Amongst a rush of cases of women imagining that priests or high-ranking men have singled them out for love, Clérambault describes the case of Léa-Anna, a fifty-three-year-old delirious erotomaniac suffering from persecution. She was brought to the Sainte-Anne special infirmary in 1920 after an arrest for the usual banal causes: she had approached a policeman, accused him of laughing at her and slapped him.
From a broken peasant family with an alcoholic father, Léa-Anna had made her way to Paris, become a milliner and taken on a rich, well placed lover, who supported her in high fashion for eighteen years. After his death, a second relationship with a younger man having come to an end, Léa-Anna began to believe that the King of England was in love with her and had sent emissaries. She went to England, stood in front of Buckingham Palace and began to interpret everything that happened to her as signs of the King’s love.
Emotion fuelled the hopes which the aristocrat Clérambault understood as one of the stages of a disease of which an overreaching pride is the underlying feature. Doubt marks the next stage. If the King can love, he can also hate. The one thing the delusion won’t permit is indifference. With doubt comes the paranoiac phase of the condition: the King is persecuting her, playing tricks on her, preventing her from finding a room in London’s better hotels, making her lose her luggage and money. He is, she now believes, also responsible for the poverty and humiliation she has generally been forced into as well as for her present incarceration.
Clérambault calls the tale Léa-Anna reveals, the ‘novel’ of the érotomane’s passion. Like Freud, his nomenclature is literary. The twentieth-century self, as understood by the mind doctors, tells stories, whether they’re family romances, self-aggrandizing passions, or the kinds of case histories Freud worried might be too close to novelettes, the chick lit of its time.
A social conservative who believed the insane were a danger to public order, Clérambault was interested above all in classifying his ‘criminal’ patients, whose condition he saw as constitutional and therefore untreatable. Yet he had stumbled on a ‘mental automatism’–an unstoppable charge of ideas in madness–of which the erotic content was undeniably modern, and proximate to the Viennese he despised.
Clérambault’s ‘stalkers’ suffer from a disturbance of love which parallels and parodies true ‘forbidden’ romance at every juncture: first comes the sense of being desired and desirable through countless secret signs and glances, then come the hurdles and misunderstandings, then the disillusion, the chagrin or sadness; finally the rupture, with its anger and texture of paranoia. His women are the heirs of Madame Bovary, taking her sentimental aspirations into a world of delusional excess. Indeed Madame Bovary, penalized for her dreams and ambitions, gave her name early in the century to a condition, bovarysme, which signified illusions about the self, dissatisfactions, the desire to be another. In the courts, the condition Flaubert had given birth to in the heroine of whom he had said, ‘C’est moi’, was used to insist on the irresponsibility of the accused. Bovarysme was the sign of madness which would place a woman in an asylum rather than in a prison.
Clérambault is said to have possessed a terrifyingly acute clinical gaze, an eye for detail and difference which was honed by his artistic pursuits and which abetted his zeal for classification. A descendant of an old aristocratic family, alert to social rank, he was hardly himself lacking in the pride he so regularly found in his erotomaniacs. Like them, he was also adept at secret passions: one for photography, the other for the arrangement of women’s drapery, its folds and fall, an art he had studied and photographed with a fetishist’s obsessiveness during his war years in Morocco when he served in the French army. Clandestinely, he now attired wax figurines, alert to the feel of fabric, the erotic charge of silks and velvets he had so graphically described in his account of the fetishism of textures and female kleptomania in an early review for a criminology journal.
Whatever his dislike of artists, Clérambault’s own clinical notes are filled with an artist’s attention to the look and dress and movement of patients, all communicated in a resonant, telegraphic style. When his sight failed him and a cataract operation removed his ability to see depth, he arranged an elaborate suicide. Like a detective, sight was crucial to his being: he couldn’t face the loss of it. He staged his own murder, pistol in mouth, watching himself in the mirror before falling back on to the divan he had carefully placed behind his chair. When police entered his house in Montrouge on the morning of 17 November 1934, they found not only the dead body of the reputedly misogynistic doctor, who had never allowed women into his lectures, but hundreds of wax mannequins, intricately draped dolls and photographs of Morocco (now in the collection of the Musée de l’Homme). The man who had popularized a medical category describing erotic obsession was thus no stranger to it himself. He left his name to a stalking syndrome organized around a false but persistent belief that one is loved by a famous or prominent person and entailing the obsessive pursuit of a disinterested object of love.
It is perhaps no wonder that under the problematic tutelage of Clérambault, with whom he shared a high Catholic aestheticism, his charismatic pupil Jacques Lacan grew alert to the vacillations of desire, not to mention the significance of mirrors. From Freud, whose primacy of influence he was later to claim, Lacan learned the importance of the unconscious and of sexuality in the structure of the paranoid psychosis. But his psychiatric training in the Sainte-Anne Hospital, where delirium and the clinical gaze were the norm, always informed his later psychoanalytic work.
Whether it was because of his link with the Surrealists, or his participation at the first reading of Joyce’s Ulysses at the Shakespeare and Co. Bookshop in Paris, Lacan also showed an early interest in the way language functioned amongst the patients at the Sainte-Anne. The theorist who would later declare that the unconscious was structured like a language was already alert to the slipperiness of syntax, sound and meaning, the inherent ambiguity and overflow of language–all evident in the speech as well as the writing of his deluded and particularly his paranoid patients. How easy it is for meaning to slide away from authorial and indeed authoritative intent is evident in such ambiguous signs as ‘Refuse to be put in this basket!’ or ‘Dogs must be carried on the escalator!’ Cultural and gender codings are assumed; a slight shift on speakers’ or hearers’ part can indicate ‘madness’: it seems to be perfectly all right for a major South African politician, for example, to say that a woman’s short skirt sent him the message that she wanted sex–he is deemed neither mad, nor a rapist. But if in a similar instance a woman had said, ‘His short trousers sent a message to me’, she might well be regarded as eccentric; said often enough in the early part of the last century and accompanied by irritable behaviour, the eccentricity might catapult into madness. Later on, Lacan was also to show how words could take on the force of acts and seep into the unconscious of hearers to shape their symptoms.
One of Lacan’s first case presentations, made in 1931 with two of his colleagues, featured the ‘inspired writings’ of a thirty-four-year-old teacher, Marcelle, classified the year before as an erotomaniac by Clérambault because of her fixation on her superior, who had recently died. Clérambault had the woman committed because she was claiming twenty million francs’ worth of damages from the state (her employers) on the grounds of privations and dissatisfactions, both sexual and intellectual–an early, contested instance of sexual harassment, one might say.
Marcelle saw herself as Joan of Arc. Through her revolutionary writings she wanted to regenerate a decadent France, caught in an economic crisis and with a rising far right. ‘All those old forms need shaking up,’ she said. ‘I shall make the language evolve.’ The declaration has one wonder whether Marcelle had read the Surrealist manifestos. Certainly Lacan saw in her prose something which resembled their attempts at automatic writing, at allowing the unconscious free rein on the page, exploding grammar and syntax and, in the poets’ case, perhaps willing those wild puns of sound and sense
, metaphors and leaps of significance that Joyce nurtured and which seemed to come so readily to Zelda Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf. In this early stage of a long career, Lacan was prepared to classify Marcelle in a traditional psychiatric way, while at the same time analysing her schizographie, her untranslatable and surreal mode of writing. The young teacher’s letter to the French President began: ‘Monsieur le Président de la République P. Doumer holidaying amidst spiced bread and sweet poets. Monsieur le Président of a Republic overcome with zeal. I would like to know everything in order to make you the corn mouse of coward and canon, but I’m much too long to guess.’
‘Aimée’ and Jacques Lacan (1901–81)
On 3 June 1931, some three weeks after Marcelle had written her letter, a woman whose core condition was labelled as erotomanic was sent to the Sainte-Anne from the Saint-Lazare women’s prison infirmary. She had languished in a delirium for twenty days after having attempted to assassinate a well known comédienne, Huguette Duflos, the lead in a popular boulevard comedy, All Is Well. All wasn’t well with Marguerite Pantaine. At the Sainte-Anne, she was put in the care of Jacques Lacan. Under the name of Aimée, or ‘Beloved’, the heroine of one of her own ambitious unpublished fictions, Marguerite was to become a famous case: the subject of Lacan’s medical dissertation and the first of his theoretical disquisitions: Of Paranoid Psychosis In Its relations with Personality. The thesis had all the panache of a contemporary Madame Bovary, a story of love, ambition and tragic delusion narrated with a novelist’s care. It also came with a modernist twist, a tale within a tale. Lacan included lengthy sections of Marguerite’s own fictions, side by side with interpretations of her delusional interpretations of the world.
The thesis bears a parallel to Freud’s Studies in Hysteria: it is a founding text in the history of French psychoanalysis. But forty years on, hysteria has given way to psychosis. The dissertation is also Lacan’s Interpretation of Dreams. If Lacan’s subject is woman, language and psychosis rather than Freud’s autobiographical self, dreams and neurosis, it is perhaps because in Aimée, Lacan can think through his own family structure, the ties to siblings, the play of unconscious identifications within the family so that children re-enact parental lacks or buried wishes, and the grand dreams which will catapult him from provincialism to the very centre of Parisian intellectual and artistic life. The debt to Freud lies in the way Lacan makes use of his insights about the links between the structure of paranoia and a repressed homosexual identification. Lacan had that very year been translating Freud’s 1922 essay on ‘Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality’.
At 8.30 p.m. on 18 April 1931, thirty-eight-year-old Marguerite Pantaine, well dressed, gloved, polite, had approached Huguette Duflos just as the celebrated actress of stage and screen reached the actors’ entrance to the theatre. Having confirmed the woman’s name by her response, Marguerite opened her handbag, took out a large knife and struck out at the woman’s heart. Duflos kept her cool and stopped the blade with her hand, suffering a serious cut through ‘two flexor tendons’. Two assistants rushed to constrain Marguerite and hustled her off to the nearest police station.
Here, she refused to explain her act, though she answered questions about her identity normally enough. She claimed that for some years Duflos had been conspiring against her, stirring ‘scandal’, threatening. She had teamed up with the famous academician and writer, Pierre Benoit, the film of whose book she starred in as a duchess. Benoit had portrayed Marguerite maliciously in numerous passages in his books and had stolen the plots of Marguerite’s own fictions. This very Benoit was also the man, Lacan later learned, who ‘loved’ her and who had persuaded her to leave her husband. Together, comédienne and writer had prevented Marguerite’s books from being published. Though Benoit had met her once when she had accosted him at his publisher’s, whom she haunted, there was in reality no relation between them except in her troubled imagination.
At the prison infirmary, Marguerite was diagnosed by the forensic doctor, Benjamin Truelle, who concluded that she suffered from a ‘systematized persecutory delirium based on interpretation and with megalomaniac tendencies and an erotomanic substrate’. No civil suit was brought by Duflos, but the story made the papers with all the hyperbolic stereotypes that female criminality even today still receives. Le Journal contended that Marguerite was a masculine woman, with few friends except for two women teachers with whom she was preparing exams. She had been deranged by too much reading of fiction and attempting to write her own. She was a ‘declassed’ peasant, who had risen to the rank of clerk at the post office, where she earned a good living. (In fact, on the very day that she was arrested, notice had come of her promotion.)
Jacques Lacan, then a hospital-based psychiatrist, observed Marguerite/Aimée for some eighteen months.
In his substantial case history, he changed her name, provenance and some details, turning her into a railway clerk. No sooner had the twenty-day delirium following the assassination attempt subsided and Aimée arrived at the Sainte-Anne than she became a reasonable and compliant patient. The attempted homicide had ‘apparently resolved the preoccupations of her delirium’. There might still be some holes in her memory and she was convinced her act had been undertaken in order to protect her child from those who wanted his death. But Aimée spoke her story, and wrote. Before an audience, her generally reserved manner grew deeply expressive, her very posture that of a heroic mother. Lacan not only interviewed his patient but gathered all available evidence about her. This included reading her copious writings and calling in her family. Her estranged husband was now living with her sister: together they looked after Aimée’s son, apparently with her acquiescence since she had asked to be transferred to a post in Paris, while her husband, a postal worker like her, remained in the outlying region. She visited regularly enough, though her frightened sister would have preferred her not to.
The bright daughter of a peasant family, Aimée had made her way up the educational route to a good post. Though she had still not attained her baccalaureate, she was ambitious, and, as Lacan notes, ‘themes of persecution are intimately linked with delusions of grandeur’. Aimée had dreams of rising to a new and better life, of accomplishing some great social mission. Her aspirations extended to achieving idealistic reforms. These were linked with an erotomanic fixation on the Prince of Wales.
Having had a secret affair at the age of eighteen, Aimée had married seven years later, in 1917. Apparently frigid, her first pregnancy had not come until 1921. During the pregnancy, then twenty-eight, she had begun to suffer from an overwhelming sadness and a sense that her colleagues at the office–at that time the same as her husband’s–were laughing contemptuously behind her back and wishing her baby dead. She felt her husband resented her earlier relationship. They quarrelled frequently. Coded messages began to appear for her in the newspapers and she had terrible dreams. Her vehemence during this period frightened her family. She slashed a friend’s bicycle tyres, threw first a pail of water, then an iron, at her husband.
A girl child was born dead on 20 March 1922. Aimée blamed the death on her enemies, in particular a woman of higher class who had for three years been her best friend, but had now moved office. She had telephoned Aimée during the pregnancy to ask after the child.
Aimée’s second pregnancy brought back her fears and depression. Once the boy was born, she gave herself up to him with a passionate ardour, nursing him until he was fourteen months old. Everyone else irritated her and she interpreted all actions as hostile to her child. She was overwhelmed by a sense that both familiars and strangers were insulting her, that the whole town saw her as depraved. She wanted to run away. Secretly, she applied for leave from her post and for a passport to America, using a false name for the request, since otherwise it would have needed her husband’s consent. She would have abandoned her child, she claimed, for his own good. Her grand schemes were beginning to take shape.
The family had her confined
in a private asylum. She started writing letters to a famous author, asking him to rescue her. Asylum staff reported her saying: ‘There are those who have built stables in order to trap me as a milk cow’ ‘I’m too often judged other than I am.’ After six months, her family took her home. She was better, if not cured. She moved to Paris. The delusionary structures which would lead to the assassination attempt took a firm grip. Huguette Duflos, much in the news because of a court case, became a fixation when office staff spoke of her in flattering terms: Aimée interrupted, saying the woman was nothing but a whore. It was this comment, Aimée believed, that had set Duflos against her and implanted the wish to kill Aimée’s son.
What Lacan calls her ‘interpretative madness’ then moved into full swing. Newspapers, posters, ads, everything Aimée came into contact with added up to the single fact that Huguette Duflos was about to target Aimée’s son in revenge for his mother’s slander and bad character. Soon any celebrated or successful woman became part of the plot against Aimée and her son. Lacan notes that her hatred had a core of ambivalence. The women she loathes and fears are the very women she wants to be. As for the author she has fixed on, Benoit, too, is present in his minions, the many writers and journalists who steal her ideas and use them wrongly. Aimée would save the world, do good, while they only harm. They propagate war, Bolshevism, murder and corruption, exploit our misery for their selfish ends.
Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors Page 31