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Quotations/Comments665-653665 Even the most glamorous hookup – J.F.K. and Marilyn Monroe – lost some of its film noir allure after a report of how Marilyn had robotically described it to her shrink: ‘Marilyn Monroe is a soldier . . . the first duty of a soldier is to obey her commander in chief.’ — Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, op-ed page, December 31, 2005.
Marilyn Monroe is generally considered to have committed suicide by ingesting an overdose of drugs. And as we know, suicide is the most serious symptom of schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease. That Marilyn was seriously mentally ill when she took her own life is obvious and it can fairly be said that she suffered from this malignant illness. Specific mention is made in the above quotation that during her psycho-therapy she reported to her psychiatrist that she was a “soldier” obeying the orders of her superior, her commander-in-chief, when she acquiesced to the presumed entreaties of President Kennedy to sleep with him. Note must be taken here of her strong unconscious identification as a male in this remark to her psychiatrist, as there is no doubt that she meant it from a male soldier’s viewpoint. (This was before the days of increased enlistment by females in the military services.) It may be difficult to conceive of the ‘glamorous’ Marilyn as suffering from the ‘bearded lady disease’, but her severe bisexual conflict / gender confusion, as evidenced in the above quotation, marks her as a victim of it. For in her unconscious mind she really was a male “soldier”, doing the bidding of her commanding officer, as insane as this idea may appear at first glance. (It would be interesting to know if her psychiatrist pointed out this Freudian slip-of-the-tongue to her and explored with her its deeper meaning and direct relationship to her mental distress.) A manicurist who once worked on her hands was quoted as having observed that she had very “masculine hands.” This would fit in with the concept of a basic unconscious masculine identification, an identification which she spent her entire life defending herself against conscious knowledge of, by projecting onto both herself and the world, an ultra-feminine, girlish persona.
664 ELIZABETH WURTZEL'S DEPRESSION IS of such mammoth proportions, she might as well be famous for it. Or at least that's what she seems to think. ‘I'm starting to wonder if I might not be one of those people like Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath,’ she writes in the prologue to PROZAC NATION (317 pages, Houghton Miflin, $19.95). ‘I might as well be Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra,’ she says on the following page. And later: ‘I felt like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's,’ or perhaps, ‘like Mary Tyler Moore, throwing her hat, as if it were caution, to the winds of Minneapolis.’ Wurtzel's depression is apparently of the megalomaniacal sort. At various other points in the book she compares herself to Virginia Woolf, Natalie Wood, Axl Rose, Miss Havisham, Brian Jones, Gregor Samsa and the title character in the film ‘Betty Blue.’ — “To be Young, Gifted and Blue”, Karen Schoemer, Newsweek, August 29,1994, p. 58.
At least three of the people Ms. Wurtzel identifies with were afflicted with schizophrenia – Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf – and all three were driven to suicide as a result of their mental illness. They were victims of the ‘bearded lady’ disease, just as Ms. Wurtzel seems to be when she identifies herself with both female and male persons, the latter being Axl Rose, Brian Jones, and Gregor Samsa. Her so-called depression "is of such mammoth proportions", according to the author of this article, that "she might as well be famous for it." The author also states that Ms. Wurtzel's depression "is apparently of the megalomaniacal sort." The term ‘megalomaniacal’ refers to a symptom always found in paranoid schizophrenia, as is also the symptom of depression. So it would appear Ms. Wurtzel definitely fits into the category of those persons who could be called ‘schizophrenic’ – that is, persons afflicted with the ‘bearded lady’ disease.
663 If they knew who D'arcy was they'd cheerfully lock her up for good. Then John could wait forever. I incorporate John into the witch fantasies. The one permitted male, the sorcerer, the broad figure in white who wears a coat and whose face is puffy from incarceration. Much like Agatha here, who in her age and continuously narcotized state has come to resemble a man. If John is here as Agatha, who is D'arcy then? My eyes rove the room but can find no parallel for the nonpareil. My God, then she was here. It happened. There is no opposite number here - the clue. That would mean that she has left John here in Agatha for solace while she is gone. - The Loony-Bin Trip, Kate Millett, Simon & Schuster, 1990 by Kate Millett, p. 238.
This passage vividly illustrates Millet's intense sexual confusion. "If John is here as Agatha, who is D'arcy then?" And then there is Agatha, "who in her age and continuously narcotized state has come to resemble a man." Finally, Millet believes that D'arcy "has left John here in Agatha for solace while she is gone." The sense of severe schizophrenic sexual confusion exhibited by Millet in this passage should be readily apparent to the ‘normal’ reader.
662 Case C - Patient was a twenty-eight-year-old single woman suffering from severe depression. During the course of her therapy, which consisted of over sixty hours of Freudian psychoanalysis, supplemented by face-to-face ‘talk’ sessions with a female therapist at another location, the patient's depression deepened.
During one of her last psycho-analytic sessions, the patient was lamenting the fact that her female therapist had gone on vacation and she expressed a deep and anguished longing for her. She mentioned that she had seen an advertisement in the ‘personals’ column of her local newspaper which she thought this therapist might have placed with the hope that the patient would see it and know that it was from her. The ad stated how much the writer, a female, missed and loved a certain unnamed person.
At this point the analyst realized the patient had such a powerful and overwhelming homosexual love for her female therapist, the full import of which she was denying to herself, that she had become psychotic, as demonstrated by the paranoid delusion that her therapist was trying to contact her secretly through the ‘personals’ column.
Very shortly thereafter, patient broke off her psycho-analysis while continuing her work with the other therapist, who by this time had returned from vacation. Patient then discontinued this therapy as well and started anew with a psychiatrist who prescribed heavy doses of anti-depressant drugs for her.
She terminated this latter treatment after several months and eventually found her way into a group therapy situation where she formed a close friendship with another female member of the group. This friendship quickly grew into an intimate homosexual relationship and the two women have now lived together for a number of years. [An anonymous case history.]
Simply speaking, this patient became schizophrenic as the direct result of repressing her strong homosexual feelings and then recovered her mental health as the direct result of finally being able to acknowledge and act upon them.
661 “I do love her. But I am not in love with her. Nor with her two brothers or sister. Yes, I have four children. Four children with whom I spend a good part of every day bathing them, combing their hair, sitting with them while they weep their tragic tears. But I am not in love with any of them. I am in love with my husband.
It is his face that inspires in me paroxysms of infatuated devotion. If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children. — Ayalet Waldman, “Truly, Madly, Guiltily, Modern Love”, The New York Times, March 27, 2005, p. 11.
If every mother could honestly make the above comments about her feelings towards her husband and her children, both mental illness and its cause (bisexual conflict and consequent gender confusion) would be eradicated from the world. A bold claim, but true. For the greatest gift a mother can give her children is to be “in love with” their father, and likewise the greatest gift a father can give his children is to be "in love with" their mother. Note that the emphasis is placed on the phrase to be “in love with” rather than just “to love”. Why should this ‘romantic’ state of affairs between the father and mother be so vitally important for the mental health and well being of their children? Simply stated, it is because this romantic climate between the parents provides such a felicitous atmosphere of heterosexual normality for the children of both sexes to identify with, thus thankfully sparing them from the unfortunate and often malignant emotional entanglements which unhappily-matched parents all too frequently inflict upon their children, leading to the latters’ loss of self-confidence and joy in their budding sexual identity and appropriate gender identification. An emotionally starved mother will turn to her children to fulfill her frustrated longings for love and acceptance, thus placing upon one or more of her children an enormous psychological burden which is ruinous to their emotional well being and normal psychological development. Philip Wylie, the noted author, once wrote a book titled Generation of Vipers to describe this type of mother, highlighting in it the deadly effect she has on the emotional life of her children. And of course, the emotionally starved father has a similar deleterious effect on the psychological health of his children. The so-called ‘mama's boy’ and ‘daddy's girl’ are the direct products of a hothouse of warped emotional attachments in these types of families where emotionally frustrated parents turn to their children for the emotional satisfaction and love they should be receiving from each other in the ‘romantic’ sense. Thus the normal masculine emotional growth of the ‘mama's boy’ is stunted, as is the normal feminine emotional growth of the ‘daddy's girl’. And the end result of this sexual identity blockage in the children, if not checked and corrected early on, is a post-pubertal descent into schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease, or else its opposite, the pursuance of a homosexual lifestyle, for these emotionally warped sons and daughters of emotionally warped fathers and mothers. And so author and mother, Ayalet Waldman, would that every child in the world be so fortunate as to have a mother like you, one who loves her children dearly but is "in love with" her husband, and not her children, and who is married to a husband with the same romantic feelings towards you that you have for him, and who also possesses a similar deep love for his children, without being "in love with” them.
660 ‘I don't know what occurred at the end,’ Ms. Gibbs said. ‘She was excited about the future. She kept talking about how there was going to be a movie about her. She had a purpose.’
Ms. Stone [Domino's mother] guesses that because Ms. Harvey was anxious and desperate for sleep, she took too many painkillers. No one knows how she obtained the pills. Ms. Stone described the upbeat voice mail message Ms. Harvey left on the day she died. ‘She wanted to tell me about the four people she'd employed to look after her,’ Ms. Stone said. ‘She said, ‘Mumsy, everything is going to be fine. They're really, really nice people. Boys at night to keep the riffraff away. Don't worry about me. I love you lots.’’ (Ibid., p.3)
When Domino's mother stated that Domino was "desperate for sleep", she was accurately describing one of the most malignant symptoms of schizophrenia — insomnia. This writer has personally known three persons suffering from this symptom, two of whom it drove to suicide and the other very close to it, until he was saved at the last moments by forced hospitialization. And one of the suicides ended life in a bathtub, as did Domino, and for basically the same reason, to end the intolerable pain caused by his prolonged insomnia. In Freud's famous Schreber case, the psychotic Schreber's major complaint in the early, most florid stage of his paranoid schizophrenia, was of his inability to sleep, causing him to declare that there was nothing left for a man to do in order to end the agonizing pain of his insomnia than to kill himself, which he tried repeatedly to do. Thus it is very tragic that Domino herself had not been hospitalized before she succumbed to her painkillers as a way of ending her intolerable pain. We can clearly see in her case how her schizophrenia, caused by her intense bisexual conflict/gender confusion, brought her life to a very sad end as it has done to so many others in the past, and will continue doing to so many others in the future, until the truth of the cause of this devastating illness can finally be acknowledged and dealt with accordingly, to the benefit of all humankind. Domino's final tragic words to her mother, "Mumsy, everything is going to be fine”, sounds like a term of endearment (‘Mumsy’) that a small child would use. And in truth, her emotional growth really had become fixated at a very early, tomboyish stage, the remainder of her life being but an extension of this immature state of development with its consequent total blockage of any further emotional growth.
659 'She was a beautiful girl with the height and everything else, but she had a particular look that was actually very sexually ambiguous with the tomboy thing and the shaved head,’ said Mrs. Nelson, who met Ms. Harvey when the girls were 11 and in an English boarding school. ‘Modeling is all about having the right look at the right time, and it wasn't the right time for her.’ . . . . . . . . . . .
Ms. Harvey had a close but at times difficult relationship with her mother. ‘Her personality was completely different than her mother's,’ said Heidi Gibbs, Mrs. Morton's sister. ‘What was important to her mother was being a lady, and that just wasn't important to Domino.’
In California, Ms. Harvey pursued various unladylike careers like work on a ranch and as a firefighter before finding her calling at Celes King Bail Bonds in South Central Los Angeles . . . . . . . . . . .
Although tabloids frequently described her as a lesbian, Ms. Harvey dated a series of men. ‘They were all losers,’ Ms. Stone said. ‘She was captivated by anybody with a dark side.’ (Ibid., p. 3)
Here again we can see the very severe bisexual conflict/gender confusion problem that dominated Domino's life and led to her slide into madness or schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease. She certainly was a ‘bearded lady’ in every sense of the word.
658 But the movie's subject, who was eagerly awaiting the release, will not. She was found dead in her bathtub on June 27. She died after suffering from a heart attack and had toxic levels of fentanyl, a painkiller, in her blood, said Stephen Bernard, her lawyer, citing a coroner's report. ‘Domino,’ which focuses almost exclusively on Ms. Harvey's exploits as a bounty hunter, does not dwell on the darkest part of her life: a 15-year struggle with drug addiction. What it does capture, her friends and family say, is the essence of someone who was so fascinated with danger that she organized her life around it, becoming one of the few female bounty hunters in the country and helping to capture 50 fugitives, often in life-threatening circumstances. (Ibid., pp.2-3)
The title for this article about Domino Harvey, written by Allison Hope Weiner for The New York Times, would have been more fitting if it had been headed A LUST FOR DEATH AND DANGER, rather than A LUST FOR LIFE AND DANGER, considering the fact that her entire life had been one long descent into madness and death, ending in her 35th year. There is no way to prove that Domino committed suicide, but she was facing the prospect of a jury trial and potentially long prison term if she were to be found guilty of dealing in drugs, as she had been charged with. We also know that suicide is considered the most serious manifestation of schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease. It is an interesting, though macabre fact that many suicidal persons resort to using a bathtub to carry out their final act of self-destruction, presumably on the grounds that it would leave a less messy death scene and could more easily be cleaned up afterwards. (This commentator had a physician friend who suicided in a bathtub by slitting open several arteries.)
657 'I tracked Domino down in Hollywood, where she was modeling and bounty hunting,’ Mr. Scott said over the phone from his Los Angeles office late last month [September, 2005]. ‘Domino lived in an apartment above the garage because she wasn't allowed in her mother's house with all her guns. We'd sit up in her apartment with the Soldier of Fortune magazines and AK-47's scattered around the room, and then I'd go and have tea with Mum and the Jack Russells and the Francis Bacons on the wall.' — “A Lust For Life And Danger”, Allison Hope Weiner, The New York Times, Oct. 9, 2005, ‘Sunday Styles’, Section 9, p.1
The very sad story of Domino Harvey, the one time model turned bounty hunter, provides us with a classic case demonstrating how severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion form the basic etiological root of all mental illness, up to and including schizophrenia. And Domino very definitely suffered from schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease. On the one hand, she had once been a beautiful model; on the other, she became a tough-as-nails, masculine, shaven-head, bounty hunter. There was no subtlety at all to her bearded lady self. It was shockingly and glaringly apparent to all who crossed her path in life.
656 From my material, in which negative instances are consciously absent, I am forced to the conclusion that schizophrenic illnesses in the male are intimately related as a sequent to unfortunate prolongation of the attachment of the son and the mother. (Dr. Harry Stack Sullivan)
Here again we can see the all-important role the mother inevitably plays in determining the mental health of her children, for good or for ill. The so-called CBI mother, or Close Binding Intimate mother, is the cause of schizophrenia, not only in her son, but also in her daughter (See previous quotation). The children of a CBI mother either become homosexual, or, if the homosexuality is denied and repressed, schizophrenic. Of course there are gradations of schizophrenia, just as there are of homosexuality, but definitely the offspring of such a mother will inexorably suffer from some degree of bisexual conflict/gender confusion, leading in its most severe form to either outright schizophrenia or homosexuality. And proof of the fact schizophrenia is rooted in the negation and repression of homosexuality is the inescapable truth that the CBI mother produces both schizophrenic and/or homosexual children.
655 The mother's attitude was so subtly ingratiating, and yet domineering, that she would almost have to be destroyed as a mother if the patient were to free herself from its terrible influence and win her own womanhood and independence. (Dr. Edward J. Kempf)
The above type of mother perfectly fits the definition of the "schizophrenogenic" mother, or the mother who is the direct cause of the development of schizophrenia in her daughter. The latter's only escape from this malignant fate, as Dr. Kempf so clearly points out, is somehow to free herself from this mother's "terrible influence", preferably through intensive, long-term psychoanalytic therapy. Interestingly enough, although not mentioned here by Dr. Kempf, is the similar schizophrenogenic influence this type of mother would have on a son. Both son and daughter would be in great psychological danger when so dominated by this kind of woman/mother. Unless escape can be effected, they would be equally in grave danger of developing schizophrenia or its opposite manifestation, homosexuality. Most assuredly, either they would be afflicted with bisexual conflict gender confusion, which, if not dealt with correctly, leads to one or the other state of being.
654 Reflecting on a visit to a reunion of his mother's relatives, the photographer Walker Evans wrote to a friend that ‘. . . How fatal it has been that all the women have ruled the men right out of their masculinity, independence, courage, will and at last, brains even.’ — Walker Evans, by James R. Mellow, [Source not noted.]
The type of woman mentioned by Walker Evans in the above quotation is the type from which springs all homosexuals, male and female, as well as all schizophrenics, considering the fact that schizophrenia is caused by the repression or denial of homosexuality. This type of woman rules not only her son “out of their masculinity, independence and courage", but also her daughters out of their femininity, independence and courage, thus dooming both sexes to either outright homosexuality or mental illness. Admittedly this is a harsh statement, but unfortunately a true one. In the insightful words of Dr. Lewis B. Hill, in his outstanding book, Psychotherapeutic Intervention of Schizophrenia, the equation goes thus: “It would seem that the schizophrenic patient is often of the third generation of abnormal persons of whom we can gain some information. The preceding two generations of mothers appear to have been obsessive, schizoid women who did not adjust well to men. There is some evidence that they were, in a sense, immature and that within the obsessive character structure could be found hysterical difficulties. It is to be noted, also, that there are two preceding generations of men who are not masters, or equals, in their own marriages and homes, or psychosexually very successful, and who are often described as immature, alcoholic, and passive, or hardworking, self-centered, and detached from the family." In a nutshell, this is the scenario intuited by Walker Evans in the above quotation. Dr. Hill further emphasizes his position in the following insightful summary of the so-called "schizophrenogenic" mother, and her forebears. "The maternal grandmothers of the patients are usually reported to have ruled their homes either directly or, more commonly, through tears and suffering. Mothers of the patients have learned this technique from these grandmothers and with very few exceptions dominate, in one way or another, the family situation, including the husband. Usually they employ the hurt techniques to make others feel guilty; much more rarely they are arbitrarily and angrily in charge." Thus we can see the critical importance of the mother’s own mental stability in determining the emotional destiny of her children. The insightful words of the photographer Walker Evans takes us into his own family’s warped psychological dynamics and demonstrates to us its malignant consequences for all his relatives. Unfortunately, in his brilliant exposition of the skewed family dynamics which produce schizophrenics, Dr. Hill neglected to mention that these same family dynamics also are operative in every case among the relatives of children who turn out to be homosexual, thus proving the thesis that the genesis of schizophrenia is denied and repressed homosexuality.
653 'Do you believe in demon possession?' I asked 'Why do you ask?' 'Well, it's strange,' I said, 'but I remember that at my sickest, it was as though Gression took complete possession of me. It was as though I lost my soul and Gression's soul entered my body and I became Gression and my body did his bidding.' (Ibid., p.213)
In this paranoid delusion of persecution that his former psychoanalyst, Dr. Gression, had taken "complete possession of me", Mr. Stefan unconsciously demonstrates his passive, feminine attitude towards his former therapist. For a man to believe that another man has taken "complete possession" of him, "body" and "soul", as we can see from the remainder of this quotation, most assuredly indicates the presence of very strong homosexual feelings. This delusion of Mr. Stefan's of being "possessed'' by Dr. Gression is remarkably similar to the one experienced by the famous paranoiac, Daniel Paul Schreber, in relation to his former physician, Dr. Flechsig. In Schreber's case, as interpreted by Sigmund Freud, his "affectionate dependence upon his physician" had "become intensified to the pitch of an erotic desire." This desire was violently opposed and denied by Schreber's ego, leading to his paranoid delusion that Dr. Flechsig had now become his persecutor, one who wished to use him sexually as a female prostitute. In exactly the same manner Mr. Stefan had repressed his own powerful erotic feelings towards Dr. Gression, leading to his paranoid delusions as outlined in the above quotation. Mr. Stefan had further stated to his current physician that he had wanted to kill Dr. Gression for what he "did to me and my wife." (p.212.) He went on to say that "I've killed him a thousand times in my imagination. I've shot and stabbed and beat him and . . . ." For this reason it can sometime be dangerous for physicians to treat persons suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, which condition is invariably the result of repressed and denied homosexual feelings. The initial positive transference of the male patient to the male physician can quite easily become intensified to the point it becomes erotic longing, leading to the delusion of being persecuted by the physician, followed by the wish to kill or otherwise destroy and remove this object of homosexual temptation. From his own words, it is quite clear that Mr. Stefan himself was very close to crossing this fragile line into violence against Dr. Gression, fueled as it was by by his unconscious, unacceptable homosexual feelings for him. |
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