Women and Madness

by Phyllis Chesler

  How shall women learn to go beyond an incestuous and procreative model of sexuality?

  What does it mean to use or to have one’s body, time, and mind used solely for economic profit? How different in meaning is the Nazi use of the human body for industrial purposes, for “profit”—from most labor in capitalist and Communist societies? How does this Nazi practice as metaphor differ from female—or male—prostitution? How shall we redefine work and “human need” in industrial-technological times?

  How can we rear male infants to bisexuality—to respect, trust, fear, and love women and men equally? How can we rear female infants to do the same?

  When can we stop assigning any significance to biological differences? And if biological differences remain, despite true cultural neutrality, shall we, can we, use science to achieve a single standard of human behavior? Who shall decide what the standards shall be? Who shall teach them, enforce them? And for what purpose? And can a single standard of behavior ever constitute anything more than a background against which more unique or dramatic behaviors can occur?

  How shall we come to terms with our bodies and with the natural universe? Many “natural” events—like early death, disease, hardship—are neither desirable nor necessary. (Many “unnatural” events like slavery, monogamy, and pollution are not desirable either.) If male violence and female domesticity are indeed natural, then is it in humanity’s interest to channel or banish these predispositions? If not, how may we stop oppressing that which is natural?

  How shall we rid ourselves of our ignorance and paranoia about scientific skills? How shall we create a climate in which neither Prometheus nor Christ is punished for their gifts of knowledge—a climate in which many female givers of knowledge can flourish?

  * Men are often victims of nature but women are “nature.” When women seek to be something other than “natural,” they experience their limitations or victimization at human male hands, and usually not through earthly—or divine—circumstances.

  * Husbands may want their wives to “get out” of the house after they have done twenty years of domestic service and are no longer “young” or “interesting.” Feminists want both nurturance and comradeship from women whose relationship to the patriarchal family makes this exceedingly difficult.

  NOTES

  CHAPTER ONE

  1.Adrienne Rich, “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-law,” Snapshots of a Daughter-in-law: Poems 1954–1962 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968).

  2.Peter Weiss, Marat/Sade: The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis De Sade (New York: Atheneum, 1965).

  3.Anais Nin, Cities of the Interior, distributed by Phoenix Box Shop (New York, 1959).

  4.C. Kerenyi, Eleusis: Archetypal Images of Mother and Daughters, translated from the German by Ralph Manheim; Bollingen Series LXV, Bollingen Foundation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967).

  5.Lara Jefferson, These Are My Sisters (Tulsa: Vickers Publishing Co., 1948).

  6.Erich Neumann, Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine. A Commentary on the Tale by Apuleius, translated from the German by Ralph Manheim; Bollingen Series LXV, Bollingen Foundation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956).

  7.Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (New York: Doubleday, 1971). (Originally published in 1963 by Faber and Faber.)

  8.Ludwig Binswanger, “The Case of Ellen West,” ed. by Rollo May, in Existence (New York: Basic Books, 1958).

  9.Ibid.

  10.Nancy Milford, Zelda (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).

  11.Jessie Bernard, “The Paradox of the Happy Marriage” ed. by Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran, in Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness (New York: Basic Books, 1971).

  12.Elizabeth P. Ware Packard, Modern Persecution or Insane Asylums Unveiled and The Liabilities of the Married Woman (New York: Pelletreau and Raynor, 1873). These two remarkable volumes were her only source of income after her “escape” from the asylum and during her legal battle for the rights of mental patients and married women.

  13.Charles W. Ferguson, The Male Attitude (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966).

  14.A. Alvarez, “Sylvia Plath: A Memoir,” New American Review No. 12 (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1971).

  15.I. J. Singer, “The Dead Fiddler,” The Seance (New York: Avon, 1964).

  16.C. G. Jung and C. Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, translated from the German by R. F. C. Hull, 1949 (New York: Bollingen Foundation. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969); C. Kerenyi, Eleusis: Archetypal Images of Mothers and Daughters, translated from the German by Ralph Manheim; Bollingen Series LXV, Bollingen Foundation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967); Sir James G. Frazier, The Golden Bough (New York: Macmillan, 1958).

  17.Simon Dinitz, Russel Dynez, and Alfred Clarke, “Preferences for Male or Female Children: Traditional or Affectional,” Marriage and Family Living, Vol. 16, May 1954; Alfred Adler, Understanding Human Nature, translated by W. Beran Wolfe, 1927 (New York: Fawcett World Library, 1969); Joan D. Mandle, “Women’s Liberation: Humanizing Rather than Polarizing,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, September 1971. The history of many royal family “tragedies” in Europe involves the hysterical need for a male rather than a female heir. The Tudor families of Henry VIII in England and the Romanov families of Nicholas in Russia are two well-known examples. I may note that Queen Hatshepsut of ancient Egypt wore male dress and a ceremonial false beard during her reign: royalty and/or divinity are somehow more associated with the male than the female sex. In non-Western and/or pre-Catholic cultures there are, of course, many goddesses. Many are treated by gods in depressingly familiar mortal ways: for example, Zeus’s treatment of his wife Hera. Buddha, Shiva, Allah, and Jehovah are most often depicted or thought of as men. It is interesting that the Egyptian god Osiris is a Demeter-Persephone-like male god of earth, vegetation, and rebirth, and that the three most important Egyptian goddesses—Isis, Nephthys, and Hathor—are concerned with “female” provinces: the protection of children, the home, love, happiness, dance, and music.

  18.Emma Goldman, “Marriage and Love,” Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1969).

  19.Judith Bardwick, The Psychology of Women: A Bio-cultural Conflict (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).

  20.Naomi Wesstein, “Psychology Constructs the Female,” ed. by Gornick and Moran, in Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness, (New York: Basic Books, 1971).

  21.Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (New York: William Morrow, 1971).

  22.Neumann, op. cit.

  23.These and other of the myths I’ve drawn upon are discussed in the following two books, as well as in the books referred to in footnote 16: Helen Diner, Mothers and Amazons: The First Feminine History of Culture, edited and translated by J. P. Lundin (New York: Julian Press, 1965). (First published in the 1930s under the pseudonym of “Sir Galahad”); Phillip E. Slater, The Glory of Hera: Greek Mythology and the Greek Family (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971).

  24.Slater, op. cit.

  25.Regine Pernoud, Joan of Arc By Herself and Her Witnesses, translated from the French by Edward Hyams (London: MacDonald, 1964).

  26.Ibid.

  27.Slater, op. cit.

  28.Jung and Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology.

  29.Ibid.

  30.Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1929).

  CHAPTER TWO

  1.Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961), translated by Richard Howard (New York: Pantheon, 1965).

  2.Allan M. Dershowitz, “Preventive Detention and the Prediction of Dangerousness. Some Fictions about Predictions,” Journal of Legal Education, Vol. 23, 1969.

  3.Foucault, op. cit. Thomas S. Szasz, The Manufacture of Madness (New York: Harper and Row, 1970)
; George Rosen, Madness in Society: Chapters in the Historical Sociology of Mental Illness (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).

  4.Szasz, op. cit.

  5.Foucault, op. cit.; Thomas S. Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (New York: Hoeber-Harper, 1961); Erving Goffman, Asylums (New York: Doubleday-Anchor, 1961); T. J. Scheff, Being Mentally Ill: A Sociological Theory (Chicago: Aldine Press, 1966).

  6.Arnold Ludwig, Arnold J. Marx, Phillip A. Hill, and Robert M. Browning, “The Control of Violent Behavior Through Faradic Shock: A Case Study,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, Vol. 148, 1969.

  7.C. M. Wignall and C. E. Meredith, “Illegitimate Pregnancies in State Institutions,” Archives of General Psychiatry, Vol. 18, 1968.

  8.Bruce Dohrenwend and Barbara Dohrenwend, Social Status and Psychological Disorders (New York: John Wiley, 1969). Olle Hagnell quotes another theory of conditioned female “patient” behavior made by H. Holter in A Prospective Study of the Incidence of Mental Disorders: The Lundby Project (Sweden: Svenska Bokforlaget, 1966).

  9.Jean MacFarlane et al., A Developmental Study of the Behavior Problems of Normal Children Between Twenty-one Months and Thirteen Years (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954); L. Philips, “Cultural vs. Intra Psychic Factors in Childhood Behavior Problem Referrals,” Journal of Clinical Psychology, Vol. 13, 1957; D. R. Peterson, “Behavior Problems of Middle Childhood,” Journal of Consulting Psychology, Vol. 95, 1961; L. M. Terman and L. E. Tyler, “Psychological Sex Differences,” ed. by L. Carmichael in Manual of Child Psychology (New York: John Wiley, 1954).

  10.Leslie Phillips, “A Social View of Psychopathology,” ed. by Perry London and David Rosenhan, in Abnormal Psychology (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969).

  11.E. Zigler and L. Phillips, “Social Effectiveness and Symptomatic Behaviors,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 61, 1960.

  12.Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness.

  13.Frederick Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (New York: International Publishers, 1942).

  14.Konrad Lorenz, a noted writer on animal behavior, has recently been quoted as saying, “There’s only one kind of people at a social disadvantage nowadays—a whole class of people who are treated as slaves and exploited shamelessly—and that’s the young wives. They are educated as well as men and the moment they give birth to a baby, they are slaves … they have a 22-hour workday, no holidays, and they can’t even be ill.” Interview, New York Times, July 5, 1970.

  15.National Institute of Mental Health Statistics 1965–1968, U. S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare; Phyllis Chesler, “Patient and Patriarch: Women in Psychotherapeutic Relationship,” ed. by Gornick and Moran, in Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness (New York: Basic Books, 1971); Judy Klemesrud, “When the Diagnosis Is Depression” (The Depression Research Unit in New Haven referred to treats mainly women between the ages of 21–65), New York Times, May 5, 1971; Lee Burke, E. Renkin, S.Jacobson, S. Haley, “The Depressed Woman Returns,” Archives of General Psychiatry, Vol. 16, May 1967; Margaret M. Dewar and Iain MacCammend, “Depressive Breakdown in Women of the West Highlands,” American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 119, 1962; Theodore Reich and George Winston, “Postpartum Psychoses in Patients with Manic Depressive Disease,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Vol. 151, No. 1, 1970; Pauline Bart, “Portnoy’s Mother’s Complaint,” ed. by Gornick and Moran, in Woman in Sexist Society.

  16.Pauline Bart, op. cit.

  17.Earl Pollack, Richard Redick, and Carl Taube, “The Application of Census Socioeconomic and Familial Data to the Study of Morbidity from Mental Disorders,” American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 58, No. I, January 1968.

  18.Alfred L. Friedman, “Hostility Factors and Clinical Improvement in Depressed Patients,” Archives of General Psychiatry, Vol. 23, 1970.

  19.Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970).

  20.Alfred L. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, and Paul H. Gebhard, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1953); Sigmund Freud, Female Sexuality (1931) (New York: Basic Books, 1959); Wilhelm Stekel, Frigidity in Woman in Relation to Her Love Life (New York: Washington Square Press, 1954); Karen Horney, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967); William Masters and Virginia Johnson, Human Sexual Response (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966) and Human Sexual Inadequacy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970).

  21.Masters and Johnson, Human Sexual Response and Human Sexual Inadequacy; Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, Malleus Maleficarum, cited by Thomas S. Szasz in The Manufacture of Madness; Mary Jane Sherfoy, “The Evolution and Nature of Female Sexuality in Relation to Psychoanalytic Theory,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association, 1966.

  22.Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus,” Ariel (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).

  23.Norman L. Farberow and Edwin E Schneidman, “Statistical Comparisons Between Attempted and Committed Suicides,” The Cry for Help (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965).

  24.Richard H. Sieden, Suicide Among Youth. Prepared for the Joint Commission on Mental Health of Children, 1970.

  25.Shirley Angrist, Simon Dinitz, Mark Lefton, Benjamin Pasamanick, “Rehospitalization of Female Mental Patients,” Archives of American Psychiatry, Vol. 4, 1961. Her patient sample was drawn from state and private hospitals, and included people released after 1957. Her original intention was to compare the parents of “schizophrenics” with those of “normals.”

  26.Shirley Angrist, Simon Dinitz, Mark Lefton, Benjamin Pasamanick, Women After Treatment (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968).

  27.Frances Cheek, “A Serendipitous Finding: Sex Role and Schizophrenia,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 69, No. 4, 1964.

  28.M. Letailleur, J. Morin, and Y. Le Borgne, “Heautoscopie Hetersexuelle et Schizophrenie [The Self-Induced Heterosexual Image and Schizophrenia],” Ann. Med. Psychology, Vol. 2, 1958.

  29.David C. McClelland and Norman F. Watt, “Sex Role Alienation in Schizophrenia,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol. 73, No. 3, 1968. The sample was drawn from a Boston hospital, and involved people who were hospitalized from one to twenty years. All groups were matched for age, education, and class

  30.Ibid.

  31.M. Lorr and C. J. Klett, “Constancy of Psychotic Syndromes in Men and Women,” Journal of Consulting Psychology, Vol. 29, No. 5, 1969.

  32.M. Lorr, J. P. O’Connor, and J. W. Stafford, “The Psychotic Reaction Profile,” Journal of Clinical Psychology, Vol. 16, 1960.

  33.Jonas Rappoport, The Clinical Evaluation of the Dangerousness of the Mentally Ill, (Springfield, Illinois: Charles Thomas, 1968.)

  34.Alan M. Kraft, Paul R. Binner, Brenda Dickey, “The Community Mental Health Program and the Longer-Stay Patient,” Archives of General Psychiatry, Vol. 6, January 1967.

  35.Carl A. Taube, “Admission Rates by Marital Status: Outpatient Psychiatric Services,” Statistical Note 35, Survey and Reports Section, National Institute of Mental Health, December 1970.

  36.Marcel Saghir, Bonnie Walbran, Eli Robins, Kathy Gentry, “Psychiatric Disorders and Disability in the Female Homosexual,” American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 27, 1970; Charlotte Wolff, Love Between Women (U.K.: St. Martins Press, 1971).

  CHAPTER THREE

  1.Ilse Ollendorff Reich, Wilhelm Reich: A Personal Biography (New York: St. Martins, 1969).

  2.Paul Roazan, Brother Animal (New York: Knopf, 1969).

  3.Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1970).

  4.Juliet Mitchell, Woman’s Estate (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971).

  5.Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1970).

  6.Evelyn P. Ivey, “Significance of the Sex of the Psychiatrist,” Archives of General Psychiatry, Vol. 2, 1960; William Schofield, Psychotherapy: The Purchase of Friendship (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Pre
ntice-Hall, 1963); Phyllis Chesler, unpublished study, 1971.

  7.Carl A. Taube, “Transitional Mental Health Facilities Staffing Patterns,” Statistical Note 28, NIMH Survey and Reports Section, October 1970.

  8.Carl A. Taube, “Consultation and Education Services in Community Mental Health Centers—January 1970,” Statistical Note 3, NIMH Survey and Reports Section, February 1971.

  9.Phyllis Chesler, “Patient and Patriarch: Women in the Psychotherapeutic Relationship,” ed. by Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran, Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness (New York: Basic Books, 1971).

  10.Schofield, op. cit.

  11.Matina Homer, “Fail: Bright Women,” Psychology Today, November 1969.

  12.Maurice K Temerlin, “Suggestion Effects in Psychiatric Diagnosis,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Vol. 47, 1968.

  13.Inge K. Broverman, Donald M. Broverman, Frank E. Clarkson, Paul S. Rosenkrantz, Susan R. Vogel, “Sex Role Stereotypes and Clinical Judgements of Mental Health,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Vol. 34, 1970.

  14.W. R. Orr, Ruth Anderson, Margaret Martin Des. F. Philpot, “Factors Influencing Discharge of Female Patients from a State Mental Hospital,” American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 3, 1954.

  15.Nathan K. Rickel, “The Angry Woman Syndrome,” Archives of General Psychiatry, Vol. 24, 1971.

  16.Herbert C. Modlin, “Psychodynamics in the Management of Paranoid States in Women,” General Psychiatry, 1963.

  17.Judith Bardwick, Psychology of Women: A Bio-cultural Conflict (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).

  18.Mary Jane Sherfey, “The Evolution and Nature of Female Sexuality in Relation to Psychoanalytic Theory,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association, 1966.