If Mr. E. J. had only appended a few of his dreams to his human document, there would be very little difficulty in pointing out the emotional repression that was at the bottom of all his mental symptoms. That he conforms to a certain well-known type of psychic fixation there is very little doubt. He has always been bereft, because he has a feeling of being spiritually or mentally alone. He never learned to be independent in mind, but always looked for an uncritical, soothing, maternal sort of love from people who were not ready or willing to give it. He has not changed materially. Now that his so-called recovery has come, and being unable to find what he demands, he takes refuge in the next best thing, and plays at obtaining it vicariously; he convinces himself that he is going to devote himself to doing for others “all the little kindnesses that life offers.”
The layman who would get some knowledge of insanity should avoid such confessions as that of E. J. If he would make acquaintance with the self-coddling of a neurotic individual who delights in self-analysis, self-pity, and exaggeration of his symptoms, and who is a fairly typical example of juvenile fixation, his purpose will be accomplished by reading this and similar articles. There is, however, a safer and more satisfactory way of securing such information, and that is by reading the writings of Pierre Janet. There he will find the obsessed, the hysteric, the aboulic, the neurasthenic individual discussed in masterly fashion, and he will find the presentation unmixed with mediæval mysticism and puerile platitudes, unflavoured with specious “uplift” sentiment and psychological balderdash.
On the other hand, he may get real enlightenment from “The Jungle of the Mind,” published recently in the same magazine, providing he closes his eyes to the editorial comment and refuses to read the letter “of a physician of reputation” which sets forth that “according to all our text-book symptoms of dementia præcox she was surely that.”
The purpose of such editorial comment must be either to suggest that the enigmatic dissolution of the mind to which Schule gave the name “precocious dementia” may eventuate in recovery, or to show that doctors make mistakes. If it is the former, it needs a lot of proof; if the latter, none whatsoever. Though students of mental pathology know little or nothing of the causes of the mental disorders of hereditarily predisposed individuals who get wrecked on the cliffs of puberty, or of the alterations and structure of the tissues that subserve the mind, they know, as they know the temperaments of their better halves, the display, the types, the paradigms of the disease. And the lady who has recently contributed some notes on a disfranchisement from the state of non compos mentis to the Atlantic Monthly with such subtle display of proficiency in the literary art, may be assured that the doctors who averred she had dementia præcox added one more error to a list already countless. With the daring of one who hazards nothing by venturing an opinion, I suggest that she merely made a journey into a wild country from whose bourne nearly all travellers return. The country is called “Manic-Depressive Insanity.”
A young woman of gentle birth develops, while earning her bread in uplift work, “nervous prostration,” that coverer of a multitude of ills. Her sister's home, to which she goes, brings neither coherence nor tranquillity. In fact, she gathers confusion rapidly there, and seeks to get surcease of it in oblivion. After three attempts at suicide, she is sent to a sanitarium. Six months of that exhausts her financial resources. This, with increasing incoherency and fading actuality, necessitate transfer to a state hospital, and there she remains three years, going through the stages of violence, indifference, tranquillity, resignation, and finally the test of work and recreation, culminating happily in probational discharge and resumption of previous work.
This is the record of thousands in this country and in every civilised country. The variety of insanity which she had (and it is the commonest of all the insanities) nearly always terminates in recovery—that is, from the single attack. There is, of course, the likelihood of recurrence. How to avoid that is what we are keen to learn from mental hygienists and from those taught by experience. If this disenfranchised lady will tell us ten years hence what she has done to keep well and how her orientation has differed from that of the ten years following puberty, she will make a human document of value intellectually, not emotionally, as this one is. Meanwhile, should she be disposed to do something for future psychopaths, she may record the experiences of her life from childhood to the period of full development, and particularly of the decade following her fifth year. If she will do this with the truthfulness of James Joyce, the chasteness of Dorothy M. Richardson, and the fullness of Marie Bashkirtseff, it may be said of her: “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise.”
It may be literature to describe one's fellow inmates of a psychopathic hospital, to portray their adult infantilisms, to delineate their schizophrenias, to recount their organised imageries, but it does not contribute an iota to our knowledge of insanity, how to prevent it, and how to cure it.
We need intrepid souls who will bare their psychic breasts and will tell us, without fear or shame, of their conventionalised and primitive minds: how the edifice was constructed, the secrets of the architect, and of the builder. If Dostoievsky had been insane, not epileptic, the literature of psychiatry would today be vastly more comprehensive.
THE END