Melissa.Knox-Raab@uni-due.de
R12 S04 H22
Office
hours: By Zoom appointment
Phone:
183-2162
Going Crazy
in America: The American Tradition of the Madness Memoir
Monday 8-10
R11 T04 C84
Why do Americans write so many memoirs about
going nuts, about escaping from crazy mothers or about dysfunctional
families? This course seeks explanations mainly in the Puritan tradition
of self-examination and the popularization of psychoanalysis, both of which
contribute to a tradition of introspection. In 1630, the Puritan preacher John
Winthrop gave a sermon on board a ship transporting future Massachusetts Bay
colonists in which he warned that their new community would be a "city
upon a hill", watched by the world. That idea inspired a need for
self-examination along with the belief that America would be God’s country (so
the more you watch your behavior, the better; you fulfill God’s will or you
avoid doing the reverse). The American Jeremiad, the Calvinist
self-examination, dovetail with the rigorous self-study and self-condemnation
that enter almost any form of psychotherapy in America. The status of
individualism and the elevation of the “common man” and woman through the
democratic ideals of American government, the glorification of independence and
the pursuit of happiness, if not the idea that happiness itself is a right,
remain some of the important sources of American autobiography in general, but
in particular autobiographies about mental crises. To go crazy in America
means to undergo an experience—and often to write about it—in the ways that
religious persons undergoing conversions tended to write about that experience
in the 17th century and beyond. For additional perspectives,
I’d recommend (but it is not required!) is Ethan Watters Crazy
Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche (Free Press, 2010) and
Clifford Beers’s A Mind That Found Itself (1908)
available on the internet:
https://archive.org/stream/mindthatfoundit00beer/mindthatfoundit00beer_djvu.txt
Students should purchase the
following from the university bookstore or an Internet source:
William Styron Darkness Visible
(depression) (1988)
Daniel Smith, Monkey Mind: A
Memoir of Anxiety (2013)
Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet
Mind (manic depression) 1995 OR Lithium Jesus by Charles Monroe Kane
(2016)
Elyn Saks, The Center Cannot Hold
(schizophrenia) (2007)
Augusten Burroughs Running With
Scissors OR Nancy Bachrach The Center of the Universe (2009)
(crazy mothers)
Susannah Kaysen, Girl,
Interrupted (1993) OR Emily Fox Gordon, Mockingbird Years:
A Life In and Out of Therapy (2001) (Adolescent collapse and life in a
psychiatric hospital)
Requirements: (1) Come to class and do all the
readings. (2) All BA students will do a five-minute talk teaching something
they find interesting to the class. Master’s students get fifteen minutes and
may use additional commentary.
4 April Introduction to the course: excerpts from the writers
we will read.
11 April Darkness, Visible, a memoir whose themes of
sadness, depression, and despair, including suicidal thoughts, also appear in Styron’s
novels.
18 April HOLIDAY: Easter
25 April Darkness, Visible and begin Monkey Mind.
2 May Monkey Mind
9 May Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind. With
this book, we see another tradition, a common one, that of the psychiatrist or
therapist who knows the field through personal experience.Alternative reading:
Charles Monroe-Kane’s Lithium Jesus, a vivid memoir of manic episodes.
16 May Kay Redfield Jamison or Charles Monroe-Kane continued.
23 May Elyn Saks, The Center Cannot Hold.
30 May Elyn Saks, continued
6 June HOLIDAY
13 June Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors OR
Nancy Bachrach, The Center of the Universe.
20 June Burroughs or Bachrach
27 June Susannah Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted OR Emily Fox Gordon, Mockingbird
Years
4 July Susannah Kaysen OR Emily Fox Gordon
11 July Susannah Kaysen OR Emily Fox Gordon
Going Crazy: Excerpts from the Reading
Source of William Styron’s title—a line
from John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, first published in 1667 and
revised in 1674:
say first what cause
Mov'd our Grand Parents in that
happy State,
Favour'd of Heav'n so highly, to
fall off
From thir Creator, and transgress
his Will
For one restraint, Lords of the
World besides?
Who first seduc'd them to that foul
revolt?
Th' infernal Serpent; he it was,
whose guile
Stird up with Envy and Revenge,
deceiv'd
The Mother of Mankind, what time his
Pride
Had cast him out from Heav'n, with
all his Host
Of Rebel Angels, by whose aid
aspiring
To set himself in Glory above his
Peers,
He trusted to have equal'd the most
High,
If he oppos'd; and with ambitious
aim
Against the Throne and Monarchy of
God
Rais'd impious War in Heav'n and
Battel proud
With vain
attempt. Him the Almighty Power
Hurld headlong flaming from th'
Ethereal Skie
With hideous ruine and combustion
down
To bottomless perdition, there to
dwell
In Adamantine Chains and penal Fire,
Who durst defie th' Omnipotent to
Arms.
Nine times the Space that measures
Day and Night
To mortal men, he with his horrid
crew
Lay vanquisht, rowling in the fiery
Gulfe
Confounded though immortal: But his
doom
Reserv'd him to more wrath; for now
the thought
Both of lost happiness and lasting
pain
Torments him; round he throws his
baleful eyes
That witness'd huge affliction and
dismay
Mixt with obdurate pride and
stedfast hate:
At once as far as Angels kenn he
views
The dismal Situation waste and
wilde,
A Dungeon horrible, on all sides
round
As one great Furnace flam'd, yet
from those flames
No light, but rather darkness
visible
Serv'd onely to discover sights of
woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades,
where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never
comes
That comes to all; but torture
without end
Source for Elyn R. Saks’ title—a line from the first
verse of William Butler Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming,” written in 1919 and
published in 1920:
Turning and turning in the widening
gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall
apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the
world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and
everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is
drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while
the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
What I had begun to discover is
that, mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience,
the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of
physical pain. But it is not an immediately identifiable pain, like that of a
broken limb. It may be more accurate to say that despair, owing to some evil
trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche, comes to resemble
the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room . .
. For those who have dwelt in depression’s dark wood, and known its
inexplicable agony, their return from the abyss is not unlike the ascent of the
poet [Dante], trudging upward and upward out of hell’s black depths and at last
emerging into what he saw as “the shining world.” William Styron, Darkness
Visible
I was a senior
in high school when I had my first attack of manic-depressive illness; once the
siege began, I lost my mind rather rapidly. At first, everything seemed so
easy. I raced about like a crazed weasel, bubbling with plans and enthusiasms,
immersed in sports, and staying up all night, night after night, out with
friends, reading everything that wasn’t nailed down, filling manuscript books
with poems and fragments of plays, and making expansive, completely
unrealistic, plans for my future. The world was filled with pleasure and
promise; I felt great. Not just great. I felt really great . . . I found
myself buttonholing my friends to tell them how beautiful it all was. They were
less transfixed by my insights . . . my exhausting ramblings: You’re talking
too fast, Kay. Slow down, Kay. You’re wearing me out, Kay. Low down, Kay. Kay
Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
I greeted my
two classmates in the Yale Law School Library. It was ten o’clock on a Friday
night . . . They were both in my “small group”—the only small class a
first-term law student has at Yale . . . But at my insistence, we’d made the
date to work on the second memo assignment. Although each of us was responsible
for his or her own memo, we were allowed to strategize together. We had to do
it, to finish it, to produce it, to . . .
“Memos
are visitations,” I informed them. “They make certain points. The point is on
your head. Pat used to say that. Have you ever killed anyone?”
[My
friends] looked at me as if they, or I, had just been splashed with ice water.
“A joke, right?” quipped one. “What are you talking about, Elyn?”
“Oh,
the usual. You know. Heaven and hell. Who’s what, what’s who. Hey!” I said,
leaping out of my chair. “Let’s all go out on the roof.” Elyn Saks. The
Center Cannot Hold
Dr. Finch leaned back in his rattan
swivel chair and folded his arms behind his head. My mother sat across from him
on the floral love seat and I sat in the armchair between them . . . I was
twelve but felt at least fourteen, my parents had been divorced for over
a year, and my mother was seeing Dr. Finch constantly. Not just every day, but
for hours every day. And if not in person, certainly on the phone.
Sometimes, like now, I would get sucked into one of their sessions. My mother
felt it was important that the doctor and I get to know each other. She felt
that maybe he could help me with my school troubles. The trouble being that I
refused to go and she felt powerless to force me. I think it may have also
distantly bothered her that I didn’t have any friends my age. Or any age,
really. Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJovPcCuxhQ
When I was
eighteen my parents were faced with a problem: what to do with a sullen,
disorganized daughter who had failed to graduate high school and who had
returned home to Washington, D.C., wrists bandaged, from an extended stay with
her boyfriend’s mother in Indianapolis. They took me in tow to the psychiatrist
I’d been seeing off and on through my high school years, who recommended that I
spend some time in a “therapeutic environment.” He suggested Austen Riggs, a
hospital in Stockbridge, Massacusetts . . . Not all of us were normal late
adolescents. Some were seriously depressed, not just sluggish. Some were
harmlessly odd, like L., a lapsed seminarian who carried on a constant internal
debate about the supremacy of the papacy . . . a few patients were mad . . .
one somehow got her hands on an antique cannon, fiddled with it to make it
operational, and fired it out her bedroom window. She also pulled a gun on her
therapist, making him plead for his life. The other, a young man who could have
doubled for Charles Manson, stuffed hard-boiled eggs into his rectum and laid
them publicly, dropping his pants and squatting in the hallway. Emily Fox
Gordon: Mockingbird Years: A Life in and Out of Therapy
Mockingbird: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WM_R-6AKHE
