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Madness Narratives and the Reality of Madness

Susan J. Hubert’s Questions of Power: The Politics of Women’s Madness Narratives is a compelling and scholarly account of the many witty, sane, deeply philosophical, sometimes daring, sometimes too dutiful, but always fascinating narratives. This should be required reading not only for English and History majors but for psychiatrists and mental health professionals. I was riveted, fascinated, horrified, entertained—and I already knew many, if not most of Hubert’s narrators. Thus, I got a chance to visit with some old friends, but I also saw some ghosts. The very month that I received this book, a feminist colleague sent me a manuscript about her years of involuntary psychiatric hospitalization from 1975–2000. She does not deny that she has had “breaks with reality.” Nevertheless, her self-perceived impairment made her involuntary commitment more—not less— traumatic, as did the awful effects of psychiatric medication, and other indignities of institutional life. And, a lawyer asked me whether I would be willing to testify for the second time on behalf of female psychiatric patients in the state of Nebraska who have routinely been raped while in custody (by other patients and by staff), and who were first mocked, then punished for “telling; ” the punishment included being straitjacketed, sedated, put into seclusion, and into four-point restraints. They were also punitively diagnosed for exhibiting the symptoms of Rape Trauma Syndrome. These rapes did not only happen in the 1890s (similar “vicious rapes” were reported by Clarissa Lathrop [1890] whose work Hubert discusses). They occurred in the 1990s and in 2001. There is an understandable feminist desire to restore dignity and agency to suffering women. Melinda Givens Guttman, in The Enigma of Anna O (2001), her wonderful biography of Bertha Pappenheim (Freud’s Anna O) reminds us that it was Pappenheim, the Jewish feminist crusader, (who was seriously mentally ill for more than a decade), not Breuer, and not Freud, who invented the “talking cure;” Penn State sociologist Karen Bettez Halnon in her excellent unpublished dissertation on “Womens’ Agency in Hysteria and its Treatment” (1995) confirmed the extent to which many “hysterical” symptoms were forms of resistance and rebellion, especially among poor and prostituted women. Finally, it was Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard—not Thomas Szasz—who first compared institutional psychiatry to the Inquisition. This last point is not lost on Hubert. The Fathers of both Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry, and of Psychoanalysis were often Mothers, women, patients, some of whom were sane, some less so. Hubert shows us that diary-keeping preserved the sanity and hope of many women while in psychiatric custody, and later became the basis for their altruistic crusades against continued state torture and against the “one man rule” of state and private asylums. Hubert argues that many nineteenth century women wrote gloriously damning exposes of institutional abuses, but that many twentieth century women (there are many exceptions) confessed their gender-based sins and sought absolution from their doctors—and then wrote about it in fiction and nonfiction. Joanna Russ in What Are We Fighting For? Sex, Race, Class and the Future of Feminism (1998) made a similar point about how many twentieth-century women willingly colluded in their own gender-biased diagnoses. Hubert has written an admirable, but not necessarily an original, book. Her choice of original sources is superb. But, Hubert is also naive. Hubert also hopes that “women’s madness narratives can . . . [interrupt] psychiatric discourse,” and help us all “envision new ways of beings” (p. 142). And yet, as Hubert herself points out, many women who are psychiatrically incarcerated behave in racist, sexist, classist, and homophobic ways as do their keepers, both the sadists and the well-intentioned. Just because someone is “mad” is no guarantee that they will be more heroic, or any more “politically correct” than their jailors. Alas, ’tis true. I suspect that Hubert might have gulped a bit—perhaps even taken to the hills— were she to have encountered some of the twentieth-century narrators whom she most admires while they were actively hallucinating, physically abusive, menacing, growling, actively suicidal, ringing her bell at 3:00 A.M., parking themselves on her couch, refusing to leave, refusing to shower. Like Hubert, I admire their candor, artfulness, canniness, philosophical and political points, but I could not live with, or take responsibility for them, nor could I work with them on many feminist issues because their ability to do world-work was severely impaired. I agree with Hubert that forced hospitalization, institutional practices, and stigmatizing diagnoses are abominable, torturous, and cannot “heal” women who are in rebellion, or who have been broken by oppression. Like Hubert, I, too, prefer the valiant nineteenth-century exposés and crusaders against asylum abuses (Elizabeth Packard, Clarissa Lathrop, Ada Metcalf, Lydia Smith, Anna Agnew) to the twentieth-century apologists (Lucy Freeman, Joanne Greenberg, Barbara Benziger, Jane Hillyer, Sylvia Plath, Marion King) for femininity and embracers of both the idea of a benevolent helper-physician, and the individual solution. I disagree with Thomas Szasz, R.D. Laing, and Hubert and I said as much in Women and Madness (1972). Madness (manicdepression, schizophrenia, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders) itself is terrifying and painful and should not be confused with political or even aesthetic revolution. Analyzing a text or document is not exactly the same as analyzing a distressed human being who has turned to you for help. It is one thing for a literature