Echoes of Berlin
Lessons From A Dance Slav
Athlete Without Compelling Personal Drama Expelled from Olympics
Election Based On Merit, Not On Identity
What Free Press?
In N.H., A Deal To Close
Obama Patriotism and Worldview Declared Off-Limits
Who Started Cold War II?
Martha's Big Adventure - A Blueprint to Build Your Dream
The 3 a.m. Phone Call Is Real
A Majority Minority Nation
Too - Americas
McCain Vs Obama: Showdown At Saddleback
No Celebration For Horses At This Celebration
Leroy Sievers
Lessons From Literature
A Sad Week For Georgia, America And The World
Good And Evil And Obama
Blame Everyone But Russia!
Weekly Review
Even Health Care Can Be Outsourced
The Bushites Crude Connection To Georgia
It's A Three-Man Race: Obama Vs The Two McCains
Faith And Our Future
Obama And Pro-Life 'Liars'
On A Fair Footing
Predator And Prey
Bush Bets Pakistan Will Become South Korea, Not Iran
How To Stop Putin
The Party Of McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis And Kerry
Dems Will Never Abort Pro-Choice Mission
Holier Than Thou
On Meal Diversity, Being Green, Dudists, Al's Opera, Etc.
Democratic Platform's Hidden Soros Slush Fund
Lobbyist Says Blocking Her Political Donation Is Unfair
Back-To-Back Conventions: The Great Unknown
Democrats Should Apologize For Blowing It On Surge
Pain At The Port
Report From A Forgotten War (2nd In A Series)
Can McCain Back In Again?
Helping Boys Without Hurting Girls
Clarity Is Good, Wisdom Is Better
If There Is No God
Hillary's The One!
School Lunch Dough
Governing is Above Obama's Pay Grade
New Orleans Counts Its Blessings
Return Of A Literary Hatchet Man
Woe Is Me, Said The Democrat
This Old Soldier Never Learns
'It Was The Human Thing To Do'
Memo to Obama: This Election Is About the Voters
Edwards: An Affair We Won't Remember
The Great Garet Garrett -- Interview with Bruce Ramsey
What Happened To Common Ground?
Blind Defense of Koran Abrogates Reality
The Rhinoceros in the Room ... RACE
Where Paternalism Makes The Grade
The Disappearing Lame Duck



Harpers180.gif
New Books
Harpers Magazine 5/14/2008
Digg This Story!
Del.icio.us Reddit StumbleUpon Yahoo! MyWeb Technorati Google Bookmarks Furl Ma.gnolia Newsvine Bloglines Rojo Facebook
Consider Hannah Green's rose garden, Sylvia Plath's bell jar, Virginia Woolf's lighthouse and Marilyn Monroe's pills. Or such textbooks on falling apart as Doris Lessing's "The Four-Gated City," Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," R.D. Laing's "The Divided Self," Erving Goffman's "Asylums" and Michel Foucault's "Madness and Civilization." Not to neglect the revisionist analysis of Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Susan Brownmiller, Phyllis Chesler, Julia Kristeva and Juliet Mitchell. Nor the impassioned witness of Kay Redfield Jamison, Kate Millett and Germaine Greer. If you've already read "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and "The Picture of Dorian Gray," how about taking a look at Leon Daudet's "Les Morticoles," in which the loony bin is a music hall where patients perform the "Folies Hysteriques"? Isn't it fortunate that Freud's Bertha Pappenheim and Jung's Sabina Spielrein were more resourceful than their sad, fictional sisters, Shakespeare's Ophelia and Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor?

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

Add Feed to ZapTXT Add Feed to Bloglines Add Feed to Technorati Add Feed to LibWorm! Add Feed to My Yahoo! Add Feed to Google Add Feed to Newsgator Add Feed to Rojo Add Feed to Windows Live Add Feed to My MSN
Door to the knowledge
By Arcadio Esquivel - Cagle Cartoons, La Prensa, Panama * Posted 06/12/2005
Post to MySpace!
Comment
Email
Door to the knowledge
© Copyright 2005  Arcadio Esquivel - All Rights Reserved.
Make A Comment
We appreciate your feedback. Post a comment using the form below.
Your Name (required)
Your Comments
Type the characters you see in the image: