6 They labeled their treatment a “punishment program” and noted that the “procedure was administered against the expressed will of the patient.”

  Celibacy is the official order of the asylum day. Patients are made to inhabit an eternal American adolescence, where sexuality and aggression are as feared, mocked, and punished as they are within the family. Traditionally, mental hospital wards are sex-segregated; homosexuality, lesbianism, and masturbation are demeaned.

  However, sexual abuse of female or of vulnerable male patients by both staff and other patients is rampant—and freely chosen sexual relationships are still discouraged.

  The female-“dominated” atmosphere of hospitals means a (shameful) return to childhood, for both men and women. However, the effect of sexual repression, for example, is probably different for female than for male patients. We must remember that in state hospitals approximately fifty percent of the male patients are drug addicts and alcoholics—groups which are already somewhat withdrawn from heterosexual activity, for any number of reasons (lack of money, lack of desire for family “responsibilities,” passivity, anxiety, physiological incapacity, misogyny, etc.). Women have already been bitterly and totally repressed sexually; many may be reacting to or trying to escape from just such repression, and the powerlessness that it signifies, by “going mad.” Many male patients may be escaping the demands of a compulsive and aggressive heterosexuality by “going mad.” Its absence is perhaps not as psychologically or physiologically devastating as it is in the case of women.