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New Quotations/Comments700-686700 Anorexia is one of the deadliest psychiatric diseases; it's estimated that up to 15 percent of anorexics die, from suicide or complications related to starvation. About a third may make some improvement but are still dominated by their obsession with food. Many become depressed or anxious, and some develop substance-abuse problems, like alcoholism. Almost half never marry. It is thought that if anorexia is not treated early on, during adolescence, it tends to take an average of five to seven years for the person to recover - if it happens at all. [ “One Spoonful at a Time,” Harriet Brown, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, 11/26/2006, beginning on p. 52. ]
If you delete the words "anorexia" and "food" from the above quotation, and substitute the word "schizophrenia" or "schizophrenics", the reader is left with a very precise definition of that illness. The reason for this is because "anorexia" is but one of the many varied and seemingly unrelated symptoms of the mental illness we have arbitrarily named "schizophrenia", which further includes "autism" and many other widely divergent manifestations of this disease, the basic etiological factor in which we now know is that of severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion. This basic etiological factor is especially transparent, and thus more easily confirmed, by studying the most commons symptoms of the schizophrenic illness we call "anorexia." It will be noted that "anorexia" begins, in almost every case, during a girl's adolescence when the normal hormonal changes ushering in puberty begin to alter a girl's physical appearance by adding feminine "curves" to her breasts and hips. And it is the psychological repudiation of this feminizing process by the girl who develops anorexia which causes her to resort to starving herself to keep this from happening. Thus there is a grim and sometimes fatal "method in her madness" as the desired effect of obliterating these hated and feared physical signs of her developing femaleness is rapidly realized, resulting in the wasting away of her body, sometimes to the point of death, unless emergency interventional steps can be taken in time to prevent such a tragic outcome. One noted example of the devastating effect this illness can cause is the case of the well-known French writer and intellectual Simone Weill, who early in life developed schizophrenia/anorexia and eventually died of starvation as the result of it. Schizophrenics also develop substance-abuse problems, have a much lower rate of marriage than non-schizophrenics and take a long time to recover from the disease -"if it happens at all." And finally, what has been called the most serious symptom of schizophrenia - suicide - is also a significant threat to persons who suffer from anorexia. Thus we can see that anorexia and schizophrenia share many of the same symptoms, and this is so because they are one and the same illness, whose underlying etiology, as stated above, is invariably that of severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion. The fact that anorexia is an illness experienced almost exclusively by sexually maturing adolescent girls points unerringly to the twin factors of denial of appropriate gender identity orientation and bisexual conflict as playing the central role in the genesis of this illness. And as anorexia is almost exclusively an illness experienced by young girls, autism is almost exclusively an illness experienced by young boys. The role of the mother is the all-important factor in the causation of both illnesses, but it has been more widely documented in the case of autism by such investigators as Dr. Bruno Bettleheim, who laid the blame for the schizophrenic autistic syndrome squarely on the "evil mother", who then became, in popular parlance, the "refrigerator mom", or the mother who, due to her own psychological problems, is unable to provide normal nurturing and maternal warmth and love to her child who consequently develops autism. A patient named Henry who was undergoing psycho-analysis once made this very pertinent statement about mothers and motherhood: "In the Metropolitan Museum I saw a sculpture - a group of women putting away the body of Jesus Christ. They looked at the wounds with different feelings - beautiful compassionate faces. I have never seen faces like this in the world. If I had seen looks of love and compassion in my mother's face or other women's faces, I would have been different." [In Search of a Response, Leida Berg, M.D., and Harold Steinberg, The Tiresias Press, Inc., New York, 1973, p. 273.] If all mothers in the world could be loving and compassionate like the women portrayed by the artist in the above-mentioned sculpture, mental illness would be banished from the face of the earth. No more schizophrenic anorexics, autistics, paranoids, depressives, obsessives, etc. But of course this will never happen, unfortunately for mankind. The "hand that rocks the cradle rules the world," always, for better or for worse.
699 I was posting to let you know that my voices seem to harass me with religion. I was born and raised Catholic. But three years ago my voices were giving me a hard time with religion. They mostly blasphemed and gave me genital tactiles when I read the bible. I would really get frustrated after a while of this torture and yell at the voices, "what do you want me to do put my genitals on the bible" I'd yell at them. I seem to be evil too, but I don't think it is my fault. If there is a god in the universe, I hope thatentity will understand that I was under mind control techniques. I then joined a Japanese based religion, Sukyo Mahikari. There I was given light and did not have to pray except when you get there at first. The prayers are just to thank Su God for everything. In the Catholic religion we would pray and go to church every Sunday. I did that but the voices would attack me and after a while and tell me evil things. As well I got tortured in the genitals and could not really think. I guess I am weak and stop going to church every Sunday. I belong to the Knights of Columbus and it reallyhelps my esteem. I do projects with this fraternity and am the recorder for meetings. After a while of going to Sukyo Mahikari I was becoming a bit stronger. I did not get genital tactiles at this religion. For two years I have been going. I feel spiritual or this goodness inside of me. The evil voices are not brainwashing me eventhough I can hear them faintly. I am reading religious material again the bible, Sukyo Mahikari books, ect, ect,. But if this affliction wants to attack me I am sure it would only take three days to strip me of my religion with mind control techniques. Harassing the genitals is torture. On top of that I get a sick white female voice yelling at me, "do you want, do you want!!!" I want to be a good person and mind my own business. I like to socialize with anybody who is kind. Religion or no religion. I do believe there is a god or ultimate power. But I don't know how accurate the bible is or all these difference I seem to hear when I go to different religions. The Pentecostal, Johovah witness, Catholics are religions I have encountered. All believe in the same god and Jesus but have different beliefs. I feel more comfortable with Sukyo Mahikari. It doesn't matter what religion you are and you can enjoy your life without much worry about sinning in the eyes of mankind with their rules. I don't get harassed in the genitals. I just have to go twice a week for about an hour and I am done. This has helped me with my other faith Catholicism. I am in a Catholic fraternity Knights of Columbus, I sometimes go to church but not every Sunday. I socialize with my brother knight [name deleted for privacy reasons] and we see movies together or get lunch. It is something that is good and that I can do without worrying about hearing voices and having an episode. I used to make it a great deal. But now it's not so bad. I let people know if I am hearing voices and take medication and don't have to worry about a crises. Lately I have been reading the bible and now listening to gospel music. But recently, the voices told me "GET OUT" and I was reading religious material and listening to the Katinas a gospel group. We got our first storm and the lights flickered and the CD player skipped. I found this odd and wondered if the government is the cause of this? I put down the book and reset the CD player. It happened once more but I was writing notes of what was going on and what the voices are saying. It stopped. I went back to reading and I just got twitches on my left side of my shoulder. I have been discourage from religion before and felt lousy. My mentality starts to deteriorate and I get angry and carry all this ugly hatred inside. Because the voices defeats me when I feel good and full of morals. The mind control works for them and lets them know that any time of the day they can harass me and taunt me and then go for the gonads and kill my spirit. I start cursing god for not helping me and wonder if he exist and wonder why he lets voices harass me. I don't mean to be a religious fanatic but all I am saying is that I think it is good for my life and hope that I never give up on religion. I guess deep down inside I believe there is a god but the voices at anytime can discourage me from religion. Sincerely, - [name deleted for privacy reasons] [ Transcribed from an Internet posting on a schizophrenic support group site. ]
The above-quoted individual is obviously and floridly insane, afflicted with the malignant mental illness known as paranoid schizophrenia, the "bearded lady disease." When he talks about his "genital tactiles", he is referring specifically, of course, to the sexual stirrings in his genital area which are caused by his repressed, homosexual cravings. He further states that he is often "harassed in the genitals" and that "harassing the genitals is torture. " He continues in this same vein when he complains that the voices he hears "can harass me and taunt me and go for the gonads and kill my spirit." It is clear from these statements that this paranoid schizophrenic man is constantly tormented by his overwhelming, ego-dystonic homosexual cravings which have been completely repressed and denied, consequently leading to his self-described delusional state of mind. And as in all such cases of psychosis, the ever-present factor of bisexual conflict and gender confusion is invariably the basic etiological pathogen in the illness. Finally, his remark that "On top of that I get a sick white female voice yelling at me, 'do you want, do you want!!!'" shows that unconsciously he almost certainly identifies himself as "a sick white female", the ego-dystonic nature of which is projected, in typical paranoid fashion, on to the outer world, thus protecting his ego from the conscious knowledge of his transvestism. (If the author of the above quoted material happens to be of a different color other than white, the basic premise of projected transvestism would still be a valid construct in this case.). The phrase 'do you want, do you want!!!' could further be interpreted as meaning, "Do you want sexual satisfaction as a sick white female?" It follows logically that this man, who is fully aware of his schizophrenic illness, would thus view himself as a "sick white female" in the repressed, unconscious gender image he has of himself. Truly as it has been said, "Schreber's name is legion."
698 “We're going to be murdered," Marshall Herff Applewhite told a reporter in 1972. "And when we are, after three and a half days, we're going to walk out into life in the next level above human." Two years earlier, hearing voices, Applewhite had checked into a psychiatric hospital, seeking to be "cured" of his homosexual urges. Apparently "cured," the former music teacher went on to become, variously, "Bo," "Do," the "Present Representative" and "The One That Was Jesus." Last Wednesday, he was found dead, along with 38 members of the Heaven's Gate movement, in the worst mass suicide on American soil. Most attempts to understand the Heaven's Gate members' bizarre final exit are put in the social context of religious cults. But Applewhite's weird mixture of messianism, ufology, paranoia and the belief that one is not of this world may have been more a product of extreme mental illness than a tortured search for spiritual answers. [ “Marshal Applewhite's Cry for Help,” www.salon.com, March 31, 1997, by Jonathan Broder. ]
Marshall Applewhite was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, the direct consequence of his severe bisexual conflict and gender identity confusion. As the result of this illness, he was the catalyst leading directly to the deaths of 38 other people, himself included, in a mass suicide. And in exactly the same manner did the paranoid schizophrenic leader Jim Jones, in Jonestown, Guyana, and the Branch Davidian leader, David Koresh, in Waco, Texas, lead all the members of their own two "religious" cults into a frenzy of mass suicide/murder. Thus well over a combined total of a thousand persons - men, women and children - died because Applewhite's "bearded lady" madness similarly afflicted the latter two charismatic, though also totally insane, personalities. In Applewhite's Heaven's Gate cult, it was discovered after their death that many members had previously orchestrated their own castration. Thus we can observe, again and again, the terrible tragedies which have been wreaked upon mankind since the beginning of its history on Earth by schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease. As the noted psychiatrist Dr. Alfred Honig was quoted as remarking in the above quoted article from Salon magazine, "The leader [Applewhite, Jones, and Koresh] is constantly saying, 'The world is going to end.' -- The idea that the world is coming to an end is in every psychotic's mind -- and they all drift into a state characterized by delusions of a world-ending catastrophe. Then, as I said, either of two things happen -- suicide or psychosis. I've seen it happen many times." These common "end of the world" fantasies which are embraced by the psychotic person are not nearly as "delusional" as they may sound, for in reality, from the psychotic's point of view, being suddenly, or even gradually, transformed into the opposite sex, or becoming manifestly homosexual, certainly would constitute "the end of the world" for the vast majority of psychotics as they have known it and lived it right up until the advent of their paranoid schizophrenic illness.
697 Afternoon: She looked tired and miserable. One of the physicians came up to her bed and asked, "Why don't you get up?" "Yes, but may I?" the patient asked with astonishment. Her voice sounded more humble and submissive than I had ever heard it. "Not only should you get up, but you should make your bed and help on the ward!" Without a word Frieda got out of bed beginning stiffly and awkwardly to turn the mattress. In so doing she fell twice. After her second fall she remained lying on the floor for a long time in a typical catatonic position. I helped the patient and them accompanied her through the ward on the walk which had been ordered for her. Quietly, her arms hanging rigidly at her sides, she wandered through the room - sometimes with very tiny steps, at other times with very large steps. Her gaze seemed turned inward; there was no indication that she saw anything around her. We came to the bed of an unconscious young woman from whose throat issued a loud rattle. Our patient woke up as if from a dream. Terrified, she stared at the wasted figure whose eyes were sunken and half opened. She took two quick steps toward the patient and then collapsed wordlessly. Tearless sobbing shook her body. I sat down with her, putting her head on my lap. After a few minutes I began to talk quietly of the harshness and cruelty in life. She became quiet and wept. I helped her to get up and slowly led her back. She stopped at every bed, here and there patted a pale, despairing face, gave some fresh water to a feverish, thirsty patient and then quietly went to her own bed. Although her handshake was hearty, her look indicated that anything she might say then would only disturb her. I left her alone for a while. Later on she was completely clear, moving about like a normal person, talking about her childhood, about her uncle, about fairy tales and children's songs. Pointing to the ward nightshirt she said, "I'm so happy about this shirt. Earlier I was always forced to wear ladies' nightshirts, but I always hated them. I like men's shirts only and this one seems to be a man's shirt. I am so glad that someone has given it to me." [ (Ibid, Quotation 696, pages 83-85.) ]
The analyst Gertrud Schwing here provides a first-hand account of the aftereffects of insulin-coma therapy on a group of female patients in a psychiatric hospital, including her own patient, Frieda. This therapy was used extensively in such hospitals and sanitariums before the advent of the newer psychotropic drugs. In Frieda's case, we learn of its beneficial effect upon her from Schwing's remark that "Later on she was completely clear, like a normal person, talking about her childhood, about her uncle, about fairy tales and children's songs." Before her insulin-coma treatment Frieda had been in a state of complete catatonic inaccessibility. And now that she is "completely clear", the genesis of her schizophrenia becomes apparent - namely, her severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion, as demonstrated by her comments in the last lines of the above quotation wherein she declares how happy she now is to be able to wear a man's nightshirt rather than a woman's. Basically she is saying that she strongly rejects the female role in life and embraces the male role, with its consequent love of women rather than men. It has been the rejection of this knowledge, or insight, leading to the repression and denial of her powerful homosexual feelings, which has led to her present schizophrenia and its related catatonic symptomatology. As always, the cure lies in the lifting of the repression, the conscious acknowledgement of these powerful ego-dystonic, homo-erotic feelings, and then the beginning of the process of working through them until the point is reached where a reasoned decision can be made by the patient as to which sexual and gender orientation, homosexual or heterosexual, male or female, will best fit her long-term emotional and physical needs, and provide her with the most overall satisfaction, peace-of-mind and general happiness. (What has been said here about Frieda would apply equally to the cure of any male schizophrenic patient.)
696 Then she gave it to me because she had written it for me. I asked her if this was the poem which I so very much would like to have from her. "That I do not know," she suggests, "I simply had to write now for you, but I do not know what it is." She took the pad back. Looking at the pencil she said, "One cannot draw with this. It would have to be much bigger and thicker! I would need a carbon crayon." But nevertheless she drew. A whole leaf was formed, gray-black in color with slanting vertical and horizontal lines. The she wrote on it with large letters, "I love," and gave the leaf back to me. I remained silent. She again took the pad, sketched and shaded in leaf after leaf, writing a sentence on each and then showed the final leaf to me. The pencil had become blunt and I wanted to sharpen it but the patient quickly put it in her mouth and with one jerk bit the wood through the middle. Without saying anything I took both pieces and returned them to her sharpened. Three or four drawing were lying on the chair. After drawing for a little while longer, she put everything away, reached out her arms to me and pulled me to her so that our cheeks touched. I sensed that she longed for a kiss but that she did not dare to ask for one. I kissed her softly on the forehead. The patient took my head into her hands, pressed her mouth on mine and kissed me ardently. Then she lay back and was quiet for a long time, her hand pressed on her cheeks. After awhile she began to sing softly: "Quiet, quiet, holy song." At first she sang softly and then more loudly with greater spontaneity. It was as if the tenderness granted her had finally gratified a deep longing and thus she was now able to turn to other matters. After she finished singing she told me about her hometown, about book, poems and music. Noticing that her hands were black from the pencil, I expressed a wish to clean them with my handkerchief. Smiling in response, she took the handkerchief and looked at it for a long time. "Oh no," she said, "This is so very beautiful that I shall swipe it from you." All the while she searched my face with a questioning but roguish look. Since she could not discover a "no" in my facial expression she carefully put the handkerchief next to her heart. Later she let me take it back without any resistance because she knew that handkerchiefs were not permitted in the section for disturbed patients. Then she asked me for water, drank half of the cupful, placed it on her forehead for a few minutes and later poured it through a slit in her shirt over her naked body. "To cool off," she explained to me. Just as I was ready to leave the patient the door was opened and a man's voice could be heard. Quickly she lifted her head, listened intently, and said, "That is Dr. X and he is the one who has my voice." In the daily report it was written, "Patient Frieda spent the entire day lying quietly in an open bed." [ A Way To The Soul Of The Mentally Ill, Gertrud Schwing, International Universities Press, Inc., New York, NY, 1954, pages 78-80. ]
Patient Frieda is obviously deeply in love with her therapist, both emotionally and physically, or homo-erotically. Witness the description by the therapist that "The patient took my head into her hands, pressed her mouth on mine, and kissed me ardently." It is due to the severe repression and denial of her homosexuality and gender confusion up to this point in her life that the patient had become schizophrenic, or psychotic. Now that she has finally been able to express some of these heretofore deeply repressed feelings in her transference relationship with her analyst, the first step on the road to recovery from her severe mental illness has been taken. Further signs of her deep-seated bisexual conflict and gender confusion are demonstrated by the remark, on hearing the male doctor's voice in the hall, "That is Dr. X and he is the one who has my voice!" One other masculine action was when she took the pencil which needed to be sharpened, put it into her mouth and "with one jerk" bit it in half. In summary, the above quotation describes a woman who is deeply in love with another woman, her therapist, and whose severe mental illness stems directly from her long-term repression and denial of these same-sex feelings, now finally allowed to surface in her transference relationship with her analyst.
695 The way to accomplish a positive transference relationship is, as we have reported, a very simple one. We must give to the patient that motherliness which he lacked as a child and which the patient, without knowing it, has searched for all of his life. I do not refer here to the privations which Freud has shown us are connected with the child's insatiable longing for love destined to remain unfulfilled, because that love is directed towards the parent of the opposite sex. All of the patients I have reported here are women. Turned away from the world, mute or excited, they remained inaccessible for any kind of treatment, for any kind of human help. Through motherliness they came within reach. Does this not mean that the mother-child relationship stood in the foreground in the life history of each of these female patients? The hypothesis that we are dealing here with patients who have lacked the experience of motherliness (which must be identical with the death of the mother) was confirmed. All of my patients have grown up, in the deepest sense of the word, motherless. Here it seems necessary to reflect on the nature of motherliness. Are not its chief characteristics the ability for one to feel, that is, to grasp intuitively the needs of another; the ceaseless preparedness, or, as Dr. Federn has formulated it, "making the fate of another as important as one's own." But let us make a more precise differentiation: motherliness and mother love are not identical. Motherliness is the product of sublimation resulting from the original mother function and from the woman's natural preparedness for devotion. The preparedness for devotion, however, is meant for the object. Its aim is the merging of the ego with the object through an almost complete conversion of ego libido into object libido. Motherliness is therefore only possible for those women who can without any reservations avow themselves to the function of motherhood. The original mother love is something primary, natural and "instinctual." Its existence can also be demonstrated in animals. The mother without motherliness does not love her child as an object, she loves it exclusively as a part of herself. From this we may conclude that in motherliness more object libido is expressed than in mother love. Mother love is sufficient in the lower animals. It was also sufficient for man at a time when culture and the demands of society (religious, moral, economic, etc.) did not require the amount of restrictions of the instincts required today. This unused, unsatisfied natural preparedness for devotion must necessarily be sublimated to motherliness in many women. We must yet explore the relation of this preparedness for devotion to the ever increasing demands on the person who is growing up in our culture. We may speculate that it is the motherliness - the sublimated preparedness for devotion in the mother - which offers the child in our culture the help which he needs for the mastery of the oedipal conflict, and also the help for mastering that period of waiting between the time of his biological sexual maturation and the time when the culture allows him a life of full sexual activity. All of the patients whom I described in the first chapter lacked the experience of motherliness from their mothers. Alice, an illegitimate child whose mother died at the time of the patient's birth, was left in a loveless environment without an adequate mother substitute. I have already described Betty's mother as an ambitious woman preoccupied with social activities, a type of mother I call the "busy, society-conscious woman." Dora grew up without a mother and received indifferent care. Can we not assume that a mother, who puts her newly born baby into a situation where it can receive only bad care and who then calls again for the child fourteen years later, has no motherliness at all? Elly's mother is an active business woman whose masculine traits impress one. She always considered the child as a burden and had neither time for her nor interest in her development. The mothers of those patients which will be reported later together with the mothers of those patients whose histories I cannot report here can be divided into three groups: 1) The very busy, society-conscious woman. 2) Sick, neurotic women who devote their time and interest to their own persons. 3) Very active, masculine-identified women who are usually very competent in masculine occupations in the business world. We cannot explore the history of these mothers here. But I can state that in every case where historical material was available, confirmation was found for the conjecture that the mothers of these patients had also lacked their own mothers. In most instances, death of the mother had made the child motherless. In some cases I found motherlessness in our sense of the word. Of course, there are many reasons why these privations have such different effects. Some such women are driven to a life expressing the mother function in busy, conspicuous public activity, which, however, lacks the vital core of motherliness. Other such women react to their unsatisfied need by developing illnesses or by engaging in antisocial behavior. Still other women turn away bitterly from the function of womanhood or motherhood. The first group of these women attempts to find a solution to their conflicts by attempting to give to others the motherliness which they themselves have lacked. A final analysis of their lives, noting particularly the illnesses of their own children, indicates that the privation was not overcome - these women never achieve their goal. The illnesses or the antisocial behavior of the women of the second group may be the consequence of particularly difficult early life experiences, the result of an inherited disposition, or these reactions may be the consequence of the interaction of both these factors. In my opinion the "masculine woman" of group three is determined by a biological disposition I refer to the relative strength of the feminine and masculine chromosomes which determine the sexual and biological disposition of the sexual glands and in the organism. Of course the personality development of such individuals is also influenced by environmental conditions, particularly by circumstances which are favorable for identifications with the father or other males. We have observed that the patients whose case histories are reported here lacked the mother. I have found that the mother was also lacking in many neurotically ill patients. All such people need psychoanalytic help but the help cannot always be offered in the same way. [ A Way To The Soul Of The Mentally Ill, Gertrud Schwing, International Universities Press, Inc, New York, New York, 1954, pages 51-55. ]
In every case of schizophrenia, it would be possible to prove that the mentally ill person, male or female, had never experienced in the earliest stages of their life, when it is so vitally important to both mental and physical health, the type of "motherliness" which has been so brilliantly and intuitively described by Gertrud Schwing in the above quotation. And this basic lack of motherliness of course would play the same critical role in all the other lesser grades of mental illness, since "schizophrenia" is but an arbitrary name we apply to the most severe cases of emotional disturbance. Thus it can truly be said that the so-called "schizophrenogenic mother", i.e. the mother of the person who develops schizophrenia, was invariably emotionally unable, for whatever reason, to provide this key factor of motherliness to her developing child. (As Ms. Schwing points out, this is most often the case because the mother herself had lacked the experience of motherliness from her own mother.) This critical factor of "motherliness" allows the child to gain the emotional confidence and knowledge that he or she is loved and cherished unconditionally for himself or herself, which includes total acceptance of the child's sex, thereby firmly establishing the child's anatomically-correct sexual orientation and identity. Such a child is therefore permanently insured against ever developing "schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease," or any of the lesser mental illnesses as well, which are always caused by severe, unconscious bisexual conflict and gender confusion. The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, as the old saying goes, and to the extent that the mother's "hand" lacks the quality of true "motherliness", the world suffers accordingly. All mental illness basically springs from this lack of true motherliness, and all we have to do is look around us to see what havoc and destruction mental illness has wreaked upon the world and its inhabitants, not only today but throughout the history of mankind.
694 You know, for the 15 years that I have been having ASP, I thought I was haunted by an evil spirit, the target of a malevolent spirit. It started when I was fifteen, and it would occur when I was especially exhausted. I would here [sic ]this extremely evil sounding voice just off in the distance but could never see the face or image...thankfullly, I guess. The only thing I could do would hyperventilate to force the episode to end. This sometimes would occurdozens of times per night. When I went away to college, it stopped and when it started again, I thought "great, it found me". When I moved back home to finish my undergraduate degree it stopped again for some time and then returned and I felt the same way. Each and every time I moved, I felt that it eventually followed me. I had run into one other person with similar symptoms and she and her family thought she was being haunted or possessed by an evil spirit and was seeing a priest and that scared the heck out of me. I never went into any significant detail about my episodes to my wife because I didn't want to frighten her. We have a system going when I feel the episode beginning, I begin to hyperventilate to the point that it wakes her up and she wakes me up. Just touching me does not wake me, even light speech won't. she has to violently shake me sometimes to arouse me. This mostly occurs when I fall asleep on my back, however, it appears to not matter what position I sleep in. I had an episode last night that was particularly frightening. Like I said early, the voice has no face. This time, I saw the image and it was of my father in law, whom I actually love, he ran up to my face in superhuman speed and was malevolently threatening my life and smothering me and pressing on my chest. This is the first time I saw it as an image and could make out any detail. It occurred again four to five times as I attempted to fall back to sleep. i [sic] here [sic] this is familial, I hope my daughter does not get this frightening affliction. I do my best to have as best sleep patterns as I can, but working in health care sometimes precludes this. I have read some websites about standing up to the image, defending your self spiritually and physically, or laughing at the image to force it to go away, but I have not been about to try it. The fear paralyzes me that I cannot think to do anything but hyperventilate so my wife can wake me up. I guess I will keep trying. Thankfully, this only occurs sporadically, mostly with months in between episodes. I can't imagine going through this daily or even weekly. Sorry about the long post. I look forward to reading through some of the pasts posts and future threads. [name deleted for privacy reasons] [ Source: An anonymous posting on the internet. ]
This is obviously the case of a man who has been experiencing schizophrenic symptoms ever since the age of fifteen. (The original name for schizophrenia was "dementia praecox", or precocious dementia, because it was noted that the symptoms of the disease usually began to appear for the first time in adolescence, around the time of puberty.) The "visions" he speaks of here are actually visual hallucinations, one of the hallmarks of the disease, often experienced in conjunction with audio hallucinations where the person hears unseen and/or unknown voices speaking to him or her. "When the schizophrenic's bisexual conflict becomes overwhelming, the repressed homosexual excitement discharges itself through the medium of the psychotic hallucination rather than through the medium of genital orgasm, as would be the case under normal circumstances where there was no repression of the homosexual lust by the ego. Thus the psychotic hallucination is actually a 'hysterical conversion' mechanism utilized by the organism for the discharge of sexual tension which has been blocked by repression from its normal route of genital orgasmic discharge." [ J. Michael Mahoney, Schizophrenia -- The Bearded Lady Disease, Quotation 503, page 374. ] The "evil spirit" haunting this man is in reality a person of the same sex to whom he is unconsciously sexually attracted at the time, but due to the complete repression of these feelings metamorphoses by projection into the evil spirit which tortures him episodically with his unseen presence. The fact that the "evil spirit" has finally showed a face, for the very first time, in the figure of his loved father-in-law is indicative of his strongly repressed homosexual attraction towards this man. In this particular vision, the step-father runs up to him and is "malevolently threatening my life and smothering me and pressing on my chest" while the subject lies on his back in bed, in a feminine sexually-receptive position. The great threat here is that the subject's powerful homosexual desires, in this particular instance related directly to his beloved father-in-law, are close to breaking through to conscious awareness from their many years of total repression and denial. To have this happen would indeed be terrifying for it would force him to face and deal with, for the first time, his strong homosexual nature. If he had the ego-strength to do this, however, the "evil spirits" which had haunted him since the age of fifteen would disappear forever and he would grow emotionally into a more mature and happier human being, no matter the final outcome of his sexuality, whether homosexual or heterosexual.
693 For all students of psychiatry, Schreber, its most famous patient, offers unique insight into the mind of a schizophrenic, his thinking, language, behavior, delusions and hallucinations, and into the inner development, course and outcome of the illness. His autobiography has the advantage of being complete to an extent no case history taken by a physician can ever be: its material is not selected or subject to elaboration or omission by an intermediary between the patient and his psychosis, and between both and the reader. Every student therefore has access to the totality of the patient's products. Indeed the Memoirs may be called the best text on psychiatry written for psychiatrists by a patient. Schreber's psychosis is minutely and expertly described, but its content is - as Dr. Weber explained to the Court - fundamentally the same and has the same features as that of other mental patients. Schreber's name is legion. We ourselves have learnt from it things which neither textbooks we read, nor lectures we attended could teach us. It helped us understand the actions and speech of chronic psychotics, enabling us to make contact with them, and in this way lessen their alienation. In milder patients, particularly hypochondriacs and schizophrenics, we could help them understand their concern and preoccupation with body and body functions, or vague anxiety in terms of fantasies and budding delusions about their physical and mental identity. We have talked and listened to many Schrebers since we studied the Memoirs. [ (Ibid, Quotation 992, pp. 25, 26.) ]
Drs. Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter (mother and son) performed a very great service for the English-speaking world when they were the first scholars/psychiatrists to translate Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness into English in l950. Considering the fact the book was first published in Germany at the turn of the century and was very favorably reviewed in 1903, this translation was long overdue. Schreber's Memoirs has the well-deserved reputation of being the most important psychiatric case ever chronicled and studied, and is the one from which Sigmund Freud drew the material to support his revolutionary theory that paranoia is invariably caused by repressed homosexual drives. As Drs. Macalpine and Hunter so eloquently describe Schreber's seminal work, "To write such a frank autobiographical account required Judge Schreber's intellect, his determination to grapple with his madness, his training in logical thinking, his inborn quest for truth, his integrity, absolute frankness, and finally admirable courage in laying his innermost thoughts and feelings bare before other people, knowing that they thought him mad." Windscheid, 1904, stated that "Never before have the symptoms of paranoia been offered in such detail and so completely... because of his high intelligence and logical training, Schreber's presentation must be called perfect by the well-informed physician. The book is therefore recommended to all psychiatrists." And Pelman, in another 1903 review of the book, declared that "Dr. Schreber's Memoirs stand sky-high above publications of other mental patients... Written without malicious intent, they contain the story of his mental illness from his point of view and are of the greatest interest... The great clinical value of this book is further enhanced by the inclusion of Court documents and medical reports... The Memoirs deserve the closest study." Judge Schreber was indirectly the first person to solve the mystery of the genesis of mental illness by so ruthlessly and honestly reporting on his own bisexual conflict and gender confusion, to an extent that had never been done before. He thus provided the astonishing insights which enabled other investigators, including Freud, to see into the deepest levels of the core conflict which invariably fuels the myriad symptoms of mental illness, the very conflict which had driven him insane, just as it has every other person who has ever become functionally mentally ill, or psychotic. As has been stated many times before, "Schreber's name is legion." It can truly be said that mankind owes Judge Daniel Paul Schreber an incalculable debt of gratitude for gifting it with the invaluable knowledge to be gained through a careful reading of the chronicles he so faithfully kept describing the tumultuous course of his psychosis and the intense physical and mental agonies he experienced during it.
692 The patient's [Daniel Paul Schreber] delusional system amounts to this: he is called to redeem the world and to bring back to mankind the lost state of Blessedness. He maintains he has been given this task by direct divine inspiration, similar to that taught by the prophets; he maintains that nerves in a state of excitation, as his have been for a long time, have the property of attracting God, but it is a question of things which are either not at all expressible in human language or only with great difficulty, because he maintains they lie outside all human experience and have only been revealed to him. The most essential part of his mission of redemption is that it is necessary for him first of all to be transformed into a woman. Not, however, that he wishes to be transformed into a woman, it is much more a must according the Order of the World, which he simply cannot escape, even though he would personally very much prefer to remain in his honourable manly position in life. But the beyond was not to be gained again for himself and the whole of mankind other than by this future transformation into a woman by way of divine miracle in the course of years or decades. He maintains that he is the exclusive object of divine miracles, and with it the most remarkable human being that ever lived on earth. For years at every hour and every minute he experiences these miracles in his body, has them confirmed also by voices that speak to him. He maintains that in the early years of his illness he suffered destruction of individual organs of his body, of a kind which would have brought death to every other human being, that he lived for a long time without stomach, without intestines, bladder, almost without lungs, with smashed ribs, torn gullet, that he had at times eaten part of his own larynx with his food, etc.; but divine miracles ("rays") had always restored the destroyed organs, and therefore, as long as he remained a man, he was absolutely immortal. These threatening phenomena have long ago disappeared, and in their place his "femaleness" had come to the fore; it is a question of an evolutionary process which in all probability will take decades if not centuries for its completion and the end of which is unlikely to be witnessed by any human being now alive. He has the feeling that already masses of "female nerves" have been transferred into his body, from which through immediate fertilization by God new human beings would come forth. Only then would he be able to die a natural death and have gained for himself as for all other human beings the state of Blessedness. In the meantime not only the sun but also the trees and the birds, which he thinks are something like "remains of previous human souls transformed by miracles", speak to him in human tones and everywhere around (p.388) him miracles are enacted." It is not really necessary to go further into all the details of these delusional ideas, which by the way are developed and motivated with remarkable clarity and logical precision - the description given should suffice to give an idea of the content of the patient's delusional system and of his pathologically altered conception of the world, and it only remains to mention that also in the patient's behavior, in the clean shaving of his face, in his pleasure in feminine toilet articles, in small feminine occupations, in the tendency to undress more or less and to look at himself in the mirror, to decorate himself with gay ribbons and bows, etc., in a feminine way, the pathological direction of his fantasy is manifested continually. At the same time the hallucinatory processes, as already mentioned above, continue in unaltered intensity and they as well as certain pathological motor impulses are shown by very noticeable involuntary automatic actions. As the patient himself declares, he is very frequently forced by day and night to utter "unnatural bellowing sounds"; he affirms that he cannot control them, that it is a matter of divine miracles, of supernatural happenings, which cannot be understood by other human beings, and these vociferations, based on physical compulsion, and very annoying also for his environment, occur so unremittingly that they disturb the patient's nightly rest in the most painful way and necessitate the use of sleeping drugs. [ Dr. G. Weber, Superintendent of the Asylum [9th December 1899, at Sonnenstein Asylum in Pirna, Kingdom of Saxony, Germany], Area Psychiatrist, Psychiatric Adviser to the Court, as published in Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, by Daniel Paul Schreber, Translated, Edited, with Introduction, Notes and Discussion by Ida Macalpine, M.D., and Richard A. Hunter, M.D., M.R.C.P., D.P.M., Wm. Dawson & Sons, Ltd., London, 1955, pp. 272, 273. ]
From even a cursory reading of the above quotation, it is shockingly evident that the mental patient Daniel Paul Schreber is stark, raving mad - as mad as one can possibly be. And it is also glaringly evident that the immediate cause of his madness stems from his severe bisexual conflict/gender confusion, amply illustrated by means of his florid bearded lady symptomatology." This case finally lays bare for all to see the basic underlying conflict which invariably generates the fierce and fearsome symptoms of all mental illness, in both males and females - in the latter by simply reversing the psychic imagery of the psychosis. In the male it is always the repressed and denied wish to be a female and love men, while in the female it is the wish to be a male and love women." It was from this case, the so-called "Schreber case", considered by many to be the most important psychiatric case ever studied, that Sigmund Freud drew the evidence on which he based his groundbreaking theory that the symptoms of paranoia occur inevitably as the result of repressed homosexual wishes and feelings in the individual so afflicted, regardless of the gender, social standing, race or any other defining characteristics of that person." If Daniel Paul Schreber had consciously been able to acknowledge and accept the reality that his gender-dystonic homosexual feelings were his alone, and not the result of some outside source - i.e. God - forcing them upon him so it would be necessary for him to create a new race of human beings on earth, he would have become just an ordinary, effeminate homosexual man rather than the raving maniac he turned into. He could not bear to accept what to him would be the frightful reality of his homosexual wishes, and consequently he fled from them into the relative safety of his paranoid delusions. And so it is in all cases of mental illness. "Schreber's name is legion", the concept which was very clearly stated by G. Weber, the superintendent of the asylum where Schreber was held during the most severe stages of his psychosis. As superintendent Weber explained to the court, Schreber's psychosis differed little in form or content from that of any other inmate in the asylum.
691 HOUSTON - Andrea Yates, who said she drowned her five children in the bathtub because she believed she was saving them from Satan, was found not guilty by reason of insanity Wednesday at her second murder trial … ... Yates had a well-chronicled history of mental problems, which had led to several hospitalizations and at least two suicide attempts. A deeply religious woman, she believed she was failing to properly home school her children in the Houston suburb of Clear Lake and was haunted by visions that one of her sons would become a gay prostitute. [ “Jury Finds Yates Legally Insane in Murder Retrial,” by Miguel Bustillo, Los Angeles Times, July 27, 2006 ]
Andrea Yates was obviously suffering from a very severe case of paranoid schizophrenia when she killed her five children. And the clue to her severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion, invariably the cause of schizophrenia and its related mental illnesses, lies in the last sentence of the above quotation wherein it was stated that she was "haunted by visions that one of her sons would become a gay prostitute." Actually the real fear which "haunted" Andrea Yates was the fear of her own powerful homosexual nature which she had repressed completely her entire life due to the strictures of her narrow religious beliefs which designated homosexuality as sinful and "Satanic". In her insane mind, utilizing the psychological mechanism of projection which is invariably operative in paranoia, one of her sons, the oldest of whom was seven at the time of his murder, becomes the one she fears might turn out to be homosexual, and not herself. Furthermore, Yates's severe gender confusion was demonstrated by the fact she chose a male, a son, to represent her own homosexual fears. In her irrational mind, she unconsciously identified not only as a sinful, "Satanic" homosexual but also as a masculine one, the gay male prostitute in her "visions", i.e. her paranoid schizophrenic delusions. Lastly, in news photographs of Andrea Yates, it is extremely difficult to discern any traces of genuine femininity in her appearance. Her basic masculine nature predominates. Thus schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease, has once again become the instigator of a terrible human tragedy.
690 These sudden reintegrations of tendencies opposed to homosexual activity in turn set up the situation of homosexual cravings, with consequences similar to those above indicated. That the outcome in these individuals who have had earlier overt experience is somewhat less ominous than is the case in its absence is not only theoretically to be expected, but actually the case both in the paranoid developments and in those who undergo schizophrenic disorders. (27) [ (Ibid Quotation 689, p. 214) ]
What Dr. Sullivan is emphasizing here is the fact that persons who have had actual homosexual experiences, either in reality or by means of masturbatory fantasy, and then subsequently repress the memory of them, for whatever reasons, fare much better psychologically when these repressed homosexual cravings inevitably force their way back into conscious awareness than do those persons who are experiencing consciously for the first time sudden, frightening eruptions of homosexual desires and longings.
689 In any case, the appearance within awareness of the homoerotic interest stirs such violent self-reproach that a dissociation or a vigorous defensive process results. If the self is able to dissociate the abhorrent system, the personality continues thereafter to be in grave danger of panic with succeeding schizophrenia, unless the sexual tensions are being drained off by some collateral procedure such as frequent masturbation or more or less definitely autosexual intercourse with women. Moreover, under cover of the dissociation, experience in any case continues to be integrated into the dissociated system, and its partition of energy in the personality to grow. [ Harry Stack Sullivan, M.D., Personal Psychopathology, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, l972, p. 212. ]
The great psycho-analyst Harry Stack Sullivan here succinctly and brilliantly describes the psychological and physical mechanics underlying all functional mental illness. First, there appears in the person's conscious mind the sudden awareness of the dreaded homosexual wishes, followed immediately by the harsh denial and repression of these wishes, and then by their slow but unrelenting buildup in the unconscious mind until the sheer force of the accumulated sexual tensions underlying them cause the breaking point to be reached. It is at this stage of the malignant process that the so-called "homosexual panic" takes over and invariably ushers in the onset of the frank schizophrenic symptomatology.
688 When I was writing down these fantasies, I once asked myself, "What am I really doing? Certainly this has nothing to do with science. But then what is it?" Whereupon a voice within me said, "It is art." I was astonished. It had never entered my head that what I was writing had any connection with art. Then I thought, "Perhaps my unconscious is forming a personality that is not me, but which is insisting on coming through to expression." I knew for a certainty that the voice had come from a woman. I recognized it as the voice of a patient, a talented psychopath who had a strong transference to me. She had become a living figure within my mind. Obviously what I was doing wasn't science. What then could it be but art? It was as though these were the only alternatives in the world. That is the way a woman's mind works. I said very emphatically to this voice that my fantasies had nothing to do with art and I felt a great inner resistance. No voice came through, however, and I kept on writing. Then came the next assault, and again the same assertion: "That is art." This time I caught her and said, "No, it is not art! On the contrary, it is nature," and prepared myself for an argument. When nothing of the sort occurred, I reflected that the "woman within me" did not have the speech centers I had. And so I suggested that she use mine. She did so and came through with a long statement. I was greatly intrigued by the fact that a woman should interfere with me from within. My conclusion was that she must be the "soul", in the primitive sense, and I began to speculate on the reasons why the name "anima" was given to the soul. Why was it thought of as feminine? Later I came to see that this inner feminine figure plays a typical, or archetypal, role in the unconscious of man, and I called her the "anima". The corresponding figure in the unconscious of woman I called the "animus." [ (Ibid, QUOTATION 687, pages 185, 186.) ]
Out of the turmoil and anguish inflicted upon his psyche by the psychotic visions and hallucinations which he was enduring during this period, Jung's powerful bisexual conflict emerges in the form of "the woman within me." This hallucinated person who had become "a living figure within me" was the embodiment of his strongly homosexual nature, hitherto severely repressed and denied. It had finally broken through into conscious awareness only as the result of his psychosis. Unfortunately Jung never admitted in his writings, or elsewhere, from this time forth that this "anima" he had discovered within himself was in reality also a crude, lustful, sexual being. Instead, he treated her wholly as a spiritual being who was an integral part of his "soul". For this reason his recovery from his psychosis, as stated previously, was essentially a social recovery only, without insight, and thus left him prone to a lifetime of continuing mental illness, or schizophrenia, though never again on such a severe scale as before. Jung's theory of the "animus" and "anima" within everyone was but a desexualized version of Freud's theory of the basic bisexual nature of us all. It was a version of the psyche which was received much more acceptingly at that time in so-called polite society than was Freud's more elemental, yet more truthful, bisexually-based one. Even today this is the basic theoretical concept differentiating the followers of Freud and Jung.
687 Toward the autumn of 1913 the pressure which I had felt was in me seemed to be moving outward, as though there were something in the air. The atmosphere actually seemed to me darker than it had been. It was as though the sense of oppression no longer sprang exclusively from a psychic situation, but from concrete reality. This feeling grew more and more intense. In October, while I was alone on a journey, I was suddenly seized by an overpowering vision: I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came up to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country. I realized that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood. This vision lasted about one hour. I was perplexed and nauseated, and ashamed of my weakness. Two weeks passed; then the vision recurred, under the same conditions, even more vividly than before, and the blood was more emphasized. An inner voice spoke. "Look at it well; it is wholly real and it will be so. You cannot doubt it." T hat winter someone asked me what I thought were the political prospects of the world in the future. I replied that I had no thoughts on the matter, but that I saw rivers of blood. I asked myself whether these visions pointed to a revolution, but could not readily imagine anything of the sort. And so I drew the conclusion that they had to do with me myself, and decided that I was menaced by a psychosis. The idea of war did not occur to me at all. An incessant stream of fantasies had been released, and I did my best not to lose my head but to find some way to understand these strange things. I stood helpless before an alien world; everything in it seemed difficult and incomprehensible. I was living in a constant state of tension; often I felt as if gigantic blocks of stone were tumbling down upon me. One thunderstorm followed another. My enduring these storms was a question of brute strength. Others have been shattered by them - Nietzsche, and Holderin, and many others. But there was a demonic strength in me, and from the beginning there was no doubt in my mind that I must find the meaning of what I was experiencing in these fantasies. When I endured these assaults of the unconscious I had an unswerving conviction that I was obeying a higher will, and that feeling continued to uphold me until I had mastered the task. Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight. He was a mysterious figure to me. At times he seemed to me quite real, as if he were a living personality. I went walking up and down the garden with him, and to me he was what the Indians call a guru. Whenever the outlines of a new personification appeared, I felt it almost as a personal defeat. It meant: "Here is something else you didn't know until now!" Fear crept over me that the succession of such figures might be endless, that I might lose myself in bottomless abysses of ignorance. My ego felt devalued - although the successes I had been having in worldly affairs might have reassured me. In my darkness (horridas nostrae mentis purga tenebras - "cleanse the horrible darkness of our mind" - The Aurora Consurgens4 says) I could have wished for nothing better than a real live guru, someone possessing superior knowledge and ability, who would have disentangled for me the involuntary creations of imagination. This task was undertaken by the figure of Philemon, whom in this respect I had willy-nilly to recognize as my psychagogue. And the fact was that he conveyed to me many an illuminating idea. [ Memories, Dreams, Reflections, by C.G. Jung, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe, translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston, Vintage Book, New York, 1961, 1962, 1963, pages 175-177, 183-184. ]
The famed psychologist, C. G. Jung, is here describing vividly a period in his life when he was afflicted by a very severe paranoid schizophrenic psychosis. He eventually recovered, but his return from madness took the form of a social recovery without insight, as opposed to one with insight. By this is meant that he never truly came to grips with the basic etiological cause of his madness, namely, his bisexual conflict and gender confusion. As a result of this lack of insight it can truthfully be stated that he never completely regained his full intellectual and emotional faculties, a truth borne out by the fact that his later theoretical conjectures veered off into the strange, occult world of mythology. This is certainly one of the major factors which played a role in his final estrangement from his erstwhile friend and admirer, Sigmund Freud.
686 Hello, I will make this brief as I don't want to take up too much of your time. I have recently read up about Bearded Lady Disease online. I was diagnosed with Bipolar type one after psychotic episodes I had last year. Is it truly possible I could cure my disease with psychotherapy? I had strong male-male friendships while young that I broke off when they became too intimate. I had early and lasting sexual attraction to women but a powerful homosexual crush in high school. I put it out of my mind in college and later when a female love interest I was obsessed with rejected me I began growing psychotic. I have undergone such terrible pains with this disorder, and any advice you have for me (I will buy the book, but otherwise) would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much. Sincerely, - [Name deleted for privacy reasons.] [ Source: A personal communication. ]
This is obviously a person afflicted with schizophrenia - the bearded lady disease, caused, as it invariably is, by intense bisexual conflict and gender confusion. "Bipolar type 1", as the patient was informed his condition is called, is just a newer term for "manic-depressive insanity", which it was known by in the 19th and early 20th century, and which later became "schizophrenia", thanks to its naming by Professor Eugen Bleuler. This case, however, should have a welcome outcome because the bisexual conflict/gender confusion conflict is now on a conscious level where it can be dealt with in intensive psychotherapy in order to resolve it, one way or another. By that is meant that the psychotherapy will lead either to the subject's comfortable acceptance of a homosexual lifestyle or else his maturation into heterosexuality. His phrase "I put it out of my mind in college" refers to his repression into the unconscious of his homosexual longings. With "the return of the repressed" ( S. Freud), these unconscious longings became powerful enough to fuel his "obsessive" interest in a "female love interest" (a reaction-formation against his powerful homoerotic longings) and his following slide into psychosis. Again, fortunately, the subject presently seems to have a very clear understanding of how his bisexual conflict has contributed so fundamentally to his psychological distress, and with the successful outcome of the intensive psychotherapy it has been strongly recommended he undertake, the "terrible pains" he has suffered "with this disorder" should happily cease once and for all, since they have been caused not by the homosexual longings themselves but by his repression of them. |
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