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783 - 771

783.

       In 1979, I visited Philip K. Dick for a profile I was writing. In a modest apartment he shared with dusty stacks of books, deteriorating furniture, a vintage stereo system and a couple of cats, he took the opportunity to go public about a singular experience dominating his life. For the past five years, he told me earnestly, he had been receiving messages from a spiritual entity. "It invaded my mind and assumed control of my motor centers," he said. "It set about healing me physically and my 4-year-old boy, who had an undiagnosed life-threatening birth defect that no one had been aware of. It has memories dating back 2,000 years...There wasn't anything that it didn't seem to know."
       Dick had already written more than a million words of personal notes on this topic, he said, notes he referred to as his "exegesis" -- a word that traditionally means an explanation or interpretation of Scripture. In his case he was trying to explain the voices inside his head.
       The delusions of a penurious science fiction writer might seem of marginal interest, except that Philip K. Dick was not just any science fiction writer. Shortly after his death in 1982, his book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" became the movie "Blade Runner." Since then, no fewer than 10 other motion pictures have been based on his work, including "Total Recall" and "Minority Report." He is widely regarded as one of the most conceptually innovative writers in the 20th century, whose influence has been acknowledged by novelists from William Gibson to Ursula K. Le Guin. [ ....... ]
       The struggle of a highly intelligent man to find a rational explanation for something inexplicable inside himself could make fascinating reading, if it was thoughtfully organized. Alas, the "Exegesis" pursues its target in the manner of a shotgun firing randomly in every direction. Dick ruminates, cogitates and associates freely from one topic to the next. He mulls the content of his dreams, descends into the labyrinths of metaphysical hypotheses and (ironically) wonders how he can ever use this material to create a publishable book.
       Nor does he succeed in explaining the source of his visions. Jackson and Lethem acknowledge it could have been merely a stroke, residual brain damage from drug use or temporal lobe epilepsy; but they seem unimpressed by such pedestrian possibilities. They insist that "to approach the 'Exegesis' from any angle at all a reader must first accept that the subject is revelation." [ ........ ]
       What's missing here is context. From my interactions with Dick, I know many of these musings were written while he stayed up all night, sometimes in an alcoholic haze, while perusing his favorite source, Macmillan's Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (edited by Paul Edwards). He also retained a healthy sense of humor about his supposed tutelary spirit. "On Thursdays and Saturdays, I would think it was God," he told me, "while on Tuesdays and Wednesdays I would think it was extraterrestrial. Sometimes I would think it was the Soviet Union Academy of Sciences trying out their psychotronic microwave telepathic transmitter."
       Fortunately, he retained this humor and self-skepticism when he grappled with his metaphysical ideas in his 1981 novel "Valis." Here he portrayed himself as an eminently sane observer, engaging in dialogues with a delusional alter ego whom he named Horselover Fat. [ ........ ]
       The "Exegesis" takes itself much more seriously, and becomes tiresome as a result. The editors note that Dick's children, who are the heirs to his estate, weren't entirely happy about its being published, in case it "attracted unwelcome attention and threatend to undermine their father's growing academic and literary reputation with its disreputable aura of high weirdness."

[ Charles Platt, Dreaming of Androids, a review of The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, edited by Pamela Jackson, Jonathan Lethem and Erik Davis. Illustrated. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. / The New York Times Book Review, Sunday, December 18, 2011, p. 24. ]

782.

A.

       It was in April of 1938 that Dr. Cerletti began delivering, on alternate days, to some of the more psychotic and suicidally depressed patients, between ten and twenty ECT shocks. And you'll be happy to hear that the results were nothing short of miraculous. For example: 90 percent of the gang with everything from your wilted-garden-variety depression to hopeless catatonia showed everything from moderate to tremendous improvement! (The unhelped 10 percent were probably the agents of the improved 90.) And of course the other handy upside was that, for the most part, these patients wouldn't remember much from right before to a few weeks after their treatment, so it was rare that the patients complained about the experience.
       Not that, in the beginning, there weren't complaint-worthy aspects of the procedure. In the earliest days, the ECT seizures could be so violent that your bones might break, especially those that were commonly referred to as the "long bones." But it wasn't long before doctors discovered a medication that could not only prevent the previously unavoidable convulsions but would also protect the longer bones of the formerly vulnerable arms and legs. Soon after, the administering of a short-term anesthesia ensured that the patients no longer even had to be conscious during those miraculously healing seizures.
       Of course, ECT is rarely considered as treatment until all other valuable medications and talk therapies have failed. Then and only then, do they suggest that you light up the dark and gloomy skies behind your forehead.

[ Carrie Fisher, Shockaholic, Simon & Schuster, New York, NY, 2011, pp. 8-9. See also www.struckbyliving.com ]

B.

       However, contrary to widespread belief, electroconvulsive therapy is extremely effective. A family friend, Dr. Leon Rosenberg, a geneticist and former dean of Yale Medical School, has the same malady. As a patient overwhelmed by suicidal depression, he made remarkable progress after electroconvulsive therapy. As a doctor, he described his own case in a medical journal and discusses his descent and recovery with students.

[ Jamie Stiehm, My So-Called Bipolar Life, The New York Times, January 16, 2012, Op-Ed page, A17. ]

C.

       Psychoanalytic observations of schizophrenics subjected to insulin shock therapy provides another opportunity for an understanding of the role of latent homosexuality in the origin of paranoid schizophrenia. In particular, these observations illustrate the important role played by the homosexual disappointment and the homosexual panic. The cathartic discharge provoked by the insulin coma creates a release of repressed libidinal impulses. The ambivalent homosexual attitude becomes split into its two components, with the positive one invested ideally in the transference reaction and thus accessible to analytic interpretation and working through.
       Psychoanalytic investigations have demonstrated the affinity between homosexuality and the schizophrenic break. In certain complex cases of latent homosexuality, the counter-cathexis, built by the ego in order to maintain the dissociation of the psychotic core from the rest of the ego, is so precarious that the psychotic invasion occurs, as it were, spontaneously and periodically.

[ Gustav Bychowski, M.D., Homosexuality and Psychosis in Perversions, Psychodynamics and Therapy, edited by Sandor Lorand, M.D., Random House, Inc., New York, 1956, p. 98. ]

D.

       His [Daniel Paul Schreber's] excitement, which had its origin in the non-psychotic part of the personality, took a different course from that in the pre-psychotic period prior to the psychosis. In the pre-psychotic period the excitement led to genital emissions; a few weeks later, in the psychosis, before a situation leading to excitement could arise, the energy of the homosexual urge was withdrawn and then used to form the hallucination. Thus the hallucination is formed in anticipation of a danger. The energy of the homosexual urge evaporates in forming the hallucination. The hallucination is therefore a discharge phenomenon which serves to prevent the development of danger. Of course when the homosexual urge acquires energy again, then the danger returns.

[ Maurits Katan, M.D., The Importance of the Non-Psychotic Part of the Personality in Schizophrenia / International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, No. 35, 1954, p. 126. ]

781.

FORT MEADE, Md. -- The military hearing against Pfc. Bradley Manning closed on Thursday, with lawyers and onlookers alternately portraying the young soldier as a traitor who acted with premeditation and as an emotionally troubled whistleblower. [ ....... ]

       Mr. Coombs portrayed Private Manning as a man struggling with emotional issues, stemming primarily from years of having to hide that he felt he was born a woman in a man's body. His lawyers said he had reached out to his commanding officers for help and emotional support, but they had ignored his problems. And, the lawyers said, Private Manning saw himself as a whistleblower, not a traitor.
       "My client was young [24]," Mr. Coombs said. "He thought he could make a difference." [ ....... ]

       Throughout the hearing, Mr. Manning's lawyers have attempted to portray their client as a deeply troubled young man, struggling with gender identity issues during a time when the military was governed by the "don't ask, don't tell" policy that prohibited gay men and lesbians from serving openly. [ ....... ]

       Testimony by one of Private Manning's former supervisors seemed to support the defense argument. Jihrleah Showman, who also worked as an intelligence analyst, said she had warned commanders on several occasions that Private Manning was in severe emotional distress and should not be allowed to handle classified material.
       Ms. Showman said she told commanders that she believed Private Manning suffered "elevated levels of paranoia," and that he reported feeling like he was constantly being watched.
       She said the soldier's outbursts were so "uncontrolled" that she believed he posed a threat to himself and others. And she said she urged her commanders not to deploy him to Iraq.
       She described three occasions that she said exemplified Private Manning's erratic behavior, including one when he "was screaming at the top of his lungs and waving his hands," at an officer. In a second incident with a different officer, Ms. Showman said, Private Manning flipped over a table and lunged at him. And in the third incident, Ms. Showman said, Private Manning punched her in the face.
       She said the attack was "unprovoked."

[ Ginger Thompson, "Competing Portraits of Document Leaker," The New York Times, December 23, 2011, p. A13. ]

780.

A.

MISSION Tex. -- On the last night of his life, Joaquin Luna Jr., 18, filled the pages of a spiral notebook with goodbyes. In brief letters to relatives, friends and teachers, he asked one of his brothers to take care of his nephews and his niece and told a friend he had left a memento for her in his bible.
       One letter was different from the rest. It was addressed to Jesus Christ and in it he asked for forgiveness. "Jesus," he wrote, "I've realized I have no chance in becoming a civil engineer the way I've always dreamed of here ... so I'm planning on going to you and helping you construct the new temple in heaven." [.......]

       Still others have questioned what role, if any, Mr. Luna's immigration status played in his suicide. Although his relatives claimed that he committed suicide because of the pressure he felt, none of the letters mentioned his illegal status. In his letter to Jesus, he suggested that another issue was troubling him, saying he was "fearful to fall in any temptation," though he did not elaborate [.......]

       Mr. Luna was a shy, lanky young man who played guitar in church bands and helped care for his diabetic mother near the border in Hidalgo County, one of the poorest counties in America, where 35.2 percent of the population lived below the poverty line in 2009. [.......]

       Mr. Luna, who was born in Reynosa, Mexico, and came to the United States as an infant, was not like most teenagers in Mission. He drew the blueprints that were used to build his mother's new house and spoke often of becoming either an architect or a civil engineer. He joked that he did not have time for a girlfriend, spending many weekends mowing lawns to pay for his electric guitar and lessons. [.......]

       In recent weeks, administrators at the school and several people close to Mr. Luna said he had given no indication anything was wrong. But on Nov. 25, the day after Thanksgiving, he put on a maroon shirt and a tie, lay down next to his mother and told her he was sorry he was never going to be the person he wanted to be, relatives said, then he went into the bathroom, put a handgun underneath his chin and pulled the trigger. [.......]

Guadalupe Trevino, the Hidalgo County Sheriff, said that Mr. Luna's death had been ruled a suicide, but that investigators had not established a motive.
       "I'm very disappointed that some folks, and even some of our elected leaders, have exploited this young man's ill decision to take his own life, especially when we have found no evidence that points to any particular motive," Sheriff Trevino said. "Nobody knows why he did it. Only he knows for sure why he did what he did."

[ By Manny Fernandez, "Disillusioned Young Immigrant Kills Himself, Starting an Emotional Debate," The New York Times, December 11, 2001. ]

B.

From my material, in which negative instances are conspicuously absent, I am forced to the conclusion that schizophrenic illnesses in the male [or female] are intimately related as a sequel to unfortunate prolongation of the attachment of the son [or daughter] and the mother. That schizophrenic disorders are but one of the possible outcomes of persisting immature attitudes subtending the mother and son [or daughter] relationship must be evident. The failure of growth of heterosexual interests, with persistence of autoerotic or homosexual interests in adolescence, is the general formula. The factors that determine a schizophrenic outcome may be clarified by a discussion on the one hand of the situations to which I shall refer as homosexual cravings and acute masturbation conflict--often immediate precursors of grave psychosis--and of the various homo-erotic and autoerotic procedures, on the other.

[ Harry Stack Sullivan, M.D., "Personal Psychopathology / Early Formulations," W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, 1972, p. 211. ]

C.

The mother's attitude was so subtly ingratiating and yet domineering that she would almost have to be destroyed as a mother if the patient were to free herself from its terrible influence and win her own womanhood and independence. [Likewise for male patients, in order to win their own manhood and independence. / jmm.]

[ Edward J. Kempf, M.D., "Psychopathology," C. V. Mosby Co., St. Louis, Missouri, 1920. ]

779.

A.

Since 1988 when Ian experienced his first auditory communications from "God", his understanding of his role in the universe has changed. He explains that "God" made many promises to him, which He, "God" reneged on for the purpose of providing him with anxiety and emotional suffering to test his commitment and long-term reliability. Recently, Ian has been assured that he met the tests adequately. Specifically, "God" has informed him that he has suffered 100% of the pain that Jesus suffered on the cross, and is therefore, to be honored by "God" with a place in eternity relatively equal to the place assigned to Jesus. In fact, at the judgment scene where all persons, who have ever lived, come before the Almighty for assignment in some stage in Heaven or Hell, "God", Jesus and Ian will do the judging. To make it into paradise all people will have to profess belief in "God", in Jesus and in Ian as part of the godhead. His role has now been defined as the "wife of God" since he has been on such intimate terms with "God". Why "God" needs a wife in eternity is not explained to mortals.

In His conversations with Ian "God" identified a number of different times and places that He, "God" would request Ian's identity as the White Horseman to mankind. To Ian's disappointment, all the promised events failed to materialize leaving him in great emotional pain. The "God" he put his trust in appeared to be lying to Ian. In each of those occasions he pulled himself together and prepared to believe in "God's" next promise. "God's" latest explanation to him is that this was part of the testing process to see if he could stand up under persecution.

The latest word now is that the testing is over and that "God" will reveal him as the White Horseman in the not distant future. Worldwide media will all be involved and the cele-brations will be worldwide. Meanwhile, Jesus talks to him many times each day and reveals to him esoteric information which cannot be refuted.

When Ian first announced his new found mission in life his parents sought psychiatric help for him. Several psychiatrists agreed that Ian was schizophrenic and delusional with audi-tory hallucinations. He was given medication and a little personal counseling.

Believing himself to be perfectly normal, actually super-normal, he fought against taking the medication and became extremely hostile. A several month stay at a research hospital in the capital city followed. There, he was alternatively beaten by attendants and placed into segregation. He remembers those days as very painful.

His pattern changed very little during the ensuing years with periodic "normal" periods when he held jobs for months at a time. In 2002 he returned from California to live with his mother. All went well for a few months until he decided to go off his medication. Police intervened and jail followed where because of his wildness and uncooperativeness he was given a special kind of probation which required his compliance with the medication protocol. When that failed to produce and therapeutic results a move to his father's house ensued. That also failed and a new regime was defined by the court which dispensed his medication dialed on schedule.

Today, Ian is happier than at any time during the preceding 20 years. The promised future of being transformed into a beautiful young woman through all eternity who is also the wife of "God" Almighty makes him smile. And smile he might when one thinks of what he has accomplished in life.

Jim Smith (a fictitious name used for privacy reasons.)

[ For the complete article, please refer on this website to:

"A Case Review of an Individual with Schizophrenia." ]

B.

Without going further into all the details of the course of his illness, attention is drawn to the way in which from the early more acute psychosis which influenced all psychic processes and which could be called hallucinatory insanity, the paranoid form of illness became more and more marked, crystallized out so to speak, into its present picture.

This kind of illness is, as is well known, characterized by the fact that next to a more or less fixed elaborate delusional system there is complete possession of mental faculties and orientation, formal logic is retained, marked affective reactions are missing, neither intelligence nor memory are particularly affected and the conception and judgment of indifferent matters, that is to say matters far removed from the delusional ideas, appear not to be particularly affected, although naturally because of the unity of all psychic events they are not untouched by them.

Thus President Schreber now appears neither confused, nor psychically inhibited, nor markedly affected in his intelligence, apart from the psychomotor symptoms which stand out clearly as pathological even to the casual observer: he is circumspect, his memory excellent, he commands a great deal of knowledge, not only in matters of law but in many other fields, and is able to reproduce it in an orderly manner, he is interested in political, scientific and artistic events, etc., and occupies himself with them continuously (although recently he seems to have been distracted from them a little more again), and little would be noticeable in these directions to an observer not informed of his total state. Nevertheless, the patient is filled with pathological ideas, which are woven into a complete system, more or less fixed, and not amenable to correction by objective evidence and judgment of circumstances as they really are; the latter still less so as hallucinatory and delusory processes continue to be of importance to him and hinder normal evaluation of sensory impressions. As a rule the patient does not mention these pathological ideas or only hints at them, but it is evident how much he is occupied by them, partly from some of his writings (extracts of some are added), partly it is easily seen from his whole bearing.

The patient's 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 to 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 earlier 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 him miracles are enacted.

[ Dr. G. Weber, Superintendent of the Sonnenstein Asylum, in Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, by Daniel Paul Schreber, Wm. Dawson & Sons Ltd., London, 1955, pp. 267-274 * 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. ]

(See Dr. Weber's full report to the court, click here.)

778.

A.

Spalding Gray moved to New York City in 1967, shortly after his mother's suicide, when he was 26. He lived with his girlfriend, Elizabeth LeCompte, in an apartment on Sixth Street and Avenue D, on the Lower East Side. [........]
     The late 60's and 70's were a period of great artistic and personal ferment for Gray, as he struggled through a nervous breakdown and the dissolution of his relationship with LeCompte and toward confessional monologue for which he would later become famous.
     In his personal writings, Gray comes across in a more extreme way than in his theatrical persona, his anguish and need not tempered by his perceptive charm. He writes searchingly about his sexuality. He chronicles his relationships with the three major women in his life -- first LeCompte, then Renée Shafransky and later Kathleen Russo -- each one overlapping with the last, each becoming involved in his work. And it is evident that even as a young man, Gray was battling the demons that would eventually lead him to end his life in 2004 by throwing himself from the Staten Island ferry into the water.

April 20, 1970 ------------------------------------------

I want to see
     why?
     because seeing makes me feel more alive, but at the same time it makes me feel that I could kill myself
     all I have written in the past boils down to these
questions
     how much truth can a person take?
     how honest will I be able to be?

March 7, 1972 ------------------------------------------

I realize that the jig is up. This lazy in-between: I've really got to come to terms with Liz, me, the work -- who I am and what in hell am I doing with my life -- without comparisons. I feel as though I'm reaching a large crisis point in my life...I can't turn away from it.

March 18, 1972 ------------------------------------------

Very confused about my bisexual feelings. This morning Liz and I woke early after a late night.
[ ...... ] ...Liz accused me of not fully loving her, of dislike of women in general.

B.

     In 1976, when Gray was 34, he traveled throughout India with a production of Bertolt Brecht's "Mother Courage and Her Children," put on by the Performance Group. While there he had a nervous breakdown. His downward emotional spiral would continue as he traveled from India to Amsterdam, where he became physically frail and consumed by a fever.
     The following is from an undated [diary] entry narrating a series of events that he would later come to call his "India Breakdown."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I began to drink beer and smoke a lot of cigarettes. I was not treating myself well and felt I was on a self-destruct spiral. I could not will myself to leave Amsterdam and spent days and nights wandering the streets obsessed with Bali and Greece. ... I could not make up my mind. America or Bali or Greece. I started to get overwrought and just plain crazy. I began to look for "signs" that I would try to interpret. An example of a sign: I SAW a man from Indonesia on the street, and I ASKED him when he came to Amsterdam and he said, "1941," and I'd try to read that. I'd try to figure it out and make a map or structure out of it. Like: "Let's see, 1941 was the year that I was born, and that means if I go to Bali, that I'll be reborn." Then I'd think I was crazy. Don't go anywhere.
     Then during this period, I went to a homosexual bath house in Amsterdam and was "picked up" by this German photographer. He was very aggressive, and he made love to me like I was this beautiful woman. I had never experienced such a complete giving over before. ... Then I found out that Liz was coming to Amsterdam. ... I was so happy she called and rushed to meet her at the airport bus station. ... As soon as she got off the bus, I wanted to run, but instead I stayed and beat her down with my "madness." Looking back on it, I'm not clear whether I built this madness up to drop on her like a bomb. I was out of control.
     I acted crazy or was crazy. I didn't know the difference really. I told her about the homosexual experience. Her advice to me was to go back to America with her and try to work things out there. I decided to do this, but by the time I got to the airport, I was a nervous wreck. I began to break down and went to the ticket woman just before I was to board the plane and asked if I could get my luggage off the plane and she said, "Yes." And I said, "Skip it." I know I was crazy, so I wasn't crazy (yet). For much of the flight, Liz did not even know I was on the plane. I sat in the back and did not speak to her. The flight seemed an hour long. It was the first time I'd been on a plane without worrying about it crashing. I really did not care if it crashed. My will was nonexistent. I was letting myself be thrown from situation to situation.
     Liz took care of me. She brought me through. I don't know what I would have done without her. She stuck with me and was always there for me. I got into therapy once a week with a psychiatrist, and he had me on tranquilizers. The hypermanic activity soon changed to deep depression, and I slept 18 hours a day. ... I was diagnosed as hyperkalemic and was put on a special diet and given multivitamin therapy. That, combined with my seeing the psychiatrist, brought me back to a condition where I was able to work. It was then that I began to make "Rumstick Road" [with LeCompte]. I also began to have an affair with a young woman. Looking back on it, I see myself as being totally destructive to Liz. It seems like she brought me through all that so I could run off with another woman. It's beyond me how I could have done this, but I did it. And this is where it gets all confusing for me: this is where I stop being able to write about this experience. I feel guilty about this betrayal. I feel I used Liz. I feel I punished her for caring for me. I punished her for loving me. I resented her for helping me.
     This is the part that's hard to write about. I have no distance on it. I'm in it now.

[ THE DARK PRINCE OF DOWNTOWN, Introduction by Nell Casey, Editor of "The Journals of Spalding Gray," The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, October 9, 2011, pp. 24-7. ]

777.

"It's hard to look that cheap and pull it off," John Waters said admiringly of Amy Winehouse, some days after the English singer was found dead in her London bed. [ ..... ]

There were the vocals, of course, lauded for being simultaneously bluesy, jazz-inflected and somehow punk. There was the phrasing so singular that Ms. Winehouse could stretch a note until it threatened to snap and then cap it with a sly vibrato quaver. There was the songwriting, too, child-simple three-note tunes that lodged in your head, and lyrics handily capable of mauling one's heart while slicing surgically through gender conventions. "Is there another straight woman who could pull off a love song to a girl ("Valerie") or make a hit from a tune in which she refers to her boyfriend as her "lady-boy"? [ ..... ]

At the start, when she released her first album, "Frank," Ms. Winehouse appeared to be a pretty type shyly unconvinced of her appeal ("I'm ugly," she said repeatedly in interviews), a woman whose conservative taste in clothes gave no hint of the transformation she would effect by the time she released her second and final album, "Back to Black."

Her array of 13 tattoos, which she began to collect in her teenage years with a Betty Boop inked on her backside, eventually included markings reminiscent of cheap flash: hearts, anchors, pin-ups, horseshoes, a pocket above her left breast lettered with her lover's name. "In the film about Winehouse, you see her look begin to change, but it's frustrating because you don't know why," Karen Durbin, the film critic of Elle, said in an interview, referring to "The Girl Done Good," a 2008 documentary about Ms. Winehouse. "You see the moment when the pretty girl becomes something fiercer and weirder, a bad girl, and when the ordinary pretty girl makeup turns into war paint." [ ..... ]

"Janis, like Amy, is always projected as a victim," said Ann Powers, a critic for NPR Music. Yet that analysis, largely based on their shared drug addiction, is simplistic, Ms. Powers said. For one thing, it fails to account for the joyous and powerful images Ms. Winehouse and Ms. Joplin projected, for the raucous brio of Ms. Joplin's high-hippie floozie style; for Ms. Winehouse's own wholehearted embodiment of a look that lent her the air of a slatternly rocker from Camden Town, the tough immigrant neighborhood in North London. It is probably worth noting that both wore their biker--or gang-girl-style tattoos, traditional markers of renegade status, as badges of honor and pride. [ ..... ]

What's odd, she added, is how little room the victim narrative attached to Ms. Winehouse the moment she died leaves for the possibility that, though sadly in thrall to drugs, she was probably nobody's patsy. Yes, her music producer Mark Ronson may have helped shape her award winning neo-retro sound. True, her stylish husband Blake Fielder-Civil may have influenced her look. It was Ms. Winehouse alone, though, who could pull of feats of vocal and sartorial brilliance without sounding like a Karaoke singer or looking like she was in drag. [ ..... ]

"The woman on the cover of 'Back to Black' is clearly wearing her clothing and makeup as armor," Mr. Levy said. "She is someone who is outside the conventional world, beautiful but fierce, and who is making music that means to take possession of the world."

[ "A Bad Girl With a Touch of Genius", by Guy Trebay, The New York Times, July 28, 2011, p. E1. ]

A close reading of writer Guy Trebay's brilliant and insightful New York Times article (see above), can leave no doubt that Amy Winehouse was afflicted with schizophrenic, "bearded lady" disease symptomatology, and to the key role this virulent illness played in being the basic instigator of her final and fatal descent into the extreme drug and alcohol abuse she resorted to in an unsuccessful [always] attempt to self-medicate and thereby free herself from her searing emotional pain -- the invariable legacy of the "bearded lady" conflict.

"Sexual identity guarantees our psychic unity."
-- Julia Kristeva, psycho-analyst.

776.

A kind of rosy nostalgia seems to be taking over when suddenly, in the final riveting act, there enters a grotesque, almost demonic figure, tortured, mesmerising, a doctor with the prodigious wreckage of three wives, seven or eight children, alcohol, drugs, and adultery trailing behind him, a transvestite who finally has a sex change operation and ends up dying in jail: the always troubled, gifted youngest son, Gregory Hemingway.
     He is last seen sitting on the curb in Key Biscayne one morning after having been arrested the night before trying to get through a security gate. He's in a hospital gown but otherwise naked with some clothes and black high heels bunched in one hand. He had streaked, almost whitish hair that morning, painted toenails, and as the police approached was trying to put on a flowered thong. Five days later he died of a heart attack while being held in a Women's Detention Center. He was listed as Gloria Hemingway. This was in 2001; he was sixty-nine years old.
     The last, very moving section of Hemingway's Boat is devoted to Gregory, Gigi as he was always called, rhyming with "biggy," the wayward son who as a boy was caught trying on his stepmother's white stockings. "He was a boy born to be quite wicked who was being very good...," Hemingway wrote in his fictional version, Islands in the Stream. "But he was a bad boy and the others knew it and he knew it." Hendrickson says, "I'll whoof this straight out: a lifelong shamed son was only acting out what a father felt...." And these were possibly the transsexual fantasies in The Garden of Eden along with all the women in Hemingway with hair cut short like a boy's.
     When Gigi's oldest child, Lorian, saw him for the first time in years, he took her out in a chartered boat to show her big-game fishing, but then embarrassingly lost the big marlin he'd hooked. He hadn't slacked, and the line had snapped. He'd made a botch of it. He seemed broken. She reached out and touched his forehead in sympathy. "Sorry, Greg," she said. "You're a pretty girl," he said. "A very pretty girl. Call me 'Father,' would you?" She noticed the nail polish on two of his cracked and dirty nails.

[ James Salter, The Finest Life You Ever Saw, a review of "Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life and Lost, 1931-1961," by Paul Hendrickson. Knopf, 531 pp., $30.00), in The New York Review of Books, October 13, 2011, p. 8. ]

Gregory "Gigi" Hemingway's life was one which was savagely rent by schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease. This malignant illness had already destroyed his father's life [ref: Impressions 119, this website] and now it was Gigi's turn to succumb to its lethal ravages.

Thus we can see again and again how schizophrenia, "the bearded lady" disease, works its insidious poison into the lives of its unsuspecting and innocent victims, leaving disaster and heartache in its wake.

775.

A.

Anders Behring Breivik
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
July 29, 2011

He spent the first year of his life [DOB: 13 February 1979] in London until his parents divorced when he was one year old. His father, who later married a diplomat, fought for his custody but failed. Breivik lived with his mother and his half sister in the west-end of Oslo and regularly visited his father and stepmother in France, until they divorced when he was 12. /// When he reached adolescence, Breivik's behavior became more rebellious and wayward. He and his gang of friends would reportedly spend their evenings hanging around in Oslo, spraying graffiti on buildings. He later wrote that after he was caught spraying graffiti on walls, his father stopped contact with him. /// Breivik criticised both of his parents for supporting the policies of the Norwegian Labour Party, and his mother for being a moderate feminist. He wrote about his upbringing: "I do not approve of the super-liberal, matriarchal upbringing as it completely lacked discipline and has contributed to feminising me to a certain degree." /// Breivik was exempt from conscription in the Norwegian Army and has no military training.[20] In his manifesto, Breivik described how he avoided his mandatory military service in the Norwegian Army three times, by claiming he would not put his life on the line for Norway's political parties. /// Breivik claims that he started a nine-year-plan to finance the attack in 2002, founding his own "computer programming" business while working at the customer service company. He claims that his company grew to six employees and "several offshore bank accounts", and that he made his first million at the age of 24.[44] The company was later declared bankrupt and Breivik was reported for several breaches of the law.[45] To save money, he moved back to his mother's home. /// Breivik has also been linked with the bomb blasts which had taken place approximately two hours earlier in Oslo, killing eight people. Six hours before the attacks, Breivik posted a YouTube video urging conservatives to "embrace martyrdom" and showing himself wearing a compression garment and pointing a rifle.[59] He also posted a picture of himself pretending to be a military officer in a costume festooned with gold braid and multiple medals.[60] /// Breivik's lawyer has stated that Breivik may be insane.[64] The chief of the Norwegian Police Security Service disputes the claim Breivik is insane saying "His lawyer is not a psychologist and I am not. But I have previously been a defense attorney and I perceive him as a sane person because he has been so focused over such a long time."[65] Breivik himself has confessed to using testosterone in the days before the attack, saying he had become more aggressive after coming off testosterone supplements. [66][67] /// An EDL leader denounced Breivik and the attack on 26 July 2011.[79] He sympathises with the Serbian paramilitarism.[17] He demands the gradual deportation of all Muslims from Europe from 2011 to 2083.[86] He blames feminism for allowing the erosion of the fabric of European society. [117] In his manifesto he also urges the Hindus to drive Muslims out of India.[118]

B.

[continued]

"Dagens Noeringsliv" writes that Breivik sought to start a Norwegian version of the Tea Party movement in cooperation with the owners of document.no, but that they, after expressing initial interest, ultimately turned down his proposal because he did not have the contacts he promised.[82] /// Putin's [Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin] Dmitri Peskov has denounced Breivik's actions as the "delirium of a madman."[83] /// Breivik compiled a 1,516-page manifesto entitled "2083: A European Declaration of Independence (a reference to the unsuccessful second Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683 [84]), under the pseudonym "Andrew Berwick", which he e-mailed to 1,003 addresses about 90 minutes before the bomb blast in Oslo. In the manifesto, which is part political discussion, part confessional, and part action plan, Breivik sets out his belief that his actions will help to spark a civil war in Europe that will last for decades, progressing through three distinct phases and culminating in 2083 with the extermination of European Marxists and the expulsion of Muslims from Europe.[86] /// The text also copies sections of the Unabomber manifesto, without giving credit, while exchanging the words "leftists" for "cultural Marxists" and "black people" for "muslims".[91] [ Note: For more information on the Unabomber (Theodore Kaczynski), ref. "Schizophrenia - The Bearded Lady Disease, Volume One," by J. Michael Mahoney, pp. 432-34. ] /// In the manifesto, Breivik considers himself "a real European hero", "the saviour of Christianity" and the greatest defender of cultural- conservatism in Europe since 1950".[102] /// Breivik confessed and stated the purpose of the attack was to save Norway and Western Europe from a Muslim takeover and "[t]he price for this they had to pay yesterday." [ i.e., The reported cold-blooded murder of 69 adolescents on Utoya Island, including a young girl who had just turned 14, plus the additional eight fatalities of the bomb blasts in Oslo. ] /// Breivik has confessed to what he calls "atrocious but necessary" actions, but denies criminal responsibility.[22][23]

C.

These considerations therefore lend an added weight to the circumstance that we are in point of fact driven by experience to attribute to homosexual wishful phantasies an intimate (perhaps an invariable) relation to this particular form of disease. Distrusting my own experience on the subject, I have during the last few years joined with my friend Sandor Ferenczi of Budapest in investigating upon this single point a number of cases of paranoid disorder which have come under observation. The patients whose histories provided the material for this enquiry included both men and women and varied in race, occupation, and social standing. Yet we were astonished to find that in all of these cases a defense against a homosexual wish was clearly recognizable at the very centre of the conflict which underlay the disease, and that it was in an attempt to master an unconsciously reinforced current of homosexuality that they had all of them come to grief.[1] [ [1]Further confirmation is afforded by Maeder's analysis of a paranoid patient J.B. (1910). The present paper, I regret to say, was completed before I had an opportunity of reading Maeder's work. ] This was certainly not what we had expected. Paranoia is precisely a disorder in which a sexual aetiology is by no means obvious; far from this, the strikingly prominent features in the causation of paranoia, especially among males, are social humiliations and slights. But if we go into the matter only a little more deeply, we shall be able to see that the really operative factor in these social injuries lies in the part played in them by the homosexual components of emotional life. So long as the individual is functioning normally and it is consequently impossible to see into the depths of his mental life, we may doubt whether his emotional relations to his neighbours in society have anything to do with sexuality, either actually or in their genesis. But delusions never fail to uncover these relations and to trace back the social feelings to their roots in a directly sensual erotic wish. So long as he was healthy, Dr. Schreber, too, whose delusions culminated in a wishful phantasy of an unmistakably homosexual nature, had, by all accounts, shown no signs of homosexuality in the ordinary sense of the word.

[ Sigmund Freud, "Psycho-Analytic Notes on a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides) (1911), in the "The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud," Volume XII, The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London, 1958, pp. 59-60. (Translated from the German by James Strachey.) ]

D.

"Paranoia -- An Historical Digression"

Paranoia, from Greek meaning wrong or faulty knowledge or reasoning, "antedates Hippocrates" (Cameron, 1944) when "it was most frequently used in a very general sense ... as the equivalent of our popular current term insanity."

[ Daniel Paul Schreber, "Memoirs of My Nervous Illness," 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, p. 13. ]

[ .... Mr. Breivik has confessed to killing 77 people last month in Oslo and Utoya Island, and the Oslo District Court said that Mr. Breivik had to be kept in isolation partly out of fear that he would tamper with evidence or contact possible accomplices. Mr. Breivik appeared at a closed hearing under heavy police protection. His request to wear a long black tuxedo to the session was rejected. --- "Norway: Mass Killer Staying in Isolation" (AP), The New York Times, August 20, 2011, p. A9 ]

774.

A.

There is no greater example of the shape-shifting force of a pen name than that of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, who took the notion of reticence to unparalleled, even pathological levels. In maintaining more than 70 literary identities he called "heteronyms," he did not employ them as a mode of deception. Instead, he insisted that he was amanuensis to the multiple beings that dwelled within. They transcended gender, ideology and genre. They bickered with one another, mentored one another, clamored for attention like children. He once described his work, aptly, as a "drama divided into people instead of into acts."

Why Pessoa, whom George Steiner once called one of "the evident giants in modern literature," had to engage in self-breeding will never be known. The most obvious explanation must be mental illness. That he remained an obscure, isolated figure in his lifetime (he died in 1935) only adds to the poignancy of his -- their? -- vast creative output. One scholar speculated that Pessoa's heteronyms were a way to "spare him the trouble of living real life," which makes his bizarre endeavor seem enviable.

B.

The story of the science-fiction writer James Tiptree, Jr., who served as the mask of Alice Sheldon, a former Chicago debutante, had a similarly tragic ending. For Sheldon, the value of an alter ego was beyond measure. At first glance, hers seems a familiar narrative of a woman adopting a pen name so she might succeed in a male-dominated genre. But she wasn't just battling gender bias. Without Tiptree, her prose style, as she once put it, was no more imaginative or compelling than "Enclosed please find payment." She passed as Tiptree for a decade, thus allowing an emotionally troubled, sexually confused middle-aged woman to experience life as a charismatic, flirtatious man at the height of his creative powers.

Their relationship was complicated. Despite having considered, in darker moments, "taking him out and drowning him in the Caribbean," Sheldon felt that without Tiptree, she was crippled creatively. In the late 1970s, after her identity was unmasked, she was bereft. Although her fans and peers in the sci-fi world were largely supportive of her "coming out," Sheldon's efforts to keep writing under her own name (and even other pen names) were half-hearted and futile. ("Some inner gate is shut," she admitted to a friend.) In 1987, she shot her husband in his sleep and then herself.

[ Carmela Ciuraru / Essay / Secret Sharers / The New York Times Book Review, June 26, 2011, p. 39. Ref: Nom de Plume / A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms, By Carmela Ciuraru / Harper; 344 pages. ]

Both Fernando Pessoa (A. above) and Alice Sheldon (B. above), though coming from completely different backgrounds, cultures and sexes, became similarly afflicted with schizophrenia due to their severe "bearded lady" bisexual conflicts and gender confusion. In both cases, their schizophrenia led to tragic outcomes, especially so in the case of Alice Sheldon, where her consequent paranoid ideation caused her to murder her husband in cold blood, followed shortly thereafter by her own self-murder, or suicide.

In Alice Sheldon's case, however, the result of her severe, schizophrenic, "bearded lady" conflict, was glaringly "tragic," since it led ultimately and directly to the violent physical destruction of two lives -- both her own and her husband's.

773.

A.

I was also, and remain, quite incapable of interpreting female signals, or distinguishing between flirting and what primatologists unpleasantly term presenting. I never dared assume a sexual invitation could be real, if directed at me.
      The prime site of my illness, then, was sexual. Common enough. As I unearthed my buried troubles, I saw how bound up they were with features of modern society that I loathed, such as demonstrations, in which I always heard the echo of the schoolyard, or radicalism which seemed to enlarge the schoolyard into a whole ideal world. In the chants of early militant feminism, I heard the accents of Taree High. In a column I used to write for the short-lived "Independent Monthly," I coined the term 'erocide', meaning the deliberate destruction of a person's sexual morale, and speculated that we victims of the process probably outnumber all other victim-groups combined, but we will never rise up and demand redress. We are too deeply shamed, and too darkly aware that those rejected for reproduction or pleasure are scapegoats for the pain which sex entails even among the attractive. [p. 25-6]

B.

If, as shrinks tell us, a fifth of all people in this stressed age will suffer at least one depressive episode in their lives, there is clearly an enormous pool of potential recruits among people who haven't identified the real roots of their trouble and so will reliably hate substitutes or near-enough versions. [p. 26-7]

C.

AFTERWORD

    I know now that you can't kill the DOG, and that thus my earlier account has the wrong title: it should be called "Learning the Black Dog." Even before Lovan [Fluoxetine], I'd gained increments of self-esteem, and learned that treachery doesn't lurk behind every smile. I've become less afraid of Australian women, and less self-absorbed. At seventy, I'm at last more at ease with what Homer Simpson called his womanly needs. [p. 36]

D.

What I still do mourn is the terrible waste of energy the Dog has exacted from me, over my lifetime and especially in my twenty horror years, and how much more I might have achieved if I'd owned a single, healthy mind working on my side. [p. 37]

[ "Killing The Black Dog / A Memoir of Depression," by Les Murray, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2009. ]

772.

[.......]

He gives rambling incoherent speeches at places like the United Nations. His head is stuffed with oddball conspiracy theories and strange obsessions, like calling for the elimination of Switzerland or blaming the J.F.K. assassination on Israeli intelligence. He shows up in foreign countries in odd dress, with odd make-up and hair-gel preferences, once having pinned a photograph to his chest.

He has an all-female bodyguard contingent. In 2008, he announced that as part of a government shake-up, he was going to abolish all government ministries except Defense, Internal Security and a few others. [.......]

It seems that there is something advantageous in the megalomania that is his defining lifelong trait. He was kicked out of school for trying to organize a student strike. He began plotting a coup to take over the country while in college. He has repeatedly compared himself to Jesus and the Prophet Muhammad. He calls the Green Book, his book of teachings, "the new gospel."

That book, which Libyans are compelled to read (he canceled student summer vacation at one point and replaced it with indoctrination sessions), is filled with oddball notions and banal assertions. It consists of three parts, "The Solution to Democratic Problems," "The Solution to Economic Problems," and a section offering solutions to social problems.

Quaddafi apparently wrote the book with the conviction that he had discovered the answers to all human problems, which he calls the Third Universal Theory." In a characteristically absolutist passage, he writes, "True Democracy has but one method and one theory."

Along the way he offers banal observations as if nobody had ever thought of them before. He reveals that women menstruate and men do not. He unveils doctrines that have nothing to do with how he actually behaves: "Mandatory education is a coercive education that suppresses freedom. To impose specific teaching materials is a dictatorial act."

He seems to be one of those people who believes he possesses absolute truth, who wants to impose his thoughts on everybody else and exercise total dominance over others like some World Historical superman. [.......]

Over the decades, he has tried to remake the world in his own grandiose image. He tried to create a larger empire by merging Libya and Sudan. He tried to create a Federation of Arab Republics with Egypt and Syria. He tried to create an Arab Legion. He has named himself King of Kings, Imam of All Muslims and, in 2009, sought to create a United States of Africa. He has created dictatorship academies and has trained some of the world's most brutal autocrats, and, of course, he has supported terrorist movements in Australia, Ireland, Germany and beyond.

Yet this very megalomania seems to be both the secret to his longevity and to his unhinged nature. The paradoxical fact is that if you want to stay in office as a dictator, it is better to be a narcissistic totalitarian than a run-of-the mill autocrat. Megalomaniacs like Quaddafi seek to control every neuron in their peoples' heads and to control every aspect of life. They destroy all outside authority and civil society. They personalize every institution so that things like the army exist to serve their holy selves, rather than the nation at large. [.......]

[ "The Ego Advantage," by David Brooks, The New York Times, March 25, 2011, the Op-Ed page. ]

B.

Cars passed us, carrying passengers who themselves were carried on the waves of a powerful joy. On the back of a pickup truck, a group of young men sang and clapped, one of them wearing a terrible wig, a symbol of Colonel Qaddafi's famously wild haircut, which had given him the disparaging nickname Abu Shafshufa (father of the fuzzy hair). Another young man, in Algeria Square, held up a large portrait of Colonel Qaddafi in traditional women's clothes.

[ Omar Abulqasim Alkikli, Tripoli, Libya, The New York Times Op-Ed page, October 21, 2011. ]

The person described in the above Quotation, Libya's Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, is displaying all the classic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease; namely, delusions of grandeur (megalomania), faulty reasoning, obsessive thinking, and feelings of persecution consisting of imagined conspiracies being hatched against him at all times.

Schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, is a "killer" disease, has always been so in the past (viz. Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong), and will continue to be so in the future, or until the time arrives when mankind can accurately begin to pinpoint, and safely isolate, those persons afflicted with it. And now more death and destruction [ April/May 2011 ] is being unleashed upon both his own family and the Libyan people, again as the direct and tragic consequence of Col. Qadaffi's paranoid schizophrenic thinking and actions.

[ Please also see Impressions 110. ]

771.

A.

    Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed first met when Lincoln was twenty-eight and Speed twenty-two, on April 15, 1837. That date marked the beginning of their four-year bed sharing, in a room above a general store that Speed co-owned. Almost every Lincoln scholar has found the sleeping arrangement unremarkable.

     Same-sex bed sharing was common in 19th-century America, of course. It was perfectly ordinary, a question of mattress scarcity, small homes, crowded hostelries. Historians have repeatedly pointed to that fact in the wake of Tripp's Intimate World, which among other things documents Lincoln's sleeping arrangements and finds in them evidence that Lincoln had sexual relations with men.

     But as Jean Baker, the well-regarded biographer of Mary Todd Lincoln and the author of Intimate World's Introduction, has noted, for two men with financial resources to share a bed for four years bordered on impropriety. It was unusual. The non-conjugal slept together when it was necessary. They did not do it by choice.

[ "Critical Overview: Lincoln, Sex, and the Scholars," by Lewis Gannett and William A. Percy III, in The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, by C. A. Tripp, with an Introduction by Jean Baker, Thunder's Mouth's Press, New York, Copyright 2005 by The Estate of C. A. Tripp, p. XLV. ]

B.

One truly major trauma of Lincoln's life suddenly came upon him on January 1, 1841 -- the "fatal first" as he ever afterward was to call it (See Appendix 2, Letter 8). A few days before Speed had announced he was leaving and moving back to Kentucky. His father had died recently and his mother had asked him to return and help with problems at home, but the possibility that he might grant this request and actually move back home had apparently not been discussed. Lincoln was evidently crushed to learn of it that New Year's Day, and within hours, as if to complete his shake-up, he broke off with Mary Todd, whom he had been seeing for several months. [........]

     In any case, Lincoln's loss of Speed clearly belongs front and center. His anxiety over the Speed portion of this misfortune, and not seeing any way to recoup his loss, were what soon cast him into a major double-phase nervous breakdown (the worst kind). In the first phase he felt listless and shaken, yet he forced himself to attend several sessions of the legislature, during which he was preoccupied and could not keep him mind on the proceedings. Mostly he sat quietly, as if stunned, when he was able to attend at all; generally he contributed nothing. Sometimes he would only answer the roll call, or would disappear after and hour or two; once the only vote he joined in was "to adjourn."[15] His general debility was widely noticed, and was ready to snowball.

     On January 13, 1841, the second phase of his nervous breakdown came on at full tilt. With no sign of fever or other physical sickness, he became totally incapacitated and was bedridden for six days in what sounds like a state of ongoing shock. It looked very serious to outsiders, too. Wrote James Conkling to his fiancee, Mercy Levering, on January 24, 1841:

Poor L! How the mighty have fallen! He was confined about a week, but though he now appears again he is reduced and emaciated in appearance and seems scarcely to possess strength enough to speak above a whisper. His case at present is truly deplorable but what prospect there may be for ultimate relief I cannot pretend to say. [16]

[ The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, by C. A. Tripp, edited by Lewis Gannett, Thunder's Mouth Press, New York, Copyright 2005 by The Estate of C. A. Tripp, pp. 130-2. ]

C.

     That same June 19 [Lincoln] letter reveals a few other notable details. It begins without a single personal item, but drones on in a 1,575-word account of a local murder trial. Hard to find anything less personal than that, yet it is precisely this kind of impersonal recounting of some irrelevant bit of news that is often resorted to by distraught lovers who are contending with some strain, and who thus choose to recount details from a neutral territory as they wait out a storm that swirls about them. Such letters often end, as does this one, on an especially warm note. Speed [Joshua] was, in fact, the one and only person in Lincoln's life on whom he repeatedly lavished his most personal and most endearing "Yours forever," in itself a major smoking gun and a salutation he never bestowed on any woman, including his wife.

[ Ibid, p. 134. ]

D.

     The President was also not an infrequent visitor [to the Soldier's Home] in the late afternoon hours, and endeared himself to his guards by his genial, kind ways. He was not long in placing the officers in his two companies at their ease in his presence, and Captains Derickson and Crozier were shortly on a footing of such marked friendship with him that they were often summoned to dinner or breakfast at the presidential board. Captain Derickson, in particular, advanced so far in the President's confidence and esteem that in Mrs. Lincoln's absence he frequently spent the night in his cottage, sleeping in the same bed with him, and--it is said--making use of his Excellency's night-shirt! Thus began an intimacy which continued until the following spring, when Captain Derickson was appointed provost marshall of the Nineteenth Pennsylvania District, with head-quarters in Meadville.[3]

[ "History of the One Hundred and Fiftieth Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteers, Second Regiment, Bucktail Brigade," by Lt. Colonel Thomas Chamberlin, immediate commanding officer to Capt. David. V. Derickson in Washington, Published in 1895, and quoted in The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln by C. A. Tripp, Thunder's Mouth Press, Edited by Lewis Gannett, Copyright by The Estate of C. A. Tripp, 2005, pp. 3-4. ]

E.

     The answer he received must have been encouraging, though it went against a mountain of his own forebodings. Not until the very day of the wedding could he bring himself to actually go get the marriage license. And to the last moment he exuded an aura of unwilling gloom far worse than the well-known anxious knees of the ordinary bridegroom. Years later James Matheny recalled how Lincoln had come to him early on the day of his wedding lamenting with alarm, "Jim, I shall have to marry that girl." On the very evening of the marriage Matheny noted, "Lincoln looked and acted as if he were going to the Slaughter," adding that "Lincoln [had] often told him directly & indirectly that he was driven into the marriage."[7] Herndon's simpler statement is more to the point: "Lincoln married her for honor--feeling his honor bound to her."[8]

[ The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, by C. A. Tripp, Edited by Lewis Gannett, Thunder's Mouth Press, New York, Copyright 2005 by The Estate of C. A. Tripp, p. 157. ]

F.

     On the basis of inductive reasoning familiar to him as a Kinsey researcher and in the spirit of social science, Tripp intrepidly measures Lincoln's homosexuality and presents his findings in the first chapter. To do so he employs Kinsey's famous classification system that ranks as individual's homosexuality on a seven-point continuum, where o = exclusively heterosexual and 6 = exclusively homosexual. Lincoln, according to Tripp, ranks as a 5, i.e., "predominantly homosexual, but incidentally heterosexual." While this scale has recently been criticized as offering few advantages over the common terms heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual, its application to Lincoln is a clear indication of Tripp's position. There is no hedging in this book.

[ "Introduction," by Jean Baker, Goucher College, in The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, by C. A. Tripp, Edited by Lewis Gannett, Thunder's Mouth Press, New York, Copyright 2005 by The Estate of C. A. Tripp 2005, p. XVI. ]

Now that Mr. C. A. Tripp, in his meticulously researched and documented book, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, has established beyond any reasonable doubt that our most beloved and admired of all presidents was "predominantly homosexual, but incidentally heterosexual," we must ask ourselves, as did author Tripp, the question, "So What?" Indeed, what difference does this striking insight into Lincoln's basic sexual nature make to our overall view of this irrefutably great and iconic figure in America's history?

Final note: If Lincoln had attempted to repress his strongly homosexual nature when he was a younger man, and had succeeded in doing so, he would later in life have succumbed to schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, and become insane. Most fortunately this did not happen. But sadly this was not the case with his wife, Mary Todd, as she become markedly and increasingly paranoid and psychopathic as she grew older, the direct result of her repressed bisexual conflict and gender confusion, and which illness profoundly impacted not only her own life but that of everyone else's around her, including her husband's, in an extremely destructive fashion. (Please refer to previous Quotation/Comment # 770.)