by Olivia Laing
After the Aryanisation of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, most of the Jewish analysts, Reich included, went into exile. Jacobson was the only one to stay on in Berlin, at least in part because her parents refused to see the danger ahead (they hadn’t read Mein Kampf, she later said grimly). With Reich in Denmark and the rest of the Kinder scattered, she joined the socialist resistance group Neu Beginnen, which met in private houses and apartments to share foreign news, raise funds for political prisoners and smuggle people and money across borders. Her alias was John and one of her activities was hosting group meetings in her own home, an illegal act under the new Nazi government.
On 24 October 1935, Jacobson was rounded up by the Gestapo, along with several other members of Neu Beginnen. Dozens more were arrested the following month. In her booking photograph, Jacobson looks ill and resolute, her hair untidy, her clothes mussed, black smudges that could be bruises ringing her dark eyes. Her colleagues were frantic, and in letters that crisscrossed Europe they discussed the possibility that she was being tortured, though it was also understood that she was lucky not to be in Dachau, where people were already being systematically murdered.
She was held for almost a year while the Gestapo prepared their case. During this period she kept a diary, recording her feelings of loneliness and terror. She was tormented by guilt over her mother and fear of the judgment ahead. ‘Who will still be there, when I eventually come out, who will still exist to love me’, she asked herself. ‘Who will have forgotten me?’ She missed her dachshund, and in solitary confinement spent her days training a fly with sugar water to come to her finger, a sad remnant of the object world she’d lost.
One of the reasons for her arrest was that she’d been treating a fellow activist, Liesel Paxmann, a student of the philosopher Adorno who’d served as a courier for the group and who was murdered or committed suicide after being arrested on the border. Despite repeated interrogations, Jacobson refused to break confidentiality and give up information on her patient’s political work. On 8 September 1936 she was sentenced to two years and three months’ imprisonment for ‘preparation for high treason’. Her other crimes included giving a sum of five marks a month towards food and clothing for political prisoners and treating patients who opposed the Nazis, an act that was both illegal and expressly forbidden by the newly Aryanised German Psychoanalytic Society.
In the wake of Jacobson’s imprisonment, the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society went even further in its attempts to ensure the survival of psychoanalysis under the Nazis, ruling that no member could engage in illegal political activity, which included any act of anti-fascist resistance. Anna Freud in particular was furious that Jacobson ‘had put the analytic movement in danger’, and her expulsion was discussed, another example of the appeasement policy that had brought about Reich’s ejection the previous year.
In the Berlin-Moabit remand prison and later in Jawor prison in Silesia, Jacobson was able to observe the effects of imprisonment on around a hundred women. By a heroic act of will, she wrote a paper that she smuggled out to a friend, who read it at the annual International Psychoanalytic Association Congress in Marienbad in 1936 (Reich was in the audience). The next year she became seriously ill with Grave’s disease and diabetes, and was moved to a hospital in Leipzig, from which she managed to escape in 1938. She made her way to America with the help of Annie Reich’s new husband, and in New York City established herself all over again as a psychoanalyst. In her new apartment on West 96th Street she rewrote her prison essay, the first draft of which had been made without access to any books. ‘Observations on the Psychological Effect of Imprisonment on Female Political Prisoners’ was finally published in 1949.
Plenty of people had examined the psychology of the criminal, right back to Cesare Lombroso and his theories of degenerate throwbacks, but what Jacobson was trying to do was more radical. She wanted to turn the equation on its head, looking not at the psychology of the person in prison, but the psychological effect of the prison on the person. It was only by doing this, she argued, that one could properly assess whether incarceration could achieve any of its supposed effects. She wanted to know what happened to ordinary humans when they were subject to the bodily conditions of incarceration. The fact that the observer had also been a participant might be an advantage, she thought: ‘a rare opportunity to observe first-hand and to watch the psychic reactions to prison confinement more closely than is possible under any other circumstance.’
Her account begins with a description of conditions and personnel. The women were between twenty and sixty years old. Most were the wives or daughters of labourers, artisans and craftsmen. Perhaps ten per cent were the wives or daughters of professional men, and a very few had professions in their own right. Before her trial, the conditions were very poor, with tiny cells, a bad diet, rare opportunities for exercise and constant interrogations, including beatings. The state prison where she served her sentence was a marked improvement. Visitors, lawyers and letters were permitted, the cells were larger, and prisoners had the choice of manual or intellectual work. Most of the women were held collectively, spending their days in workshops and sleeping in overcrowded dorms. Intellectuals might spend a stint in solitary, but only those accused of high treason were in isolation for the entirety of their term. As per the Auburn system, conversation was not permitted, and inmates were expected to work in silence except for half an hour of recreation. Under the Nazis, recreational evenings had been abolished and most people spent the ten-hour work day picking oakum, just as Oscar Wilde had in Reading Gaol forty years before.
The arrest, with its ‘sudden violent attack on the narcissistic safeguards of the captive’, was followed by a series of shocks and deprivations. The dreadful new surroundings, the restriction of day-to-day activities, the loss of personal belongings like clothes and glasses, the severing of familiar relationships and the isolation or horribly enforced contact had, Jacobson thought, a dramatic effect on the prisoner’s psyche, bringing about a catastrophic breach in object relations. Abandoned and utterly helpless, the prisoner underwent an intense regression, the structures that sustain the personality eroded as if by a giant wave.
The signs were everywhere. Prisoners suffered from phobias, panic attacks, anxiety, irritability, insomnia. They forgot names and places. They developed physical symptoms as a consequence of what we would now call traumatic stress: racing hearts, clammy hands, urticaria, thyrotoxicosis, amenorrhea. Many, Jacobson included, were racked with guilt over their friends and relations, though prisoners from families with a tradition of political activity were far better protected against the travails of their situation.
One of the most distressing symptoms was depersonalisation, and in June 1958 Jacobson presented a second paper exploring it in more depth; one of the first attempts to understand what is now regarded as a defining feature of post-traumatic stress disorder. Prisoner after prisoner complained of feeling as if their body or some part of it – a limb, the genitals, the face, the bladder – was no longer theirs. These ‘estranged body parts’ might feel bigger than they really were, or tiny, numb, foreign, even dead. People described a sensation of being outside themselves, of watching someone else altogether go through the motions of movement and speech. Under the crushing pressure of the prison, body and psyche had come unhitched.
It wasn’t just a consequence of being locked behind bars, trapped in the physical environment of the prison. One of the most important aspects of Jacobson’s argument – and one that continues to resonate in a twenty-first century of mass incarceration – is that what happens to prisoners psychologically is the consequence of an interpersonal dynamic. Primed by her own experience, she understands what many commentators cannot: that no matter what system a prison is built on or ethics it claims to uphold, the most important element in creating and sustaining its emotional atmosphere is not the warden, the architect or even the law, but the guards. Uneducated, unprepared, untrained, it is they who decide day-to-day polic
y, maintain discipline and mete out punishment. They favour or persecute individuals, creating a sadistic framework that makes it very hard for even the most sturdy of inmates to resist regression, with all its dismal, desolating consequences.
The example that Jacobson gives is familiar from prison narratives right through to the present day, resonating particularly sharply with accounts of the treatment of immigrant families in American detention centres under Trump. It concerns what she describes as ‘the contradictory educational system of cleanliness and order’ in place at Jawor. The guards maintained a strict regime concerning objects associated with the body. Blankets had to be exactly straight, towels folded in a particular way, the tin covers of slop buckets polished until they shone. Any infraction of these rituals was severely punished. But the obsession with neatness did not extend to the bodies of the prisoners, which were equally deliberately kept in a state of filth. Prisoners were only permitted to wash the upper parts of their body, and complete undressing was punished. Showers were weekly and scant, soap was scarce and the entire prison was infested with bedbugs. There was no drainage, and only two toilets for a hundred women. They had no doors and the constant waiting led to chronic problems with constipation, cystitis and diarrhoea, heightened by the impossibility of ever washing properly. It was a system of bodily humiliation and its effect was to estrange the body from itself.
In her landmark work on torture, The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry points out that torture does not necessarily require violence but can be carried out simply by setting the body against itself, making the most ordinary and modest of habits and obligations an occasion for shame, discomfort or pain. In confinement, as in infancy, the body’s needs quickly become unbearable if they aren’t met. Removing toilet or washing facilities, denying sleep, food or water or requiring prisoners to hold fixed positions are all techniques that rapidly induce intense physical as well as emotional distress, without any need for force.
This was Wilde’s experience, too. Sentenced to ‘hard labour, hard fare, and a hard bed’, Prisoner 4099 was tortured by the basic needs of his own body. He suffered from crippling insomnia because of being forced to sleep on a plank bed without a mattress or pillow. He wasn’t capable of digesting the food, which, as he wrote later, ‘in a strong grown man is always productive of illness of some kind.’ He lost twenty-eight pounds in the first three months of his confinement due to dysentery and malnutrition. Forced to attend chapel while ill with an ear infection, he collapsed and the abscess in his eardrum ruptured. The prison doctor refused to institute even basic hygiene measures and in the end Wilde wrote a petition to the Home Secretary, saying that his ear was running continually with pus and that he had gone almost totally deaf.
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Confinement, humiliation, pain, brutality, obsessive control over bodily functions, especially eating and shitting: the connection between sadism and the prison is by no means coincidental. The Marquis de Sade spent a total of twenty-six years in prison, sometimes in lavish accommodation but more often in spaces that were no better than dungeons. Like Jacobson, he experienced terror, loneliness and deprivation on a daily basis. Reading his prison letters, it’s impossible to ignore the way they writhe with desire for the satisfaction of physical needs, for exercise, food and rest.
Like Wilde he longed for good ventilation, warmth and light. He asked over and over again to be able to walk outdoors for an hour a day (‘I have the most urgent need of fresh air’). He requested a fire in winter, candles, a camp bed, sheets and fur-lined slippers. He begged for a ‘rump cushion’ stuffed with horsehair for his agonising piles, an oversized pillow to prevent his constant nosebleeds, beef-marrow ointment in winter. Most of his requests were not fulfilled, or not fulfilled to his satisfaction.
Some of the things he most ardently desired were sexual, like the hyper-specific glass dildos, eight and a half inches long, that he bullied his humiliated wife into having commissioned. Others were more like the cravings of a greedy child, a cornucopia of Blyton-esque delights. The pleas for chocolate cake, marshmallow syrup, Breton butter, jam testify to a type of regression that Jacobson thought especially common in prisoners held in long-term solitary. The consequences that seem most pertinent to Sade include loss of contact with reality, dangerous daydreams of freedom and a crude, even perverse obsession with sex. As Agnes Martin once said, ‘the panic of complete helplessness drives us to fantastic extremes.’
But Jacobson’s analysis of the psychological consequences of imprisonment doesn’t just help explain the state of Sade’s mind. It also provides an optic through which to look again at his novels. In the context of prison, they seem less driven by misogyny than with the problem of the incarcerated body itself. This is especially true of The 120 Days of Sodom, which was produced in what must fairly be described as a frenzy over thirty-seven consecutive evenings in the Bastille in the autumn of 1785, between the hours of seven and ten at night. Sade wrote his abysmal fantasy in a minuscule hand on a narrow twelve-metre scroll he’d created by gumming tiny scraps of parchment together, rolling it up and hiding it each night in a crack in his cell wall. In it, he created a mise en abyme, a prison vision of a prison: the locked and sealed castle of Silling, from which no victim will ever escape.
The acts he imagined taking place in the cells and chambers of Silling form an encyclopaedia of bodily terror, by which I don’t just mean the abundant bad things that can happen to bodies, but rather the fears that having a body, being trapped in a body, can engender. Sade’s novels are about being able to gratify desire, yes, but they’re more powerfully animated by a compulsion to punish the body for needing anything at all, for having so many relentless, insufferable demands. To eat, to shit, to breathe: all the functions that are the source of ongoing pain in prison become in his fiction systematically abased and denied. This is at least one path through the Sadeian labyrinth, to read it as a fantasy about being inviolate, untouchable; a fantasy of solipsism and mastery that is itself the product of helplessness and deprivation. It’s not just that prison is sadistic; it’s that the historical concept of sadism was born in a prison cell, a place of deprivation that served to reveal how the body itself is a kind of prison.
In the conclusion of her essay, Jacobson returns to the question she posed in the first paragraph: does prison work? Bearing in mind its deleterious psychological effects on even the most sane inmates, can it serve any purpose? Ever scrupulous, she admits that there are some rare cases in which it can provide benefit. In an example that recalls Malcolm X, she acknow-ledges that prison can inspire ‘truly constructive development’ in particularly strong and intelligent people, if they’re given richer resources than were available in childhood. But, she adds, these ‘exceptional’ cases should not lead to the idea that prison confinement is of psychological benefit for the majority.
For everyone else, prison is an abject failure. The only thing it reinforces, she argues, is delinquent tendencies. The sadistic world in which the prisoner is immersed results in a collapse into infantile behaviour. It doesn’t work as a corrective or as a rehabilitative institution, not without a profound shift in the relationships between prisoners and guards, and not without an end to the deprivation of bodily needs for food, light, exercise, hygiene, companionship, sex and free movement. No, Jacobson concludes: ‘social and cultural development of criminals cannot be obtained by privations, sadistic measures and senseless hard labour, nor by means of ethical and religious exhortation alone.’
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Prison can’t improve the inmate, but perhaps the inmate can improve the prison. There was even a moment when it was hoped that prison could be used as a lever to change the world. On 3 August 1945, a young conscientious objector was moved to Lewisburg from the maximum-security prison of Ashland Federal Correctional Institution in Kentucky, where he’d been for the past sixteen months. Bayard Rustin was a gay black man of thirty-one who’d been sentenced to three years’ imprisonment as a consequence of refusing to fight in the Se
cond World War, or to take up any of the non-combative activities available to pacifists.
Born five days before Agnes Martin, raised, like John Howard, as a Quaker, and inspired by Gandhi, he was fundamentally opposed to violence. As the youth secretary for the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, he’d spent the early years of the war travelling across America, spreading the message of non-violent direct action to thousands of young African-Americans, among them Martin Luther King’s future wife, Coretta Scott. In his letter to the draft board, he wrote unambiguously: ‘War is wrong . . . Segregation, separation, according to Jesus, is the basis for continuous violence . . . Though joyfully following the law of God, I regret I must break the law of State. I am prepared for whatever might follow.’
Rustin had been fighting Jim Crow laws since his teens. Like Reich, he spent a youthful spell in the Communist Party before becoming disillusioned. He knew that racism turned bodies into prisons, and he wasn’t afraid of incarceration if it would help to change the crisis of oppression. In the early 1940s, the mass imprisonment of conscientious objectors had turned prisons like Lewisburg and Danbury into hot zones in the struggle against segregation. As Michael Long, the editor of Rustin’s collected letters, observes: ‘There is little doubt that Rustin would have seen the federal prison system as the centre of some of the most exciting work undertaken by radical paci-fists in World War II.’
A couple of weeks after he arrived at Ashland, this young black man demanded a meeting with the white prison warden, R. P. Hagerman, to discuss the problem of racial injustice in the prison. He followed it up with an extraordinary letter, which set out a calm opposition to segregation, followed by a series of proposals for instigating an educational programme to end racism in the prison community. Perhaps he could teach it himself?