Kate Millett
I have great respect for Seth Farber; his knowledge of history—not only American but world history—is extraordinary. It’s as if he has been reading all his life and remembering everything, from Socrates to Plato to the modern Indian seer Sri Aurobindo, then putting it all aside toward his one purpose: the understanding of the human psyche. What motivates a human being—what fears, what depths of loneliness, what hopes and joys, what visions? He has read widely and deeply with that one question in mind. Dr. Farber is an uncommon man: he has had lots of time to think, to speculate also on America, with its diversity of religions, enthusiasms, and immigrant cultures.
Dr. Farber has read R. D. Laing and David Cooper (the inventor of the term antipsychiatry), Freud in his entirely, but also Ferenczi. There are social factors to consider: “You lost your job, now you are homeless. How does that make you feel?” The psycho-person’s one tireless question turned on its head, over and over: “How does that make you feel?”
“Actually it makes me feel pretty awful, Doctor, pretty wrong, pretty failed, already. How would it make you feel, Doctor Pill Pusher? Oh, I forgot: You do have a job. Listening to me, making me feel bad, reviled, discombobulated—crazy.”
The diagnosis is everything; as Farber puts it, it’s a sentence that the condemned person spends the rest of a lifetime living with. It can mean divorce from your family, your own people, many if not all of your friends, and even your neighbors when they find out. You are diseased, evil. Everyone is afraid of you. If you have a problem it’s your own fault, for staying up late at night, for going out alone; whatever you did, you did it wrong. You are living a “shameful” life, for spending “too much money,” for calling home—even at the right time of day (not too late, not too early), even if you are happy. Still it is the wrong call, the wrong tone to take.
“Are you taking your meds?” Always, that question from everyone: from your siblings, from your own friends—who drink enough themselves, even drink more than you do. Your friends brag over lunch and say they are taking classes in everything. You find the classes silly, juvenile (young men have taken over the college, which used to be a really good school for women); for them it’s on the right subway line.
“Are you taking your meds?”
What’s happening in the world today? I burn for my own mismanaged country. But then, I’m Irish. I’ve always known America was a good idea, which never does work out. It gives you baseball, General MacArthur—who let Japan keep its emperor, the one thing they had left. Japan had never been conquered—until it was conquered utterly by American bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and now by its own nuclear power plants. Never mind—the Japanese will figure it out without any help from us.
We have our own problems: At Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, 100 million gallons of radioactive waste sit on top of several earthquake faults; finally the Department of Energy decided last year that we’d better look for another place to store it. But where? Meanwhile American greedy bastards, just like Japanese CEOs, are planning to build more nuclear power plants!
Compared to the cynicism of the United States of America, Dr. Farber is romantic hope, trailing clouds of glory behind him, still optimistic. He wrote me recently:
I think I should tell you that despite the optimism of my book, in my day-to-day life I often find myself becoming despondent: The world strikes me as so shockingly awful these days that I often think it’s too late—that every effort to change the world is futile. I say this not as a qualification of any statement I make in my book, but just to admit that I’m not absolutely confident that we can avoid the deluge. I don’t doubt that my criticisms of society are valid. And I am grateful for the opportunity to criticize not only the psychiatric system, but those “realists” who advocate making adjustments, and chic French philosophers who denigrate “grand narratives” and “grandiose” visions. It seemed providential that I even found a publisher.
I read an article recently by David Ray Griffin, the Christian theologian (famous now as a 9/11 skeptic). After discussing global warming and polluting technologies, he concluded, “The projections based upon purely ecological matters are bad enough; when this growing scarcity of land, food, and other resources is combined with increasing ethnic and cultural animosities, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and arms sales generally, any realistic picture of the future based on present trends is completely terrifying. We live in a world that is essentially good, created by divine power. But it is a world that is, even more fully than was the world in New Testament times, presently in the grip of demonic power.”
He wrote that in 1993—certainly today it’s worse. In fact every month it gets worse. When thousands of people are killed in Japan and millions are subjected to the prospect of radiation sickness, and even the more liberal wing of the American establishment (e.g., The New York Times) urges that we take precautions before building more nuclear power plants, one feels powerless in the face of evil. I believe in the immortality of the soul, in reincarnation—so I expect to be around. But when will the suffering be o’er? Round and round, life after life.
Back in the seventeenth century Jews would take leave of each other with the salutation, “Next year in Jerusalem.” This meant universal salvation, as in Isaiah (before political Zionism eclipsed the pristine universalist vision). Ah, to have that kind of imminent expectation again—like it was in the ’60s—instead now it’s only the echo of the bard singing in the town square, “How many times must a man look up before he can see the sky? And how many ears must one man have before he can hear people cry? How many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died? The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.” How many deaths? How many years? Lifetimes? Millennia? How long? “The answer is blowin in the wind.” What kind of apocalyptic, man-caused horrors lie ahead? Can we prevent hell on Earth? (It’s already hell for many. It could get worse.)
I admit, I don’t know. I believe in the vision of an Aurobindo, of a Christ—the divine life on Earth—free from even the shadow of death. But when? I have seen so many wise souls who have been ruined by the mental health system. At least my book will liberate some of these gentle, creative souls from psychiatry. In the back of my mind I first conceived the notion twenty-five years ago that the “schizophrenics” have a key role to play in the drama of salvation. I imagine that somehow they will take off their Clark Kent/Lois Lane disguises, shocking the sleepwalkers—Laing’s name for normal people—around them. The shock would be so great that the sleepwalkers will awaken from their collective death-trance for just long enough for the mad to cast a new magic spell, allowing all of them to feel for a brief while the bliss of an eternal love that is pure enough to defeat the demonic—long enough to glimpse the vision of a new dawn. And then, they too, awakened, will choose life over death—for all of us.
That is only a daydream. But it is one of the few things that gives me hope.
I have great respect for Dr. Seth Farber because his knowledge of history is so rich and he draws on it to answer certain questions: What makes the human mind tick? What stimulus, what forces? This is something unusual in an American and still more unusual in a psychologist. The function of American psychology seems so often to deny its own historical past and to function as if there were no history at all—no terrible past of machinery to still the hands of children who masturbated, to put away wives who disobeyed, people who were too poor and burdensome to be supported by their relatives, people abandoned because they were inconvenient to their masters, or husbands, or gentrified relations, or ambitious bosses. A history that simply “put the unfortunates away,” consigned them to a nut house and went back home relieved of the burden of the unwanted, the unwell. This history put away the wife who wouldn’t do her conjugal “duty,” wouldn’t change the beds, till the fields, or “act normal” and who had aspirations above her station, longed for dance, theater, to paint, or something “crazy” like that—impractical, “far out” as we used to say.
I am reminded of one of my experiences helping someone who was considered mad: a boy from the American South who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and lived. My husband and I would visit him at Bellevue because he was the brother to a Southerner who was our friend in art. This wonderful young man was not given a prize for surviving, only a trip to the local asylum as a reward. We finally got him out and sent him home.
Being an artist was simply too hard a thing to be: too uncertain, impractical, and unremunerative. We were young then, carefree, had lots of time to visit strangers who were friends too; we were practically hobos ourselves. Another friend was rich but an embarrassment to her relations because she “wrote verses,” had some “second sight,” and could recite William Butler Yeats’s poems all afternoon—to the astonishment of the psychiatrists at Bellevue. She was in and out of the hospital and became merely—sadly—a permanent patient. She was only a vulnerable woman when I met her, pliable, dependent on her relatives, relying only on another young woman who lived at my farm in the beginning.
My husband, the Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura, was sympathetic to them both, just as he was to my other lesbian friends—one of whom was an architectural theorist, as was his own friend, Arakawa—and to Madeline Gins, who switched from painting to architecture. Arakawa had been at Waseda, where I had taught English literature under Prince Ijima, the Shakespearian scholar. We gathered together in New York—old friends, trusted friends, but open to a whole bunch of new friends too: blacks, Koreans, eccentrics of all kinds, fellow artists from all over the country. It was New York, the melting pot of American art and writing. We were still young, unpretentious, and unafraid; we were “crazy artists.” The world was different then.
All this time Dr. Farber was a youngster looking for answers. After he went to grad school in the early 1980s he became a family therapist and a follower of Laing and Szasz—the two leading “antipsychiatrists” in the world—even though they did not like the term, nor each other. Like a great many people, I owe my very survival to Dr. Thomas Szasz.
The summer I spent working as an aide at St. Peter’s asylum in southern Minnesota, near St. Paul, Seth Farber was a child and I had not yet heard of Szasz. We have a joke among us: “There is the happy life in St. Paul and the hellish life at St. Peter’s.” I lost twenty pounds the first fortnight. What a job: counting silverware after every meal, eating the same food as the patients but unable to keep it down. I remember trying to persuade the cruel nurse not to put a straitjacket on the woman who was having a “fit”—a “lifer” who simply needed some sympathy, some kindness. She was not prepared to defecate on command—having been awakened at 4:30 in the morning, ordered to wash, fitted into an undershirt (a dress if there was one), shoes, and stockings, if there were any.
The rest of these abandoned women had to go naked all day—the most humiliating form of punishment—reduced to a “twin forked thing” as King Lear put it on his heath. They had committed no crime: they were just poor and old. The floor stank; the stench was terrible. The place had been built during the Civil War. The wood of those heavy plank floors had seen every suffering known to humanity: blood, shit, and urine. That was the night shift on the Geriatric Ward.
Meanwhile, I read the entire library; they had a good one—all of Freud, of course, but also his opposite number: Ferenczi and Menninger. They also had all the newest and “best” treatments, including electroshock and insulin shock therapies. Of course, as a Millett, I couldn’t believe a word of it. These unfortunates were simply being warehoused—at the will of their “masters” if they were women, and the men at the command of their bosses, rich relatives, or the adversaries of their will in probate court, stewards of their land and inheritors of their money. Even if their inheritance was only forty dollars, their brothers would put them away for it.
Once “perceived” as mad, there is no end of the scandal. The English rolled it into the Cheshire Cat and Alice and the Red Queen. There are a lot of laughs in madness, but it is a waste of time and money. A great industry is built on it today—Big Pharma.
Madness has even embroiled soldiers, victims of “post-traumatic stress disorder.” How many thousands suffer this in America after Iraq and Afghanistan? “Shell shock,” they used to call it. Drunk all the time, we call it now. So there are painkillers, amphetamines, “antipsychotics,” legalized doping. Hemingway so dreaded another lockup in the Mayo Clinic that he just shot himself. Lots of people have simply offed themselves rather than suffer the loony-bin again. To a writer, the loneliness of our profession—when cursed with the further burden of “Did you take your lithium today?” on the other end of a phone line—becomes simply too much to bear.
Diagnosis is all, and Dr. Farber will tell you, the diagnosis is enough to kill you. You are “perceived” as insane, which is almost the same as being insane. You are also broke and deprived of your liberty, which is everything. From now on, someone else will make your decisions for you, pay your bills—or neglect to pay them. You will lose your job, your house, your passport, your prospects. You become a nothing: whether someone whose chances are all gone, who never had any, or who had some but never got to do what he or she wanted.
The sexes are very different here. Patriarchy, of course, must be observed, especially in the art world, where being a painter is regarded as somewhat effeminate for a man. So the male must compensate—at the woman’s expense. One is obliged to drip paint onto the canvas, drive too fast, swear like a trooper, dismiss all women as puppets, use them, abuse them, sometimes even kill them. Or force yourself on them, let them conceive your child, then leave them unceremoniously.
When I came home after my summer of horrors, I found my younger sister had polio mellitus and the house I came back to was quarantined. Mother said, “Go back there and tell them you are now a volunteer.”
“Why? Can’t I write it up for the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Dispatch? It’s shocking how the poor are abandoned this way.”
“No one will believe you, you are only eighteen. Go back there now. You’ve earned enough so you no longer deserve a salary; I can take you off my income tax. See if you can do any good there.”
I went back.
Fortunately I knew Rosie, a head nurse, who also had an interest in psychology. She was young and adventurous and could drive a car and keep me out of trouble. We quarreled with the men’s side, who believed in brutality and practiced it daily on their victims. She was wary of the “sensitive souls” who wanted to listen to classical music with me but were really discredited doctors who regularly raped patients with the willing collusion of the male guards.
Rosie was sympathetic to my idea of musical therapy and tennis lessons for the patients. So the ward would nod off to Stravinsky and Albinoni and Hayden and exercise to Purcell’s “When Come Ye Sons of Art,” and the gang came alive to “The Firebird.” Then when we had done two weeks of this stuff, I got permission to take the patients out of the hospital and onto the grounds, which were, of course, beautiful. We chased tennis balls. I chased more balls than I ever had before. A few of us actually hit some balls! Everyone had a good day.
On wet days, we would smoke cigarettes, rolled by my expert machine, on the great porches. (Buying cigarettes and Baby Ruth candy bars for abandoned women had become too costly.) They were contented. We even got permission for a handful to “go home,” which meant usually to the same home from which they had escaped, so they usually came back.
My younger sister survived her polio. Mother said I had to go back to college and finish my course in abnormal psychology, which had started me on this adventure. My parents got divorced. Mother started to sell life insurance. I had to become her squire, driving her car and teaching her to drive it too. I had to go into retail, selling stockings every afternoon, then taking the streetcar down to town with mother’s college friends, Dr. and Mrs. Thorson, to see the dentist about my braces.
The job gave me a little latitude to buy books, drink malted milk, and take the streetcar home, passing Aunt Dorothy’s house on Virginia Avenue. She eventually sent me to Oxford, where I discovered real scholarship. It is such a pity that American scholarship has slipped the point of paying the mortgage and no one ever seems to read books that are not meant for children.
As a feminist, I must point out that the Mad movement has degenerated into patriotic/patriarchal belief in pill-pusher psychiatry, forgotten even to honor and read its male doctors like Peter Breggin and its civilian forces like Leonard Frank and Michel Foucault. It sadly neglects its female authorities like Dr. Phyllis Chesler—not to mention Susan Brownmiller, Sylvia Plath, Jessica Mitford, Eve Figes, Sally Zinman, Judi Chamberlin, Ellen Frankfort, Mary Daly, Elizabeth Davis, Barbara Ehrenreich, Judy Graham, Janet Frame, and Frances Farmer. One could read all about “institutional psychiatry” in one short story by Anton Chekov called Ward 6. Or one could dip into Holocaust studies a bit: the mental patients were the first to be exterminated in Germany. The struggle continues—all over the world now.
Of course, being Irish, I have a sense of humor, a special point of view. You have to laugh at the insanity of the world: consider the alternative.
KATE MILLETT, PH.D., prominent feminist and author, was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1934. She graduated from the University of Minnesota magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa and in 1956 attended St. Hilda’s College at Oxford University. She obtained her Ph.D., with distinction, from Columbia University in 1970. Active in feminist politics in the late 1960s and the 1970s, in 1966 she became chairwoman of the education committee of the newly formed National Organization for Women (NOW). In 1970, her book Sexual Politics was published. An amplification of her Ph.D. thesis, it was and continues to be a bestseller and remains a classic statement of radical feminist theory. In 1990 Simon and Schuster published The Loony-Bin Trip, the autobiographical story of her struggles with manic depression and her brave decision to go off her prescription drug, lithium. Other works include The Prostitution Papers: A Candid Dialogue, published in 1973 and again in 1976; Flying (1974); Sita (1977); Going to Iran (1981); The Politics of Cruelty: An Essay on the Literature of Political Imprisonment (1994); and A.D. (1995). She lives in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she oversees the Women’s Art Colony Farm, a community of female artists and writers.