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Quotations/Comments670-656670 Mais, dans des cas pareils, c'est toujours la chose ģenitale, toujours! toujurs! toujours! [ Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) ]
The renowned French neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot, one of whose students for a brief period was Sigmund Freud, is here stating the fact that in every case of mental illness he had investigated at his famous Parisian clinic, the underlying cause of the illness was invariably related to sexual (genital) disturbances in the individual so afflicted, be it male or female - "always! always! always!" Charcot's teaching had a profound influence on the development of Freud's later theories, which up to that time had not stressed the overwhelming importance of repressed sexual factors in the development of mental illness. The second greatest influence on Freud's thinking in this field was Dr. Wilhelm Fliess, an otorhinolaryngologist from Berlin, who was the first person ever to broach to him the subject of the innate bisexuality of all humans. Freud was skeptical of this insight in the beginning but as he progressed further into his psycho-analytic practice, he began to see how this bisexual factor appeared sooner or later in the reports of all his patients, albeit in most cases only after very severe resistance to its recognition on their part. Freud eventually began to accept the fact that everyone is a "bearded lady", some more than others, and that is was the repression of this conflict between the two sides of the person, the male and the female, that lay at the root of all the neuroses and also of the psychosis he called paranoia, now called paranoid schizophrenia. Unfortunately, Freud believed paranoia and schizophrenia were two different illnesses with different early fixation points, and therefore that investigators must look elsewhere for the cause of schizophrenia. Because of this critical error in judgment on his part the vast majority of investigators who followed in his wake has ever since been conducting a fruitless search for the supposedly elusive cause of this devastating illness. The fact that schizophrenia, originally called dementia praecox (precocious dementia), begins most often in individuals at or shortly thereafter the onset of puberty, should certainly have alerted investigators to the fact it must be closely connected to sexuality in some manner, even though its bisexual conflict/gender confusion component was not so clear at first and required some serious psychological digging to uncover. Through the brilliant pioneering work of Charcot to Fliess to Freud lay the path of discovery allowing future generations of investigators finally to uncover the ultimate secrets of mental illness.
669 Sex is messy, passionate, unclear, tentative, anxious, liberating, frightening, embarrassing, consoling, and cerebral. It's contradictory, different for different people and different for the same person at different times. It operates at three or four levels simultaneously. And all that covers only masturbation. [ Pepper Schwartz, professor of sociology, University of Washington, USA. ]
In this brilliant analysis, Professor Schwartz treats the universal phenomenon of masturbation with the profound wisdom, depth of insight and respect that the subject deserves. We are all intimately connected with it and what he has to say about it, whether we acknowledge it or not.
668 Hysterical symptoms hardly ever appear so long as children are masturbating, but only afterwards, when a period of abstinence has set in; they form a substitute for masturbatory satisfaction, the desire for which continues to persist in the unconscious until another more normal kind of satisfaction appears when that is still obtainable. [ A Case of Hysteria, Sigmund Freud, p.79, Vol.7, The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Hogarth Press, London. ]
What Freud is basically postulating here is that all hysterical symptoms are fueled by, and have their genesis in, old masturbatory fantasies once enjoyed by the patient but now long repressed. Obviously, then, the cure for these present day hysterical symptoms requires a return to those old masturbatory fantasies and the orgasmic satisfactions connected therewith. This results in the diminution and eventual eradication of the hysterical symptoms to the point that the patient is no longer bothered by them and can then proceed to change these archaic orgasmic satisfactions into "more normal kind of satisfaction" if hopefully that outcome "is still obtainable." But as long as these fantasies remain repressed in the unconscious, no real psychosexual growth for the individual so afflicted is possible. Thus we can see that one of the primary goals in any person's psycho-analysis is to uncover these archaic and predominantly "perverse", or bisexual/gender confused, masturbatory fantasies which are still clinging tenaciously to life in the patient's unconscious psyche, where they assert such a powerful, regressive effect on the person's overall striving towards psychosexual health and maturity, and then abreact them by orgasmically discharging them as many times as needed until they finally lose for good their sexual power to disturb the psychic equilibrium. Only in this manner will these heretofore repressed masturbatory fantasies at last be robbed of their power to wreak havoc on the individual’s psychic health, and the hysterical symptoms will be eradicated, a beneficial result much to be desired in all cases of mental illness.
667 ...It has dawned on me that masturbation is the one major habit, the ‘primal addiction’, and that it is only as a substitute for it that the other addictions - for alcohol, morphine, tobacco, etc. - come into existence. [ “Extracts from the Fliess Papers”, Sigmund Freud, Letter 79, p. 272, Vol 1, The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, the Hogarth Press, London. ]
In many ways this is the most profound insight uncovered by Freud during his lifetime. For truly, masturbation is mankind's "primal addiction", lasting a lifetime. And not only does this hold true for all humans, without exception, but for all other mammals as well, both the young and the old. Masturbation is not just mankind's "primal addiction", it is the universal one. Freud, far more than most, realized the immense importance of masturbation to the physical and mental wellbeing not only of his own patients but of everyone else as well. Fully one-and-a-half pages in the index to his 24 volumes of collected works have citations directly under the heading "Masturbation." In essence, what Freud was trying to explain in the above quotation is that the addictive cravings for alcohol, tobacco, drugs, gambling, etc. arise as substitutes for the powerful sexual satisfactions once provided by masturbatory fantasies, fantasies which have long been repressed and denied due to their ego--dystonic nature. By that is meant that these masturbatory fantasies eventually became threatening to the person's self-esteem and self-regard, in the great majority of cases because these now ego-dystonic masturbatory fantasies are fantasies of being of the opposite sex. These type of opposite-sex fantasies occur universally and naturally during the early, androgynous state of development common to the young of all cultures. Once repressed into the unconscious these early masturbatory fantasies can only grow in strength and urgency until later in life they are finally able to break out of their psychological/ physical confinement and find release by converting their frustrated sexual energy into the addictive cravings mentioned by Freud. Thus the cure for these later substitute addictions is for the addict to return consciously to those long-repressed, primal, now ego-dystonic masturbatory fantasies and de-repress and abreact them masturbatorily until they lose their power and ability to fuel the addictive, substitute cravings, cravings which can be so hugely destructive to the individual so afflicted. This de-repression and abreaction of long-repressed masturbatory fantasies is one of the primary goals to be reached in anyone's psychoanalysis, male or female. (See also Quotation 528 in the book, Schizophrenia-The Bearded Lady Disease, to gain an understanding of how this de-repression and abreaction mechanism can be accomplished, always to the great benefit of the individual concerned.)
666 She included a previously unknown Auden poem in the form of a letter written on Christmas Day 1941, in which the events of the Nativity are given outrageous counterparts in the relationship between Auden and Kallman. It reads, in part: ‘Because mothers have much to do with your queerness and mine, because we have both lost ours, and because Mary is a camp name: As this morning I think of Mary I think of you. ' [ Douglas Martin, The New York Times, Obituary page, November 2, 2003, eulogizing the life of Dorothy J. Parnan, and referencing her book, Auden in Love, Simon & Schuster, 1984. ]
The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, as the old saying goes.” The most profound psychological truth is contained in this observation. If the mother is emotionally mature and mentally stable (one and the same thing, really), her children will grow up to be likewise. If she is not, then her children will suffer accordingly. And only too often this suffering will result in the development of the warped sexual and emotional attitudes leading to homosexuality, or, if the latter is repressed and denied, to schizophrenia. Obviously, as we can see from the above poem and from other knowledge of their lives, the poet, W. H. Auden and his lover, Chester Kallman, were certainly not repressing their homosexual feelings, and thankfully so, for if they had tried, they would both have become insane. We can also see that both men had great insight into the all-important role their mothers had played in the development of their "queerness". The psychiatrist G.W. Socarides has referred to homosexuality as a "neurotic" adaptation that in males stems from emotionally-demanding, all-possessive mothers who are wed to emotionally and/or physically absent fathers. Still another way to describe these mothers of homosexual sons is that they are close, binding and intimate with them, as well as with their daughters, leading to the same result in both sexes – children who are conflicted and confused as to which sex they belong and to what sexual orientation most fits their neurotic needs. She is the classic masculine mother who rules the roost, or ‘wears the pants’ in the family, as she has steadily been described down through the ages, and who is married to the similarly classically-ineffective, effeminate man who often tries to disguise his feckless behavior behind a shield of disruptive, psychopathic behavior, such as alcoholism, drug addiction, satyriasis, etc.
665 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,
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 hospitalization. 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.' [ Allison Hope Weiner, "A Lust For Life And Danger," 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. |
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