Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Aimée’s aspiration to do good emerges as part of her erotic fantasy about the Prince of Wales, to whom she writes poetry and who acts as her protector. This ‘relationship’ has long been in place. The Prince seems to be part of the good world Aimée wants to create, one where women and children will dominate and be safe. Yet the Prince is also linked to a dissolute aspect of her life: she stops strangers in the street, apparently in order to tell them of her mission to convert them to better ways, but the encounters often lead her to hotel rooms from which she has to flee.

  At the height of her madness, Aimée is leading a double life. Still a successful post office clerk, she goes to work daily and carries out her duties. Afterwards, she moves into the wilder life of her fantasies. She studies. She goes to a newspaper office and insists they carry an article of hers against the ‘decadent’ novelist Colette. She writes two novels, one a pastoral idyll dedicated to the Prince of Wales, called The Detractor, in which the hero David is in love with a young woman called Aimée, a perfect country maiden and older sister. A painted harlot arrives in this innocent village with her consort and sows discord, hatches plots which have Aimée and her family as their victims. Her brothers and sisters die, her mother grows ill. She takes refuge in her dreams and follows them to their grave, leaving her mother in despair.

  In a second novel, also dedicated to the Prince of Wales, the heroine instead of succumbing to the evil woman goes off to Paris, like some Balzacian hero, to battle her way to the top. The book is a jumble of medieval, revolutionary and contemporary elements in which the heroine confronts a puritanical Robespierre figure, as well as communists and the writers and actors who want to kill her in effigy, before returning home to the safety of her family and the peaceful countryside.

  When this book was rejected by the publishers Aimée demanded an interview. She leapt violently at the throat of an editor. ‘Band of assassins!’ she shouted, ‘band of academicians!’ Stopped in time, this attempt to strangle was the first in an escalating series of acts which culminated in the assassination attempt. Meanwhile, she sent her manuscripts off to the Prince of Wales, hoping for his favour and help. With deadly irony, the manuscripts came back with the traditional note saying His Highness could not accept presents, on the day after Aimée was committed.

  During the time leading up to her violence, Aimée visited her son daily, waiting for him at the school gates. She worried with an ever-growing anxiety that matched her increasing ferocity that he might be killed at any moment. She accused her husband of brutality, told her sister that she wanted a divorce, wanted the child; was ready, if her husband didn’t grant it, to kill him. At night, she was haunted by dreams of the war that would take her son away. That would be her fault. She was a criminal mother.

  A month before the assassination attempt, Aimée bought a large hunting knife. The night of the crime, she later told Lacan, her state was such that she could have targeted any of her persecutors. The ‘justice’ her act represented followed her into the early part of her incarceration. She wrote to the prison director complaining that the newspapers had slandered her in calling her ‘neurasthenic’, something which could damage her future career as a woman of letters. She told fellow inmates of the terrible persecutions she had suffered. And then, suddenly, her delirium disappeared, ‘the good as well as the bad’. ‘All the vanity of her megalomaniacal illusions became clear to her,’ Lacan writes, ‘as well as the silliness of her fears.’

  According to Lacan, the delusional delirium goes because the act has carried with it Aimée’s self-punishment. In striking out at her externalized ideal, she was also hitting out at herself. This was a fulfilment of her subterranean wish, a punishment for her own repressed desires.

  Much of Lacan’s handling of Marguerite’s case has a Clérambault-like descriptive ring. Yet he emphatically shuns any of the organic underpinnings his psychiatric masters would have called up. He also holds out the possibility of cure. Though he did no formal psychoanalysis with Aimée–his training as a psychoanalyst had to wait for his own analysis with Rudolf Loewenstein which began sometime in 1932–his interpretation of her case already has a distinct Freudian emphasis.

  Bleuler apart, there were no models for conducting analysis with psychotic patients, and Freud, ever pessimistic, had misgivings about success in this area. Lacan rehearses these, but from his long conversations with Aimée and her family and friends, he constructs a detailed and distinctly Freudian analysis of the way in which her delusions have been built up. In a brilliant passage, he also uses Janet to show exactly the opposite of what later American recovered-memory theorists will go to Janet for: that is, Lacan demonstrates how memories are created through a mixture of fantasy images coinciding with associations, events, and feelings about the past. These come together to give weight not only to the memory but to the individual’s perception of that memory, its familiarity and hence its reality–so that Aimée’s fantasized memories take on the full density of lived experience. She knows that persecutory messages have been sent, when plots began and what brought them about.

  Lacan tracks back to his patient’s family history, not to find inherited madness, but to unearth a ‘special’ relationship with her mother, who always singled Aimée out for her intelligence, made her feel exceptional. Her mother, like her daughter after her, it transpires, had a tendency to feel persecuted and to read signs in her neighbours’ actions. (As Freud points out in his essay on jealousy, such a reading goes straight to the neighbours’ inevitably hostile unconscious, rather than responding to the mask consciousness dons.) Her elder sister became Aimée’s principal carer, a maternal standin, until she left home for work at the age of fourteen and then married her employer. It was his death that brought her home again, herself childless, to look after Aimée’s child: Aimée, the clever dreamer, was ever incompetent around the house, the family story runs.

  Lacan determines that Aimée’s persecutory delusions have in fact all along been her attempt to punish herself not only for past and present acts and lacks, but for a deeply buried homosexual identification with her sister–besides herself, the underlying target of all her violence. He locates Aimée’s psychic homosexuality and her conflicted rejection of it in a number of areas. He cites her confessed inability to enjoy sex–according to her husband, too, she was sexually cold. He notes her attachments to women, the vivacity of her intellectual attraction to men, her sense of affinity with them and the unconscious slippages into the male voice in her fiction, her Bovaresque ambitions, her Don Juanism–that is, her casual liaisons with men which are in fact an anxious search for herself, propelled by sexual dissatisfaction.

  Aimée’s unconscious homosexual desires, he concludes, explain the structure of her paranoia, her erotomania, and her wish for self-punishment. Everything, Lacan notes, points to this. After her first breakdown, when her childless sister returned to supplant her, desire and guilt were compounded. The resentment and anger that couldn’t be felt or directed at an ambivalently loved member of the family had to be displaced. The close upper-class friend Aimée made at work served that purpose. She turned the loved woman into an enemy, a new edition of the sister she couldn’t permit herself to hate. And so that woman became linked to her dead child, Aimée’s own failed destiny as a woman.

  Charting the structure of her unconscious drives and desires, Lacan describes how, from that moment on, Aimée projected her hatred and aggression on to objects further and further away from her real target. ‘Their very distance makes them difficult to access and so prevents immediate violence. A mixture of happy coincidence and deep emotional analogies will guide her to her objects.’ While her insanity appears to be a reaction against aggressive acts she thinks are perpetrated on her, it is actually a flight from the aggressive acts she wants to perpetrate. Not surprisingly, her sister senses this. She tells Lacan that she is terrified of Aimée and doesn’t want her home.

  To show the genesis of paranoia in psychic homosexuality, Lacan q
uotes Freud’s structure of denial in homosexual love:

  ‘I love him’ (the homosexual object) can become ‘I don’t love him, I hate him’, which is projected as ‘he hates me’, which becomes the theme of persecution.

  The second possible form of denial gives birth to erotomania: ‘I don’t love him, I love her’ (the object of the opposite sex). Secondarily projected, this becomes ‘she/he loves me’, which is the erotomanic theme. This gives birth to a pure delirious fantasy, according to Lacan, something Freud leaves out.

  The third possible form of denial goes: ‘I don’t love him. I love her.’ This results, with or without projected inversion, in jealousy, another paranoia.

  Finally, there is the form of denial which underlies all of these: ‘I don’t love him, I love no one. I only love myself.’ This explains the theme of self-aggrandizement which, with regression, circles back to a primitive narcissism.

  Once again acknowledging his debt to Freud, Lacan notes the difficulties analysis can confront in such cases:

  It is of primary importance to correct the narcissistic tendencies of the subject by a transference which is as long as possible. However, the transference to the analyst, by awakening the homosexual instinct, tends to produce a repression, which…is the major mechanism for unleashing the psychosis. This puts the analyst in a delicate position. The very least that can happen is the patient puts a rapid stop to the treatment. But in our cases, the aggressive reaction is most often aimed at the analyst himself. This can last for a long time, even after the reduction of major symptoms, and often to the surprise of the subject herself. Which is why many analysts propose as a primary condition that the therapy has to take place in a closed clinic.

  Another problem is that the patient’s necessary resistance to the analytic procedure can become part of her own delusional armoury. Which is why, he concludes, with psychosis a psychoanalysis of the ego may function better than one that focuses on the unconscious. Reflecting on Aimée’s family situation, Lacan concludes what R.D. Laing will later: the role of the family in the patient’s history as the producer of psychosis needs to be taken on board. Despite her ‘cure’ Aimée refuses to confront the very sister who has set in motion the entire displacement process which is her psychosis. She decides instead to settle on a resignation that doesn’t implicate her family, in particular her beloved mother (whom her sister has replaced), who is herself now in the midst of a breakdown because of Aimée. (Later researchers have pointed out that Aimée’s illness may indeed have been occasioned by her mother’s own illness following the death of a child, a pattern her daughter unconsciously repeated.)

  The reflection on families brings Lacan on to a social and political register. Aimée’s kind of self-punishing paranoia with its self-aggrandizement and homosexual undertow affects many individuals with superior idealized selves. They are people who want to do good in the world–teachers of both sexes, governesses, women in lowly intellectual jobs, the self-taught. Modern society can leave these individuals in cruel isolation. For them, stably structured hierarchical religious communities, militant political groups or armies, in which they can sublimate their homosexual impulses and work for a higher good, are a real boon. In the subjection to rules, their self-punishing needs are met. This solution to one of the difficulties life presents is an excellent one.

  It is worth noting that Lacan’s own younger brother had chosen the monastic life, much to his sibling’s disquiet.

  Aimée’s family was to come back and haunt Lacan, as if it were his own. Not her childhood family, but her own son. In one of those returns of the repressed which mark psychoanalytic history Lacan was–unknowingly, it seems–to find himself the training analyst of Marguerite/Aimée’s son, Didier Anzieu, who himself became a well known analyst. Lacan claimed never to have seen or certainly not to have remembered his foundational patient’s married name, nor did Anzieu know his own maternal history very precisely. Stumbling upon the link with his estranged mother, he found her case in the library and read it in a frenzy. When he questioned his mother, Marguerite had little good to say of her doctor at the Sainte-Anne. She would not have let him analyse her. He was too seductive to be trusted. Nor had he ever returned her books and papers. By another twist of fate too implausible to figure in a fiction, Marguerite at around this time became the housekeeper to Lacan’s father. He would see her on his irregular visits to his ageing parent, an affable and successful grocery wholesaler who had been married to a conventionally religious woman who was Lacan’s mother, until her death in 1948.

  If the case of Aimée does not lead directly to what Malcolm Bowie has wittily called the ‘surging glossolalia’ and ‘loosely moored conceptual mobiles’ of Lacan’s often impenetrable but hugely influential later seminars, which schooled successive generations of warring French analysts, it does present the germ of some of his major ideas. We begin to see in his analysis of Aimée and her fictions his understanding of the unconscious as being structured like a language, slippery, punning, displacing objects and meanings; and the manner in which a symbolic world impacts on the individual. Indeed, Lacan’s early work with delusionary patients, his familiarity with paranoia, is fundamental to his later conception of the way in which the other is constituted so as to contain the subject’s own lacks, hates and fears; while the other’s very existence allows the self to see its subjectivity as superior. Hegel’s insight into the master–slave relationship, so important to Simone de Beauvoir’s conception of woman as the second sex and to later constructions of the identity politics of race and colonialism, played into Lacan’s thinking, here, as well.

  Lacan’s intervention in a second famous case at this time underscores this. His intervention also points to a growing feeling amongst psychiatrists and a contingent of the new French psychoanalysts that not only can their insights bring an understanding of criminal behaviour, but that changes need to be made to the legal system to accommodate the existence of the unconscious. Princess Marie Bonaparte, one of Freud’s earliest disciples in France, whom Lacan and the younger analysts were to mock as ‘Freud-a-dit’ because her statements so often began with a reference to the man she claimed not only as her analyst but her personal friend–the man she would do a great deal to rescue from Nazi Vienna in 1938–had bravely championed the case of one Madame Lefebvre against popular will. In 1925 Madame Lefebvre, a seemingly ordinary middle-class woman, had suddenly taken out a pistol and shot her daughter-in-law who was pregnant with her son’s child. Abhorred by press and populace as a monster of motherhood, Madame Lefebvre faced the death sentence. Perhaps reminded of the rumours of murder which surrounded her own father in her childhood, Marie Bonaparte stepped in. She interviewed the woman, became the first expert psychoanalytic witness in France, and in a fine, impassioned paper tracing the way in which Madame Lefebvre in a state of delirium was in fact enacting a long-buried wish to murder her own pregnant and hated mother, argued the case for her irresponsibility.

  The Papin Sisters

  The case of the Papin sisters, the subject of a later play by Jean Genet, brought with it a renewed battle of the mind doctors over the terrain of what constituted madness. In a particularly brutal double murder with an aura of class war, two hardworking maids, Christine and Léa Papin, on the night of 2 February 1933 in Le Mans murdered and sexually maimed their mistress and her daughter, pulling out the eyes of the first. The only provocation seemed to have been the mistress’s cold distance, and the hint of an accusation that the ironing had not been done because of an electricity failure. The case kept newspapers and public enthralled for the six months of an extended judicial process in which expert witness was called for from psychiatrists. Dr Truelle, a traditional hereditarian, having examined the sisters–poor peasants, brought up in turn in Catholic institutions and by a mercenary mother–contended that there was no hereditary or constitutional condition and thus no grounds for diminished responsibility. The elder Papin sister was simulating delirium, he concluded.

>   The psychiatrist called in by the defence was Benjamin Logre, a ‘progressive’. Not permitted to visit the girls, he assessed them from the magistrate’s records and put forward a very different perspective. He rebutted the official psychiatrists’ statement that the girls were liars and described a disturbed passion between the older, commanding Christine Papin and her passive sister Léa, which had led them in a folie à deux, a double madness, to commit a sadistic, erotic crime.

  Despite the vigorous case of the defence, the investigating magistrate’s evident qualms about the sanity of the sisters and Dr Logre’s testimony, the jury brought in a predictable verdict of guilty: Christine Papin was condemned to death, a sentence commuted to life imprisonment. A year into her imprisonment, the severity of her delirium had her transferred from prison to the Le Mans Psychiatric Hospital. There she never ceased calling for her sister. She refused to eat and died in 1937. Léa served eight years and returned to live with her mother. She worked as a maid for many years, dying only at eighty-two or, some say, eighty-nine.

  The full proceedings of the trial were published as soon as it was over. Jacques Lacan entered the fray with an article in the surrealist journal Le Minotaure of 3 December 1933. Fresh from his work on Aimée, he emphasized the structural underpinnings of the sisters’ paranoid psychoses and its homosexual nature. He stressed the way in which their employers’ odd lack of human sympathy must have been echoed in the servants’ proud indifference: one group ‘didn’t speak to another’. This silence, however, could hardly have been empty, even if the key players couldn’t see what was at play. An interpretative paranoia must have been long at work, certainly in Christine, for her to have exploded into aggression.