ALSO BY PHYLLIS CHESLER
Letters to a Young Feminist
Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody
A Politically Incorrect Feminist
With Child: A Diary of Motherhood
Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman
Copyright © 2005 by Phyllis Chesler
Published by arrangement with the author
All rights reserved
This edition published in 2018 by Lawrence Hill Books
An imprint of Chicago Review Press Incorporated
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ISBN 978-1-64160-036-1
Cover design: Lindsey Cleworth Schauer
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Printed in the United States of America
Some of the material from Chapters Two, Three, and Four has appeared in different form in:
“Women and Psychotherapy,” The Radical Therapist, September 1970.
“Patient and Patriarch: Women in the Psychotherapeutic Relationship,” Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness, edited by Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran, New York: Basic Books, 1971.
“Stimulus/Response: Men Drive Women Crazy,” Psychology Today, July 1971.
“Women as Psychotherapeutic Patients,” Women’s Studies, Summer 1972.
Grateful acknowledgments are made to the following for permission to include copyrighted selections:
Excerpts from “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female” by Frances Beale from The Black Woman: An Anthology edited by Toni Cade. Published by the New American Library, reprinted by permission of the author.
Excerpts from Mothers and Amazons by Helen Diner. Copyright © 1965 by Helen Diner. Reprinted by permission of Julian Press.
Excerpts from Margaret Fuller: American Romantic edited by Perry Miller. Copyright © 1963 by Perry Miller. Used by permission of Cornell University Press.
Excerpts from Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman published in 1917. Reprinted in 1970 by Dover Publications, Inc.
Excerpts from Black Rage by William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs, New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1968.
Excerpts from “On Sexism and Racism” by Nancy Henley, resource paper published as part of the Report of the Subcommittee on Women of the Committee on Equal Opportunity in Psychology of the American Psychological Association, February 1971.
Excerpts from Notes from the Third Year by Anne Koedt. Copyright © 1971 by Anne Koedt. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Excerpts from The Politics of Experience by R. D. Laing. Copyright © 1967 by R. D. Laing. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books, Ltd.
Excerpts from an article by Toni Morrison from the New York Times Magazine, 8/22/70. Copyright © 1970 by the New York Times. Reprinted by permission.
Excerpts from “Newlywed Swings In” from the New York Post, February 19, 1970.
Copyright © 1970 by New York Post Corporation. Reprinted by permission of the New York Post.
“Medusa” copyright © 1965 by Ted Hughes and “Lady Lazareth” copyright © 1963 by Ted Hughes from the book Ariel by Sylvia Plath. Excerpts from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath copyright © 1971 by Harper & Row, Inc., published by Faber & Faber, copyright © 1966 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Inc., and Olwyn Hughes.
Excerpts from Wilheim Reich: A Personal Biography by Use O. Reich. Reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, Inc., Macmillan & Co., Ltd.
Portion of “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-law,” from Snapshots of a Daughter-law: Poems 1954–1962, by Adrienne Rich. By permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright © 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1967 by Adrienne Rich Conrad. Excerpts from “The Flight from Womanhood” from the article as it appears in Feminine Psychology edited by Harold Kelman. Copyright © 1967 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., originally published by the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.
Excerpts from Candy by Terry Southern. Copyright © 1958, 1959, 1962, 1964 by Terry Southern. Reprinted by permission of Coward-McCann & Geoghegan, Inc.
Excerpts from The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas S. Szasz. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Inc.
Excerpts from The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis De Sade by Peter Weiss. English version by Geoffrey Skelton. Verse adaptation by Adrian Mitchell. Copyright © 1965 by John Calder Ltd. Originally published in German. Copyright © 1964 by Suhrkamp Verlag. Reprinted by permission of Atheneum Publishers.
Excerpts from Les Guerilleres by Monique Wittig, translated by David Le Vay, English translation Copyright © 1971 by Peter Owen. Reprinted by permission of the Viking Press, Inc.
Excerpts from Love Between Women by Dr. Charlotte Wolff, reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, Inc., Macmillan & Co., Ltd., and Gerald Duckworth & Co., Ltd.
Credits for illustrative material appear on page 414.
They all looked half drugged or half asleep, dull, as if the creatures had been hypnotized or poisoned, for these people walked in their fouled and disgusting streets full of ordure and bits of refuse and paper as if they were not conscious of their existence here, were somewhere else: and they were somewhere else … each was occupied in imagining how it, he, she, was triumphing in an altercation with the landlord or the grocer or a colleague, or how it was making love…. It was painful in a way she had never known pain, an affliction of shameful grief, to walk here today, among her own kind, looking at them as they were, seeing them, us, the human race, as visitors, from a space ship might see them….
But the most frightening thing about them was this: that they walked and moved and went about their lives in a condition of sleepwalking: they were not aware of themselves, of other people, of what went on around them … they were essentially isolated, shut-in, enclosed inside their hideously defective bodies, behind their dreaming drugged eyes, above all, inside a net of wants and needs that made it impossible for them to think of anything else.
Doris Lessing
The Four-Gated City
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
2005 Introduction
MADNESS
Demeter and Clytemnestra, Revisited
ONE
WHY MADNESS?
Women in Asylums: Four Lives
Mothers and Daughters: A Mythological Commentary on the Lives
Heroines and Madness: Joan of Arc and the Virgin Mary
TWO
ASYLUMS
The Mental Asylum
The Female Social Role and Psychiatric Symptoms: Depression, Frigidity, and Suicide Attempts
Schizophrenia in Three Studies
A Theoretical Proposal
THREE
THE CLINICIANS
How Many Clinicians Are There in America?
Contemporary Clinical Ideology
Traditional Clinical Ideology
The Institutional Nature of Private Therapy
FOUR
THE FEMALE CAREER AS A PSYCHIATRIC PATIENT
The Interviews
WOMEN
FIVE
SEX BETWEEN PATIENT AND THERAPIST
SIX
PSYCHIATRICALLY INSTITUTIONALIZED WOMEN
SEVEN
LESBIANS
The Interviews
EIGHT
THIRD WORLD WOMEN
The Interviews
NINE
FEMINISTS
The Interviews
TEN
FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
Female Psychology in Our Culture: Women Alone
Female Psychology in Our Culture: Women in
Groups
Amazon Societies: Visions and Possibilities
The Problem of Survival: Power and Violence
Some Psychological Prescriptions for the Future
Thirteen Questions
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
2005 Acknowledgments
Without my editor Airié Stuart’s ardent desire to have this work out in an updated form, it would not exist as such. I am in her service. I am also grateful to Melissa Nosal, my assistant Robin Eldridge, and researcher-writer Courtney Martin for their exceedingly thoughtful and efficient research and to the entire team at Palgrave Macmillan. My agent Joelle Delbourgo effortlessly made this happen. As always, I am indebted to my family, and to all those health care givers and support staff who keep me in good writing shape.
I also now stand on the shoulders of many Foredaughters and Foresons whose continued work in the areas which I first pioneered in Women and Madness you will find in the updated bibliography. I am indebted to them for that work.
1972 Acknowledgments
I thank Lillian, my mother, for giving birth to me, and for taking care of me long before I could write such a book—and for whatever dreams, whatever wisdom she and Leon, my father whispered or sang to me while I slept.
I thank my friends for their love and support, and for certain evenings, weekends, and conversations: especially, Vivian Gornick, Ruth Jody, Judy Kuppersmith, and Marjorie Portnow.
I thank the women I “interviewed” for surviving—and for sharing their experiences with me.
I thank the members of the Association for Women in Psychology, especially those in the Chicago collective, and those feminists without whose existence, encouragement, and examples this book may not have been written just now.
I thank Natalie Bravermen, Louise Brown, Lillian Chesler, Catherine Clowery, Bici Forbes, Mary Shartle, Martha Hicks, and Angie Waltermath for their secretarial assistance.
I thank my students for their interest and for their help in various phases of the data-collection and statistical analysis: Elizabeth Friedman, Doris Fielding, Delsinea Jamison, George Sideris, Marina Rivas, and Roland Watts. I especially thank my colleagues in the Department of Psychology at Richmond College, and George Fischer and Larry Mitchell for their loyalty and support during the winter of 1971.
I thank Betty Prashker and Diane Matthews Reverand of Doubleday for their invaluable help in seeing this book through to its hardcover publication in 1972.
Much appreciation is due the MacDowell Colony for housing and feeding me during most of the summer of 1971; to Shirley Willner of the Biometrics Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health for answering all my questions promptly and sympathetically, and for sending me all the necessary data; to Laura Murra of the Women’s History Research Library in Berkeley, California, for sharing the files with me; to Sylvia Price of the New School for Social Research for getting me many of the books I needed—and for her help when I needed them still longer; to Stuart Kahan of the Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn for his review of the statistical analyses; and to Sara Whitworth of the Whitney Museum for her suggestions about Amazons and goddesses in Greek art.
2005 INTRODUCTION
MUCH OF WHAT WE TAKE FOR GRANTED TODAY was not even whispered about fifty or sixty years ago. During the 1950s and 1960s, clinicians were still being taught that women suffer from penis envy, are morally inferior to men, and are innately masochistic, dependent, passive, heterosexual, and monogamous. We also learned that it was mothers—not fathers, genetic predisposition, accidents, and/or poverty—who caused neurosis and psychosis.
None of my professors ever said that women (or men) were oppressed, or that oppression is traumatizing—especially when those who suffer are blamed for their own misery and diagnostically pathologized. No one ever taught me how to administer a test for mental health—only for mental illness.
I still think of this as psychiatric imperialism.
In graduate school, in my clinical internship, and in the psychoanalytic institute where I was trained in the 1960s and early 1970s, I was taught that it was both helpful and even scientific to diagnostically pathologize what might be a totally normal human response to trauma.
For example, we were taught to view the normal female (and human) response to sexual violence, including incest, as a psychiatric illness. We were taught to blame the victim for what had happened to her. Relying on a superficial understanding of psychoanalytic theory, we blamed the woman as “seductive” or “sick.” We believed that women cried “incest” or “rape” in order to get sympathetic attention or revenge.
In my time, we were taught to view women as somehow naturally mentally ill. Women were hysterics (hysteros, the womb), malingerers, child-like, manipulative, either cold or smothering as mothers, and driven to excess by their hormones.
We assumed that men were mentally healthy. We were not taught to pathologize or criminalize male drug addicts or alcoholics, men who physically battered, raped, or even murdered women or other men. We did not have diagnostic categories for male sexual predators or pedophiles. The psychiatric literature actually blamed the mothers, not the fathers, of such men, for having sent them over the edge. But mainly, we were trained to understand and forgive such super-manly men (“boys will be boys”).
In other words, our so-called professional training merely repeated and falsely professionalized our previous cultural education.
I knew that what I was being taught was neither useful nor true. At this point, I’d been attending feminist meetings almost nonstop for two years, surrounded by other women who were equally passionate, confident, vocal, and educated. In the spirit of that time, I became—and have remained—a liberation psychologist and a legal activist. I was a multi-disciplinary researcher who loved both myths and footnotes. I refused to write in an obfuscated, Mandarin language. I was psycho-analytically and spiritually oriented but I was also steadfastly political.
In 1969, I co-founded the Association for Women in Psychology (AWP). In those days, women founded new organizations every month—sometimes, every day. Emboldened by feminism, we created our own organizations where we and our ideas would be welcome and in which we could teach ourselves and each other what we needed to know. We hadn’t learned it elsewhere.
For example, I had a brand-new Ph.D., had completed a hospital internship, and was still enrolled in a psycho-analytic training institute—but I knew almost nothing about how to help another woman (or a man) understand her own life.
No matter, I was secretly studying what women really wanted from psychotherapy. I planned to present my findings at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1970. I went to the convention, but I did not deliver this paper. Instead, on behalf of AWP, I asked APA members for one million dollars in reparations on behalf of women who had never been helped by the mental health professions but who had, in fact, been further abused: punitively labeled, overly tranquilized, sexually seduced while in treatment, hospitalized against their wills, given shock therapy, lobotomized, and above all, unnecessarily described as too aggressive, promiscuous, depressed, ugly, old, angry, fat, or incurable. “Maybe AWP could set up an alternative to a mental hospital with the money,” I said, “or a shelter for runaway wives.”
The audience of more than two thousand (mostly male members) laughed at me. Loudly. Nervously. Some looked embarrassed, others relieved. Obviously, I was crazy. Afterwards, colleagues told me that jokes had been made about my “penis envy.”
I started writing Women and Madness on the plane back to New York. I immersed myself in the psycho-analytic literature, located biographies and autobiographies of women who’d been psychiatrically treated or hospitalized—women who refused to eat or who refused to marry, women who were unable to leave home, or to lead lives outside the family. I read novels and poems about sad, mad, bad women and devoured mythology and anthropology, especially about goddesses, matriarchies, and Amazon warrior women.
It is no accident that I wrote about goddesses in Women and Madness: great Earth Mothers like Demeter, who rescued her daughter Persephone from kidnapping, rape, and incest; Amazon figures like Diana, who protected women in childbirth and who literally ran with the wild beasts. Such goddess images are our collective human role models; we repress them at our own peril. Both women and men are strengthened by examples of women who embody all the human (not merely the feminine or biologically maternal) possibilities.
It is also no accident that I did not fully examine the “dark” side of Demeter and Persephone’s relationship or other primal relationship myths such as that of Queen Clytemnestra and her matricidal daughter Electra. I did so embryonically in Women and Madness but I also did so in more major ways over time and will discuss this later in this new Introduction.
Back in 1970, I also began analyzing mental illness statistics and read all the relevant academic studies. In addition, I read historical accounts of women’s lives. I located the stories of European women who’d been condemned as witches (including Joan of Arc) and, from the sixteenth century on, psychiatrically imprisoned. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in both Europe and North America, a man had the legal right to lock his perfectly sane wife or daughter away in a mental asylum. And some did. Authoritarian, violent, drunken, and/or insane husbands had their wives psychiatrically imprisoned, sometimes forever, as a way of punishing them for being too uppity—and in order to marry other women.
Some American women wrote lucid, brilliant, heartbreaking accounts of their confinements. Incredibly, these heroic women were not broken or silenced by their lengthy sojourns in Hell. They bore witness to what was done to them—and to those less fortunate than themselves, who did not survive the brutal beatings, near-drownings, and force-feedings, the body-restraints, the long periods in their own filth and in solitary confinement, the absence of kindness or reason—which passed for “treatment.” These historical accounts brought tears to my eyes.
I found an extraordinary first-person account by Elizabeth Packard, whose only crime was that of daring to think for herself against her husband’s wishes. She insisted on teaching her Sunday school class that people are born good, not evil. Packard’s punishment was three years in a state mental hospital. Afterwards, she became a crusader for the rights of mental patients and married women. In her writings, she bore witness to what was done to women in asylums.
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