Madness: A Brief History (16 page)

His sanity was restored not by the psychiatrists but by a fellow patient. Beers had become convinced that his ‘brother’ was a pretender. Put it to the test, a chum told him: write to your brother at his own address. Beers did. His brother arrived waving the letter. The scales fell from his eyes. ‘Untruth became truth’, unreason yielded to reason. He was born anew. ‘My mind seemed to have found itself. ’ He started redating time from his ‘new birth’.

Depression turned to elation. Beers envisaged himself as a genius, an artist, or a pianist. And he made his views felt. There followed months of battles with the doctors. He grew demanding and, when his demands were not met, disruptive and destructive. This was, he records, not because he was intrinsically out of control, but because the asylum’s cruelties provoked it. Placed under punitive discipline, he experienced the full horrors of the straitjacket. A sadistic assistant doctor (a ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’) imposed forced feeding and medicines out of pure malice. Beers began recording every injustice—on scraps of paper, or sometimes by scribbling on the walls—as a record of crimes against humanity and as training for the great mission he was hatching, to become the ‘saviour’ of the insane.

When family funds again ran out, Beers was transferred to a state institution, the Connecticut Hospital for the Insane, where he was ignominiously classed as an ‘indigent’. Once more the staff tyrannized him and he felt ‘abandoned by everyone’. He fought back. ‘I proceeded to assume entire charge of ... the hospital’. Beers smuggled out letters to the state governor demanding investigations and campaigning for a bill of 
rights for the insane, and developed utopian schemes for changing the world on his release.

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A mentally ill patient in a straitjacket and strapped into a chair. Such chairs of restraint were meant to quieten maniacs by depriving them of the capacity to agitate themselves by violent motion; photograph after a wood-engraving, 1908.

Eventually, on 10 September 1903, his release was granted. Resuming work as a travelling salesman, in his spare time he composed his asylum autobiography, dictating 80,000 words in ninety hours. He astutely recognized that for his book to have maximum effect it was necessary to make friends not enemies. He started showing it to men of affairs and influence, to doctors and psychiatrists, gaining the support of such powerful medical establishment figures as William James and Weir Mitchell. When
A Mind That Found Itself
finally came out in 1908 it offered not just an indictment of the past, but a blueprint for the future: his dream baby, the Mental Hygiene Movement. From then on for the next twenty years, this archetypal salesman succeeded in selling to psychiatrists, policy-makers, and philanthropists his vision of a national crusade against mental illness, spearheaded by a new organization, the National Committee for Mental Hygiene. Its secretary, its leading spirit, its prize exhibit, was to be Beers himself. His is a moral tale of the tables turned, of patient turned healer.

Married to God

Beers’s narrative is a cry of protest. Other writings by the ‘mad’ have been more by way of attempts to make strange experiences intelligible—to the world and probably also to themselves. The very first autobiography in the English language is the work of an illiterate woman (she dictated it to a scribe) telling an uncomprehending public the truth of her religious transports.

Born around 1373, daughter to a prosperous King’s Lynn burgess, Margery Kempe chronicled madness as a heaven-sent religious agony and ecstasy. Her initial bout of disturbance, after the birth of her first child, was a providential rap on the knuckles, delivered to rebuke a proud young lady, vulnerable to the Devil’s temptations. By His infinite mercy, the Almighty had returned her to her ‘right mind’, and rescued her from sin. Still she remained wedded to this world, and it took the failure of the brewery she owned—her ale went providentially flat—to humble and turn her from wickedness.

Having suffered childbed insanity and business collapse, Margery Kempe experienced an overwhelming call to cut herself off from the world, convinced that, by contrast to conditions on earth, it was ‘merry in heaven’. Her attempts to follow divine signposts met enduring hostility. ‘Woman, give up this life that you lead, and go and spin, and card wool, as other women do,’ she was told by the worldlings.

Sickened by the flesh, Margery sought release from human bondage. She fasted, did penance, and clad herself in a hair shirt. Above all, she strove to free herself from sexual slavery, knowing (following St Augustine’s reflections) how offensive to God was the pleasure she and her husband had taken in carnal delights. She told him she now loved God alone and begged him to accept a chastity pact. Eventually he signed away his conjugal rights in return for her paying his debts.

Despite this apprentice mortification, she remained vainglorious: ‘she thought that she loved God more than He loved her,’ she was to recall. In that state, she was prey to the Devil’s snares. He set a trap of lechery. A man made a pass at her. Flattered, she surrendered, only at the last moment to be spurned. Mortified, she craved Christ’s forgiveness; it was granted, and, in return, her Saviour promised her a lifelong hairshirt in her heart. Thereafter, tribulations were secret signs of holiness.

She began seeing visions, and these were accompanied by the copious bouts of weeping which attended her to the end of her days. She would also informally shrive penitents (something normally reserved for priests). A ‘miracle’ secured her escape when a piece of masonry falling from a church struck but did not harm her.

Margery’s religious observances brought public reproof. Her weeping bouts were detested, she was called ‘false hypocrite’, and her friends were advised to abandon her. Furthermore, she was accused of having the Devil in her and of being a ‘false Lollard’—that is, heretic. But such trials enhanced her awareness of the divine indwelling. When she heard mention of Christ’s Passion, she would swoon in ecstasy and experience divine music. The Lord called her His mother, sister, and daughter.

Initially Margery was perturbed. Might these voices and visions be the temptations of the Devil? Seeking guidance, she consulted the mystic Dame Julian of Norwich, from whom she received reassurance: those were not imaginings of her own devising but truly manifestations from God. Margery grew more confident of her religious calling, winning a reputation as a woman with a divine vocation. She acquired minor prophetic powers. One day, she predicted a terrible storm: it came about.

Eventually, she set off on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Proximity to the scenes of Christ’s Passion led her to weep and wail more than ever and to ‘wrestle with her body’. Some thought she was puffed up with ‘pretence and hypocrisy’, or, suffering from epilepsy. Others accused her of drunkenness. Still others believed she had been possessed by an evil spirit. Her fellow English pilgrims found her a nuisance, with her continual wailing and the ceaseless rebukes she directed towards them, and sometimes they forced her to leave their party. Similar tribulations also beset her in England. ‘Evil talk’ about her grew, and many said she had the Devil in her. She ran the risk of imprisonment, for the authorities looked with suspicion upon this wife and mother gallivanting around the country in the guise of a holy woman, berating the ungodly and urging wives to leave their husbands and follow God.

All the while, her love of God grew. She overheard conversations about her between God the Father and Jesus. Her attention became fixed upon the ‘manhood’ of Christ, but it was the Godhead Himself who finally married her. ‘I must be intimate with you and lie in your bed with you,’ the Father told her, ‘take me to you as your wedded husband. ... Kiss my mouth, my head, and my feet as sweetly as you want.’ The earlier sexual temptations which she had undergone were not, however, entirely a thing of the past, and in time she was visited by ‘abominable visions’, conjured up by the Devil, of threatening male genitals to which she was commanded to prostitute herself. Temporarily she felt forsaken, but she recovered. At another point, she was overcome by a desire to kiss male lepers; stick to women, her confessor advised.

Should we see Margery as turned by puerperal insanity, or think of her as a mystic? Despite modern attempts to pin contemporary psychiatric labels on her, there is no master key to Margery’s mind, and no one right way of reading her life. She knew that many thought her voices and visions signified madness, attributed to disease or the Devil: she pondered deeply, and sought advice. But the path to which she aspired—a spiritual communion, marriage even, with God—was legitimate within the beliefs of her times, though one, of course, exceptionally liable to misunderstanding.

Making madness visible

The disturbed have expressed themselves not just
verbally
, in countless autobiographical outpourings, but
visually
too, by drawing, painting, and making things. Long before ‘art therapy’ was recognized, it was not unknown for asylum patients to be permitted to draw on humanitarian grounds: James Tilley Matthews, just discussed, himself depicted the infernal machines assailing his consciousness—he also submitted high-quality architectural designs for a new building for Bethlem. And his contemporary, Jonathan Martin, who had partly succeeded in burning down York Minster in protest against the ungodliness of his times, drew himself, while under confinement, as the instrument of God’s wrath and of divine vengeance, descending upon London, the modern Babylon. (His brother, John, was a successful artist.) The artist Richard Dadd, probably a victim of sunstroke while travelling in the Near East, murdered his father and was confined to Bethlem, and there and in Broadmoor, under official encouragement, he painted for the rest of his life, undertaking his most acclaimed canvases, including
Contradiction: Oberon and Titania
and
The Fairy Feller’s Fatal Stoke.

It was not until the 1870s that psychiatric attention was paid to the image-making of the mad, in the belief that it might be diagnostically revelatory. One pioneer was Cesare Lombroso, who outlined a pathography of the insane imagination in accordance with his theories of atavistic degenerationism. Some of the vast assemblage of the art of the insane which he collected was reproduced in his
The Man of Genius.
By juxtaposing it with the work of children, ‘defectives’, and people from ‘primitive cultures’, he ‘discovered’ what he identified as certain perennial traits symptomatic of the crazed, infantile, or savage psyche. The paintings of the insane, according to Lombroso, were characterized by distortion, originality, imitation, repetition, absurdity, arabesques, eccentricity, obscenity, and, above all, symbolism—a rather comprehensively incriminatory list.

The implied moral was that if the mad painted like that, then those who painted like that were mad. And that was precisely the verdict passed by certain psychiatrists upon Expressionists, Surrealists, and other avantgarde artists. Cézanne and the Cubists were suffering from neurological eye complaints, judged Theodore Hyslop, physician to Bethlem, no mean artist himself and author of
The Great Abnormals
(1925).

Psychiatrists might be excused for drawing such connections. After all, as heirs to the ‘mad genius’ tradition discussed in Chapter 4, artists like Ernst Kirschner, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, and Antonin Artaud publicly flouted civilized restraint and gloried in the irrational, singling out lunatics, children, and primitives as those truly in touch with the wellsprings of feeling, unlike sterile academic artists and bourgeois critics. And they tried to emulate those they envied: Oskar Kokoschka painted himself as a degenerate, long before the organizers of Hitler’s notorious exhibition of ‘Entartete 
Kunst’ (degenerate art), held in Munich in 1937, diagnosed and denounced modern art en masse as psychopathological.

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Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909) was an Italian criminologist with psychiatric and anthropological interests. He endorsed degenerationist theories, and undertook psychiatric studies of criminality and genius, and the art of the insane; photogravure, c. 1900.