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Harpers Magazine 5/14/2008
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Consider Hannah Green's rose garden, Sylvia Plath's bell jar, Virginia Woolf's lighthouse and Marilyn Monroe's pills. Or such textbooks on falling apart as Doris Lessing's "The Four-Gated City," Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," R.D. Laing's "The Divided Self," Erving Goffman's "Asylums" and Michel Foucault's "Madness and Civilization." Not to neglect the revisionist analysis of Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Susan Brownmiller, Phyllis Chesler, Julia Kristeva and Juliet Mitchell. Nor the impassioned witness of Kay Redfield Jamison, Kate Millett and Germaine Greer. If you've already read "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and "The Picture of Dorian Gray," how about taking a look at Leon Daudet's "Les Morticoles," in which the loony bin is a music hall where patients perform the "Folies Hysteriques"? Isn't it fortunate that Freud's Bertha Pappenheim and Jung's Sabina Spielrein were more resourceful than their sad, fictional sisters, Shakespeare's Ophelia and Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor?

I am trying to suggest the range, wit, wisdom and richness of "Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors" (Norton). Lisa Appignanesi, both a novelist and a scholar of literature, psychoanalysis and feminism, leads us on a grand tour of derangement, from matricide to anorexia.
Starting off at Mary Lamb's 1796 murder of her mother in their kitchen, with a case knife, and ending up, approximately, at Elizabeth Wurtzel's deliverance by Prozac, she looks into such hospital wards and madhouses as were available in the 19th century, and the preferred theories preached and therapies practiced before Freud and pharmacology came to the rescue. Purgatives, leeches, blistering and hypnosis, for instance, plus cold baths, antispasmodics and electroconvulsions, were thought to be antidotes to fantasy, phobia, delirium, hysteria, monomania, melancholia, dissociation, possession and the vapors, which in turn had likely been caused by heredity, syphilis, change of life, overwork, self-indulgence, religious ecstasy, romantic novels or masturbation. These mind doctors wrote their own novel, a sort of "Madame Ovary," with their female patients as helpless characters. Later, everything would be blamed on conflicted sexuality, which caused repression, regression, reaction formation, projection, sublimation, post-traumatic stress disorder, recovered memory and satanic ritual abuse. Now, of course, we no longer really care why, or whether, madness might have anything to do with a crazy geopolitics and a broken social order, as long as we're allowed to medicate.

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Door to the knowledge
By Arcadio Esquivel - Cagle Cartoons, La Prensa, Panama * Posted 06/12/2005
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Door to the knowledge
© Copyright 2005  Arcadio Esquivel - All Rights Reserved.
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