Selections
from
Kill Him!",
by
Bantam Books,
Chapter Six:
"Tale
of
a Mad Knight"
I prefer the madness of Don Quixote to the sanity of most other men.
Cervante's Knight of the Rueful Countenance, Don Quixote de la Mancha, [1]
is alleged to have become deluded by the brain-addling effects of his continued immersion in the reading of chivalric tales of "enchantments, knightly encounters, battles, challenges, wounds, ... love and its torments, and all sorts of impossible things." [2]
Ignoring the staid dissuasions of family and friends, this quiet, middle-aged, country-village gentleman gave way to his madness and decided to sally forth to spend the remainder of his life as a knight-errant.
In order to serve God and country, as well as to win honor for himself, he set out in an ill-fitting suit of rusty second-hand, makeshift armor, astride a tired hack of a horse to whom he assigned the weighty name of Rocinante.
He set out to roam the world (of rural seventeenth-century Spain) on an adventurous quest to set right whatever wrongs he might encounter, in the name of social justice and for the attainment of personal glory.
Though he exaggerated his own importance, had a distorted view of what he encountered, and overestimated his chances of setting things to rights, the world into which he sallied forth was really (like our own) unjust.
Perhaps it demands such a holy fool as Don Quixote to take the evil of the world seriously enough and to imagine himself sufficiently adequate to be willing to dedicate his life to improving the suffering lot of others.
It takes "a Gothic Christ, torn by modern anguish to face the sufferings of this absurd world; a ridiculous Christ of our own neighborhood, created by a sorrowful imagination which has lost its innocence and its will and is striving to replace them." [3]
Attempts at social change are after all usually left to the youthful idealists, while older cynics wait for young fools to outgrow their folly.
I remember well some of my own early adventures as a young psychologist.
My first job was on the staff of a dead-end, monolithic warehouse for the insane known as a State Mental Hospital.
My innocence kept me from realizing that efforts to help patients in such a tragic/comic setting were hopelessly doomed to failure.
As yet un-battered, my fresh personal commitment, naively boundless enthusiasm, and exaggerated self-confidence allowed me to accomplish impossible feats, to do what could not be done.
I spent hours talking to hopelessly unresponsive, forgotten, catatonic men and women until eventually, in some, a spark of life returned to long-empty eyes.
Only after age and experience made me more "realistic" did I achieve professional sanity, so that I was no longer able to be of any help to those poor captive souls.
Needing a fair lady to whom he may dedicate his quest, Don Quixote selected a lovely local farm girl with whom he had been secretly infatuated as the princess of his mad dreams.
He resolved to call her Dulcinea del Toboso, a name worthy of the royal station to which he had elevated her.
Though this too seems a matter of insane fancy, his fantasy dedication of courtly love seems to me no more crazy than the wonderfully bewildering experience, which we have all been through (and some more than once), the phenomenon that we call "falling in love."
It may even be that
"imagination has created
all of the most perfect ladies
[and gentlemen and that]...
he who sees his lady just as she is
is no lover worthy of the name." [4]
It is of course possible to describe Reality reductively as "nothing but" this or that.
What woman, for the cynically hyper-realistic man, is any more than a rag, a bone, and a hank of hair?
The human body can be reduced to its chemical components enmeshed in a set of physical interactions, but that which is most human is lost in the analyzed ashes.
It is an impoverished chemical baggage
who lives in a world to which
he will not bring vitality and meaning.
Life is very dull for those too timid, too unimaginative, too sane to bring to it a sense of personal style, of individual purpose, of color, verve, fun, and excitement.
Don Quixote's Quest, the personal pilgrimage of his mad life, was to live in
"the world as it is traversed by man as he ought to be."
[5]
If this be the wine of madness, then I say: "Come fill my cup."
It greatly upset the other members of Don Quixote's family and his community to learn that he had chosen to believe in himself.
They were contemptuous of his wish to follow his dream.
They did not connect the inception of the Knight's madness with the deadly drabness of his living amidst their pietism.
His prissy niece, his know-what's-best-for-everyone housekeeper, his dull barber, and the pompous village-priest, all knew that it was his dangerous books that had filled Don Quixote's failing mind with foolish ideas and so made him crazy.
Their household reminds me of the families from which young schizophrenics sometimes emerge.
Such families often give the appearance of hyper-normal stability and moralistic goodness.
What actually goes on is that they have developed an elaborately subtle system of cues to warn any member should he be about to do something spontaneous, something that would topple the precarious family balance and expose the hypocrisy of their over-controlled pseudo-stability.
I remember one couple who for years had used their daughter's academic achievements both as proof of what a constructive family life they had and as a focus for the appearance of closeness that masked their dread of real intimacy.
In late adolescence the girl's growing interest in sex threatened the family with her establishing an intimate relationship with someone outside of their system of control.
Parental religious preoccupation quickened, and soon they were surprised and upset to find that their daughter (the identified patient) had become crazy, developing hallucinatory visions to support the delusion that she was to be the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary.
At first the family was "resigned" to having to take care of their crazy child for the rest of her (their) life.
They had no intention of having her hospitalized, and only sought treatment because her confusion began interfering with her schoolwork.
In a therapy group of such families, and with some individual support, after a while the crazy daughter began to manifest new non-familial sanity in the form of questioning her own delusional experiences, thinking of quitting school to get a job, and hoping to move out on her own.
At this point, father spoke out against the destructively secular influence of psychotherapy, begging his daughter not to discard her "visions," because "in matters of the spirit, who are we to judge?"
In Don Quixote's case, the auspicious community of the wise and the sane took it upon themselves to judge his books and to burn them.
Cervante's chilling parody of the Spanish Inquisition is echoed by our own contemporary experiences with forces of Law and Order and by the current [in 1972, President Richard Nixon] and recent (President Lyndon B. Johnson] Administration's attempts to protect us from dangerous ideas and information, for our own good.
In a subtler way, the protective efforts of the self-appointed sane influence the whole field of psychiatry and psychology.
The clinical diagnosis of psychopathology is too often a form of social control.
If other people make us nervous by the foreignness of their queer talk and odd behavior, we give them tranquilizing drugs, lock them away in custodial institutions.
I once witnessed an ironically enlightening instance of the cultural definition of insanity, and of the power politics of psychiatric social control.
At the time when I was on the staff of a New Jersey State Mental Hospital, a strange man appeared on a street corner in Trenton, wearing a long white sheet and quietly muttering "gibberish."
His very presence threatened the certitude of sanity of the community at large.
Fortunately, for the sheeted man's own good, a policeman was called by some saner citizen.
So it was that this poor man was able to be brought under the protective lock-and-key of his local Asylum.
His efforts to explain his strange behavior were offered in vain, since it was clear that he was a loony, or to be more scientific, he was diagnosed into that catch-all garbage can of a syndrome known as Schizophrenia, Chronic Undifferentiated Type.
It would have been difficult for anyone to acquit himself well in that diagnostic staff situation, since the patient was assumed to be crazy until proven sane, unrepresented by counsel, and not even told that anything he said could be used against him.
One further limitation was in play, accruing epiphenomenally from the sociology of American medicine.
Foreign-trained physicians are not allowed to practice medicine in this country until they have demonstrated competence both in English and in medicine.
So far, so good.
However, in the absence of such proven competence, they are permitted to work as resident psychiatrists in state mental institutions.
I have seen irascible (but otherwise normal) citizens diagnosed as confused psychotics, adjudged incompetent, and denied their civil rights and their freedom on the basis of their inability to understand the incompetent mouthings of ill-trained resident psychiatrists whose own command of English was so limited that I could not understand them either.
Fortunately, for the white-sheeted, gibberish-muttering patient in question, the hospital Visitor's Day began the very next morning.
Evidently he had called home and made his plight known.
That morning twenty other people wearing white sheets arrived at the hospital.
Equally strangely clad, they were also equivalently incomprehensible to the psychiatric staff.
It turned out (to the resident psychiatrist's amusement) that these men and women were all members of the same small rural church sect, a religious group who defined their identity in part by clothing themselves in the purity of white cloth, and by being divinely inspired to talk in tongues.
The psychiatrist in this case, being a practicing Roman Catholic (who weekly ate and drank the body and blood of Jesus Christ) thought they were a queer bunch indeed.
Heaven help him should he ever wander into a community in which his own religious affiliations would be equally obscure.
The patient was released that afternoon.
One such man is a lunatic.
Twenty constitute an acceptable and sane community.
Don Quixote's madness and his loss of contact with reality are played off against the down-to-earth sanity of Sancho Panza, a local peasant whom he has convinced to accompany him as his squire.
Sancho is committed to a common-sense approach, believing only what he can see with his own eyes.
Yet he goes along with Don Quixote's mad sallies into the illusion of adventure, because Sancho in his so-called sanity is driven by greed.
He wishes to gain worldly power, to become the governor of an island whose sovereignty Don Quixote promises him as a reward for service.
Again and again, Sancho kids himself that his knight knows what he is about, his self-deception guided by his "sane" insistence on the acquisition of power.
Time after time, Sancho is unnerved by Don Quixote's impulsive challenging and attacking of swineherds, mule drivers, and innkeepers whom he mistakes for enchanters, evil knights, and lords of the manor.
Yet each time Sancho endures what he must (with expedient cowardice in the face of fire) in the search for his own impossible dream.
How meager and empty are the squire's desires for petty officialdom when compared with his knight's mad wish to right the wrongs of this world.
Perhaps the most famous of their escapades is what is now commonly referred to as quixotic fighting with windmills.
Arriving on a great plain, the adventurers see thirty or forty windmills which Don Quixote mistakes for "lawless giants."
[6]
Sancho cannot convince him that their turning wings are not mighty arms.
Don Quixote charges to do battle with these giants, is unseated by the turning of the giant's arm, and ends up badly battered, on the ground, with broken lance.
But, consider for a moment what it took for him to do battle with these illusory forces of evil.
After all, "who doubts that the courage to face giants is both more admirable and more rare than the ability to recognize a 'fulling mill' when one hears it?"
[7]
Distorted views of the world do not always constitute corruption of the purpose of one's quest.
I remember my concern for social justice when my own life was brushed by the dark wing of madness.
Following a near-catastrophic ordeal of intra-cranial surgery, an adverse response to the drugs I had been given, and a disorienting experience of slipping back and forth between sleep and pain under the unwavering overhead lights of the intensive care unit, I was crazy for several days afterward.
To begin with, I was confused, terrified, could not understand, and did not know if it would ever end.
I was sure they were trying to hurt me.
They had put some device into my nose; it hurt and so I pulled it out.
It was bloody, and then I was sure they were trying to kill me.
Because I interfered with their efforts, they tied down my hands (later I learned that this was done with gauze, but then I thought I had been chained).
I felt helpless, enraged, humiliated.
I tried to punch one of the nurses in the face.
In retrospect, I realize that I must have been a pain in the ass to them, that they continued to try to help, and that I must have correctly read the resentment behind their attempts to reassure me that they really wanted to help me.
But I was too smart for them.
I knew.
I became more and more cunning in tricking them into removing some of the more tortuous breathing devices they had put on me.
Some of my perceptions became more elaborate but not more clear.
The hospital seemed somehow anti-Semitic and my persecution a part of that.
Some of the equipment seemed Jewish and all right, but some of it seemed Christian and worried me.
Also, though I wanted to sleep, I visualized this as some sort of "tableau" being set up so that as I slept, the video-tape footage of my sleeping would be used as comic relief in whatever kind of TV show this was that they were putting on.
At last, I recognized my wife at my bedside ...
I told her to get an investigating committee from the American Civil Liberties Union to check on their tying my hands without due process.
[8]
During the painful weeks that followed, as I was struggling to make sense of this psychotic episode, I received an answering letter from a loving friend.
This lovely man is a Jungian psychiatrist out on the West Coast, and here is what he wrote to me about the sanity of my craziness:
How marvelously and strangely correct that you would encounter one of your demons within the cavern that houses the possession which your race [the Jews] and our society values most highly, the intellect...
You found yourself in a strange land, a land somehow determined by your racial forebearers.
That strange and dangerous land which you identify as your psychosis but is simply a naturally existing deeper layer of unconscious which is always there but rarely experienced directly by the conscious human being.
You found only one source that could be trusted to identify you as yourself and how remained unquestionably herself.
[He refers here to my wife.]
I felt great empathy with you when I read ... of your fear of being attended to by a contemporary representative of the mental hospital.
[Some patients] have been almost destroyed by the "help" they receive from well-trained, well-intentioned, well-experienced psychiatrists.
Fortunately, as in your own experience, the basic health of the individual is usually stronger than the well-intentioned or inadvertently applied medicine.
In your delusion, you knew the true basis of your persecution, namely your faith ... I know how difficult it is to fight a religious war without the benefit of recognized deities.
It seems evident to me that the enemy was clearly identified by you both in your more accustomed conscious state and in your deeply unconscious state as being the impersonalizing forces that you encountered.
You even tried to give some life-meaning to the impersonalizing machines which were being used on your body ... by identifying them as machines of one faith or another ...
The truest statement of your situation was that if you permitted yourself to lapse into the totally unconscious state of sleep, in your unconsciousness, your very condition as a human being would be used to hold you up to ridicule and abuse.
[9]
I do not mean to suggest, by all of the foregoing discussion of the value of madness, that craziness as such is a good thing.
Rather, I wish to point out that in a world in which true madness masquerades as sanity, creative struggles against the ongoing myths will seem eccentric and will be labeled as "crazy" by the challenged establishment in power.
We who are sane know that our technology will save us, that war is inevitable, that poverty and hunger of a few of the undeserving poor are necessary to the well-being of the many.
These drug-crazy, Commie-fag-hippies [back in 1972] who talk about making love instead of war, who want to live on communes without indoor plumbing, who want to make their own rules, these kids have to be stopped.
Lock 'em up, punish them, straighten them out, before they end up destroying all the ways that the good Lord has intended us to live.
Of course, being crazy can instead by a stubborn expression of self-destructive willfulness.
There appear to be many people who choose to go crazy (or become alcoholics, addicts, criminals, suicides) rather than have to bear the pain and ambiguity of a life situation that they have decided that they cannot stand.
With such patients, I try to make clear that I cannot prevent their going mad, but that I will not follow their madcap course from home to hospital and back.
They may have any crazy feelings and ideas they wish, but in their community they have to act as if they were sane, if they want me to accompany them on their pilgrimage.
The irresponsible act of going crazy, in order not to have to face up to the mess they have created in their own lives, is not one to which I wish to be an accomplice.
During my own above-described hospitalization, I was fortunate enough to have been too weak physically to have acted out all of my madness.
As a result, I survived, and I believe that I learned a valuable lesson.
At one point, just after the operation and just before my psychotic episode, my breathing had stopped several times and my life was in jeopardy.
The hospital's respiration team had forced rubber tubing down into my throat to pump the fluids out of my lungs.
Then the nurse tied an oxygen mask over my face.
The cold gas felt like fire in the rawness of my throat.
Weakly, I signaled the nurse to come to my bedside.
She removed the mask for a moment to find out what was the matter.
I gasped: "The mask, take it off. I can't stand it."
She answered with quiet confidence: "Yes, you can!"
She put the oxygen mask back on and saved my life.
My madness, it seems to me, followed this exchange.
Though conditioned by the physiological trauma of brain surgery, it was also an ambiguous conglomerate of crazy flight from the helplessness, which I did not want to face, and a desperate attempt to maintain my personal integrity in a world that made no sense.
It was good and bad, filled for me with what may always remain insoluble contradictions.
It was what it was.
Writing about it seems to help some.
At the end of a series of colorfully zany misadventures, Don Quixote also achieved sanity.
On his deathbed he had to endure the moralistic admonishment of his deadly sane housekeeper: "Stay at home, attend to your affairs, go often to confession, be charitable to the poor."
Such is the lesson of sane virtue, "but a man may have to go through hell to learn it."
[10]
And so, safe from any further threat of madness, Don Quixote died "having gained his reason and lost his reasons for living."
[11]
It should be clear to the reader who has accompanied me through the labyrinth of this chapter that I do not feel that I have any once-and-for-all clear understanding of madness.
Sometimes it seems like it is the only way to travel in a dully sane and destructively stable world.
In other instances it seems to me to be an irresponsibly willful cop-out.
And in any given situation, it may seem like some of each.
My hope would not be to totally avoid madness, but rather to hold out against that face of it that turns me away from the courage I need in the presence of threat, away from Hemingway's "grace under pressure."
As for its other face, I value my own craziness and the creative places it can take me, free of the constraints of pedestrian Reason and unimaginative predictability.
Let me describe one instance in which I felt that encouraging the craziness of another was a way of helping him along the way of his pilgrimage.
Dan was an intellectual warrior, a super-competent, though somewhat over-gunned, young man.
He leaned heavily on Reason to make his way, working at all he did with clarity of purpose, sharpness of intent, and an air of weariness born of cognitive overexertion.
In therapy, he told his tale in a well-organized fashion, presenting a careful self-analysis, a report replete with answers, but empty of solutions.
I responded by being confounded by is irrelevant "insights" and fatigued by his continued efforts to be rational.
And too, I let him know that the blunt sanity of his explanations was beginning to confuse me, and the only thing that made me feel we might be getting somewhere was my own growing confusion.
His exasperation over our "lack of communication" and the growing deterioration of his illusion of clarity led Dan to redouble his efforts to master the situation.
Of course, it got worse and worse.
Then one day he came in upset, but triumphant, to report a dream which explained to him why he was getting so irritated with me.
"I dreamed last night that I was at sea, aboard a battleship.
I couldn't see you, but I sensed that you were out there somewhere beyond the horizon.
It was awful!
My ship was falling apart.
The seams were buckling, and sections of the steel armor plate were breaking loose and dropping off into the water.
Everything was crumbling.
I began to get panicky because I knew the ship would surely sink.
As soon as I woke up, I realized that the dream was about what's going on in therapy.
The more I talk with you, the more I feel like I'm coming apart at the seams.
What the hell are you trying to do to me anyway, drive me crazy?"
Of course, I was trying to drive him crazy, and I told him that this was a fine dream, that I really liked it, assuring him that the only reason that it bothered him was because he thought he understood it.
Even more disgusted, he countered: "All right, if you're so smart, you explain it!"
I pointed out that dreams can be understood, but they cannot be "explained."
If he wanted to really understand his own dream, he would have to re-experience it by letting himself go crazy enough to become the sea, instead of restricting his place to the helm of that crumbling toy boat.
For a moment, he looked at me as though he couldn't get too angry because I was surely mad.
Then, as if to indulge me, he sat quietly with his eyes closed for a few minutes, trying to let himself get hold of the nonsense of being the sea.
When he finally opened his eyes, they were wide with wonder.
His usual penetrating gaze was gone, his expression transformed.
His face and voice were animated in a new way, and the muscles of his strong, tense jaw seemed relaxed for the first time.
It was difficult for him to bring his usual precision to the description of the experience he had just had.
"It's all so different," he said.
"When I'm the sea, it's as though I have no boundaries.
I move so easily, and feel so free of struggle.
And then I could see that even if the ship fell apart and went under, it would just sink into the water, and rust away to become part of the sea.
It's as though nothing is ever really lost, so there's no problem, nothing that has to be defended."
There was much work yet to be done in therapy.
But after his experience of being the sea, Dan was more often undefended and spontaneous.
Sometimes when he felt uptight, ready to struggle for control of a situation, he remembered that he could go crazy and let himself be the sea, and his need to do battle would run out like the tide.
[From pages 90 - 102.]
+++
NOTES
1. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra,
"Don Quixote
(The Ingenious Gentleman,
Don Quixote de la Mancha)",
in "The Portable Cervantes",
translated and edited by Samuel Putnam,
New York,
Viking Press, 1951, pages 48 - 702. [?]
2. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra,
"Don Quixote
(The Ingenious Gentleman,
Don Quixote de la Mancha)",
in "The Portable Cervantes",
translated and edited by Samuel Putnam,
New York,
Viking Press, 1951, page 59.
3. Jose Ortega y Gassett,
"Meditations on Don Quixote",
translated
by Evelyn Rugg and Diego Marin,
New York,
W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1961, p. 51
4. Joseph Wood Krutch,
"Five Masters:
A Study in the Mutations of the Novel",
Bloomington, Indiana,
Indiana University Press,
A Midland Book, 1959, page 81
5. Joseph Wood Krutch,
"Five Masters:
A Study in the Mutations of the Novel",
Bloomington, Indiana,
Indiana University Press,
A Midland Book, 1959, page 98
6. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra,
"Don Quixote
(The Ingenious Gentleman,
Don Quixote de la Mancha)",
in "The Portable Cervantes",
translated and edited by Samuel Putnam,
New York,
Viking Press, 1951, page 110
7. Joseph Wood Krutch,
"Five Masters:
A Study in the Mutations of the Novel",
Bloomington, Indiana,
Indiana University Press,
A Midland Book, 1959, page 78
8. Sheldon B. Kopp,
"Guru: Metaphors From a Psychotherapist",
Palo Alto, California,
Science and Behavior Books, Inc., 1971, page 163
9. Donald D. Lathrop, M.D.
Quoted by permission from
a personal, unpublished letter.
10. . Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra,
"Don Quixote
(The Ingenious Gentleman,
Don Quixote de la Mancha)",
in "The Portable Cervantes",
translated and edited by Samuel Putnam,
New York, Viking Press, 1951, page 34.
11. Salvador de Madariaga,
"Don Quixote: An Introductory Essay in Psychology",
London, Oxford University Press,
Oxford Paperbacks, 1961, page 185
+++
from
"If You Meet
the Buddha
On the Road,Kill Him!",
by
Sheldon
B.
Kopp,
Bantam Books,
1972
Chapter Six:
"Tale
of
a Mad Knight"
I prefer the madness of Don Quixote to the sanity of most other men.
Cervante's Knight of the Rueful Countenance, Don Quixote de la Mancha, [1]
is alleged to have become deluded by the brain-addling effects of his continued immersion in the reading of chivalric tales of "enchantments, knightly encounters, battles, challenges, wounds, ... love and its torments, and all sorts of impossible things." [2]
Ignoring the staid dissuasions of family and friends, this quiet, middle-aged, country-village gentleman gave way to his madness and decided to sally forth to spend the remainder of his life as a knight-errant.
In order to serve God and country, as well as to win honor for himself, he set out in an ill-fitting suit of rusty second-hand, makeshift armor, astride a tired hack of a horse to whom he assigned the weighty name of Rocinante.
He set out to roam the world (of rural seventeenth-century Spain) on an adventurous quest to set right whatever wrongs he might encounter, in the name of social justice and for the attainment of personal glory.
Though he exaggerated his own importance, had a distorted view of what he encountered, and overestimated his chances of setting things to rights, the world into which he sallied forth was really (like our own) unjust.
Perhaps it demands such a holy fool as Don Quixote to take the evil of the world seriously enough and to imagine himself sufficiently adequate to be willing to dedicate his life to improving the suffering lot of others.
It takes "a Gothic Christ, torn by modern anguish to face the sufferings of this absurd world; a ridiculous Christ of our own neighborhood, created by a sorrowful imagination which has lost its innocence and its will and is striving to replace them." [3]
Attempts at social change are after all usually left to the youthful idealists, while older cynics wait for young fools to outgrow their folly.
I remember well some of my own early adventures as a young psychologist.
My first job was on the staff of a dead-end, monolithic warehouse for the insane known as a State Mental Hospital.
My innocence kept me from realizing that efforts to help patients in such a tragic/comic setting were hopelessly doomed to failure.
As yet un-battered, my fresh personal commitment, naively boundless enthusiasm, and exaggerated self-confidence allowed me to accomplish impossible feats, to do what could not be done.
I spent hours talking to hopelessly unresponsive, forgotten, catatonic men and women until eventually, in some, a spark of life returned to long-empty eyes.
Only after age and experience made me more "realistic" did I achieve professional sanity, so that I was no longer able to be of any help to those poor captive souls.
Needing a fair lady to whom he may dedicate his quest, Don Quixote selected a lovely local farm girl with whom he had been secretly infatuated as the princess of his mad dreams.
He resolved to call her Dulcinea del Toboso, a name worthy of the royal station to which he had elevated her.
Though this too seems a matter of insane fancy, his fantasy dedication of courtly love seems to me no more crazy than the wonderfully bewildering experience, which we have all been through (and some more than once), the phenomenon that we call "falling in love."
It may even be that
"imagination has created
all of the most perfect ladies
[and gentlemen and that]...
he who sees his lady just as she is
is no lover worthy of the name." [4]
It is of course possible to describe Reality reductively as "nothing but" this or that.
What woman, for the cynically hyper-realistic man, is any more than a rag, a bone, and a hank of hair?
The human body can be reduced to its chemical components enmeshed in a set of physical interactions, but that which is most human is lost in the analyzed ashes.
It is an impoverished chemical baggage
who lives in a world to which
he will not bring vitality and meaning.
Life is very dull for those too timid, too unimaginative, too sane to bring to it a sense of personal style, of individual purpose, of color, verve, fun, and excitement.
Don Quixote's Quest, the personal pilgrimage of his mad life, was to live in
"the world as it is traversed by man as he ought to be."
[5]
If this be the wine of madness, then I say: "Come fill my cup."
It greatly upset the other members of Don Quixote's family and his community to learn that he had chosen to believe in himself.
They were contemptuous of his wish to follow his dream.
They did not connect the inception of the Knight's madness with the deadly drabness of his living amidst their pietism.
His prissy niece, his know-what's-best-for-everyone housekeeper, his dull barber, and the pompous village-priest, all knew that it was his dangerous books that had filled Don Quixote's failing mind with foolish ideas and so made him crazy.
Their household reminds me of the families from which young schizophrenics sometimes emerge.
Such families often give the appearance of hyper-normal stability and moralistic goodness.
What actually goes on is that they have developed an elaborately subtle system of cues to warn any member should he be about to do something spontaneous, something that would topple the precarious family balance and expose the hypocrisy of their over-controlled pseudo-stability.
I remember one couple who for years had used their daughter's academic achievements both as proof of what a constructive family life they had and as a focus for the appearance of closeness that masked their dread of real intimacy.
In late adolescence the girl's growing interest in sex threatened the family with her establishing an intimate relationship with someone outside of their system of control.
Parental religious preoccupation quickened, and soon they were surprised and upset to find that their daughter (the identified patient) had become crazy, developing hallucinatory visions to support the delusion that she was to be the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary.
At first the family was "resigned" to having to take care of their crazy child for the rest of her (their) life.
They had no intention of having her hospitalized, and only sought treatment because her confusion began interfering with her schoolwork.
In a therapy group of such families, and with some individual support, after a while the crazy daughter began to manifest new non-familial sanity in the form of questioning her own delusional experiences, thinking of quitting school to get a job, and hoping to move out on her own.
At this point, father spoke out against the destructively secular influence of psychotherapy, begging his daughter not to discard her "visions," because "in matters of the spirit, who are we to judge?"
In Don Quixote's case, the auspicious community of the wise and the sane took it upon themselves to judge his books and to burn them.
Cervante's chilling parody of the Spanish Inquisition is echoed by our own contemporary experiences with forces of Law and Order and by the current [in 1972, President Richard Nixon] and recent (President Lyndon B. Johnson] Administration's attempts to protect us from dangerous ideas and information, for our own good.
In a subtler way, the protective efforts of the self-appointed sane influence the whole field of psychiatry and psychology.
The clinical diagnosis of psychopathology is too often a form of social control.
If other people make us nervous by the foreignness of their queer talk and odd behavior, we give them tranquilizing drugs, lock them away in custodial institutions.
I once witnessed an ironically enlightening instance of the cultural definition of insanity, and of the power politics of psychiatric social control.
At the time when I was on the staff of a New Jersey State Mental Hospital, a strange man appeared on a street corner in Trenton, wearing a long white sheet and quietly muttering "gibberish."
His very presence threatened the certitude of sanity of the community at large.
Fortunately, for the sheeted man's own good, a policeman was called by some saner citizen.
So it was that this poor man was able to be brought under the protective lock-and-key of his local Asylum.
His efforts to explain his strange behavior were offered in vain, since it was clear that he was a loony, or to be more scientific, he was diagnosed into that catch-all garbage can of a syndrome known as Schizophrenia, Chronic Undifferentiated Type.
It would have been difficult for anyone to acquit himself well in that diagnostic staff situation, since the patient was assumed to be crazy until proven sane, unrepresented by counsel, and not even told that anything he said could be used against him.
One further limitation was in play, accruing epiphenomenally from the sociology of American medicine.
Foreign-trained physicians are not allowed to practice medicine in this country until they have demonstrated competence both in English and in medicine.
So far, so good.
However, in the absence of such proven competence, they are permitted to work as resident psychiatrists in state mental institutions.
I have seen irascible (but otherwise normal) citizens diagnosed as confused psychotics, adjudged incompetent, and denied their civil rights and their freedom on the basis of their inability to understand the incompetent mouthings of ill-trained resident psychiatrists whose own command of English was so limited that I could not understand them either.
Fortunately, for the white-sheeted, gibberish-muttering patient in question, the hospital Visitor's Day began the very next morning.
Evidently he had called home and made his plight known.
That morning twenty other people wearing white sheets arrived at the hospital.
Equally strangely clad, they were also equivalently incomprehensible to the psychiatric staff.
It turned out (to the resident psychiatrist's amusement) that these men and women were all members of the same small rural church sect, a religious group who defined their identity in part by clothing themselves in the purity of white cloth, and by being divinely inspired to talk in tongues.
The psychiatrist in this case, being a practicing Roman Catholic (who weekly ate and drank the body and blood of Jesus Christ) thought they were a queer bunch indeed.
Heaven help him should he ever wander into a community in which his own religious affiliations would be equally obscure.
The patient was released that afternoon.
One such man is a lunatic.
Twenty constitute an acceptable and sane community.
Don Quixote's madness and his loss of contact with reality are played off against the down-to-earth sanity of Sancho Panza, a local peasant whom he has convinced to accompany him as his squire.
Sancho is committed to a common-sense approach, believing only what he can see with his own eyes.
Yet he goes along with Don Quixote's mad sallies into the illusion of adventure, because Sancho in his so-called sanity is driven by greed.
He wishes to gain worldly power, to become the governor of an island whose sovereignty Don Quixote promises him as a reward for service.
Again and again, Sancho kids himself that his knight knows what he is about, his self-deception guided by his "sane" insistence on the acquisition of power.
Time after time, Sancho is unnerved by Don Quixote's impulsive challenging and attacking of swineherds, mule drivers, and innkeepers whom he mistakes for enchanters, evil knights, and lords of the manor.
Yet each time Sancho endures what he must (with expedient cowardice in the face of fire) in the search for his own impossible dream.
How meager and empty are the squire's desires for petty officialdom when compared with his knight's mad wish to right the wrongs of this world.
Perhaps the most famous of their escapades is what is now commonly referred to as quixotic fighting with windmills.
Arriving on a great plain, the adventurers see thirty or forty windmills which Don Quixote mistakes for "lawless giants."
[6]
Sancho cannot convince him that their turning wings are not mighty arms.
Don Quixote charges to do battle with these giants, is unseated by the turning of the giant's arm, and ends up badly battered, on the ground, with broken lance.
But, consider for a moment what it took for him to do battle with these illusory forces of evil.
After all, "who doubts that the courage to face giants is both more admirable and more rare than the ability to recognize a 'fulling mill' when one hears it?"
[7]
Distorted views of the world do not always constitute corruption of the purpose of one's quest.
I remember my concern for social justice when my own life was brushed by the dark wing of madness.
Following a near-catastrophic ordeal of intra-cranial surgery, an adverse response to the drugs I had been given, and a disorienting experience of slipping back and forth between sleep and pain under the unwavering overhead lights of the intensive care unit, I was crazy for several days afterward.
To begin with, I was confused, terrified, could not understand, and did not know if it would ever end.
I was sure they were trying to hurt me.
They had put some device into my nose; it hurt and so I pulled it out.
It was bloody, and then I was sure they were trying to kill me.
Because I interfered with their efforts, they tied down my hands (later I learned that this was done with gauze, but then I thought I had been chained).
I felt helpless, enraged, humiliated.
I tried to punch one of the nurses in the face.
In retrospect, I realize that I must have been a pain in the ass to them, that they continued to try to help, and that I must have correctly read the resentment behind their attempts to reassure me that they really wanted to help me.
But I was too smart for them.
I knew.
I became more and more cunning in tricking them into removing some of the more tortuous breathing devices they had put on me.
Some of my perceptions became more elaborate but not more clear.
The hospital seemed somehow anti-Semitic and my persecution a part of that.
Some of the equipment seemed Jewish and all right, but some of it seemed Christian and worried me.
Also, though I wanted to sleep, I visualized this as some sort of "tableau" being set up so that as I slept, the video-tape footage of my sleeping would be used as comic relief in whatever kind of TV show this was that they were putting on.
At last, I recognized my wife at my bedside ...
I told her to get an investigating committee from the American Civil Liberties Union to check on their tying my hands without due process.
[8]
During the painful weeks that followed, as I was struggling to make sense of this psychotic episode, I received an answering letter from a loving friend.
This lovely man is a Jungian psychiatrist out on the West Coast, and here is what he wrote to me about the sanity of my craziness:
How marvelously and strangely correct that you would encounter one of your demons within the cavern that houses the possession which your race [the Jews] and our society values most highly, the intellect...
You found yourself in a strange land, a land somehow determined by your racial forebearers.
That strange and dangerous land which you identify as your psychosis but is simply a naturally existing deeper layer of unconscious which is always there but rarely experienced directly by the conscious human being.
You found only one source that could be trusted to identify you as yourself and how remained unquestionably herself.
[He refers here to my wife.]
I felt great empathy with you when I read ... of your fear of being attended to by a contemporary representative of the mental hospital.
[Some patients] have been almost destroyed by the "help" they receive from well-trained, well-intentioned, well-experienced psychiatrists.
Fortunately, as in your own experience, the basic health of the individual is usually stronger than the well-intentioned or inadvertently applied medicine.
In your delusion, you knew the true basis of your persecution, namely your faith ... I know how difficult it is to fight a religious war without the benefit of recognized deities.
It seems evident to me that the enemy was clearly identified by you both in your more accustomed conscious state and in your deeply unconscious state as being the impersonalizing forces that you encountered.
You even tried to give some life-meaning to the impersonalizing machines which were being used on your body ... by identifying them as machines of one faith or another ...
The truest statement of your situation was that if you permitted yourself to lapse into the totally unconscious state of sleep, in your unconsciousness, your very condition as a human being would be used to hold you up to ridicule and abuse.
[9]
I do not mean to suggest, by all of the foregoing discussion of the value of madness, that craziness as such is a good thing.
Rather, I wish to point out that in a world in which true madness masquerades as sanity, creative struggles against the ongoing myths will seem eccentric and will be labeled as "crazy" by the challenged establishment in power.
We who are sane know that our technology will save us, that war is inevitable, that poverty and hunger of a few of the undeserving poor are necessary to the well-being of the many.
These drug-crazy, Commie-fag-hippies [back in 1972] who talk about making love instead of war, who want to live on communes without indoor plumbing, who want to make their own rules, these kids have to be stopped.
Lock 'em up, punish them, straighten them out, before they end up destroying all the ways that the good Lord has intended us to live.
Of course, being crazy can instead by a stubborn expression of self-destructive willfulness.
There appear to be many people who choose to go crazy (or become alcoholics, addicts, criminals, suicides) rather than have to bear the pain and ambiguity of a life situation that they have decided that they cannot stand.
With such patients, I try to make clear that I cannot prevent their going mad, but that I will not follow their madcap course from home to hospital and back.
They may have any crazy feelings and ideas they wish, but in their community they have to act as if they were sane, if they want me to accompany them on their pilgrimage.
The irresponsible act of going crazy, in order not to have to face up to the mess they have created in their own lives, is not one to which I wish to be an accomplice.
During my own above-described hospitalization, I was fortunate enough to have been too weak physically to have acted out all of my madness.
As a result, I survived, and I believe that I learned a valuable lesson.
At one point, just after the operation and just before my psychotic episode, my breathing had stopped several times and my life was in jeopardy.
The hospital's respiration team had forced rubber tubing down into my throat to pump the fluids out of my lungs.
Then the nurse tied an oxygen mask over my face.
The cold gas felt like fire in the rawness of my throat.
Weakly, I signaled the nurse to come to my bedside.
She removed the mask for a moment to find out what was the matter.
I gasped: "The mask, take it off. I can't stand it."
She answered with quiet confidence: "Yes, you can!"
She put the oxygen mask back on and saved my life.
My madness, it seems to me, followed this exchange.
Though conditioned by the physiological trauma of brain surgery, it was also an ambiguous conglomerate of crazy flight from the helplessness, which I did not want to face, and a desperate attempt to maintain my personal integrity in a world that made no sense.
It was good and bad, filled for me with what may always remain insoluble contradictions.
It was what it was.
Writing about it seems to help some.
At the end of a series of colorfully zany misadventures, Don Quixote also achieved sanity.
On his deathbed he had to endure the moralistic admonishment of his deadly sane housekeeper: "Stay at home, attend to your affairs, go often to confession, be charitable to the poor."
Such is the lesson of sane virtue, "but a man may have to go through hell to learn it."
[10]
And so, safe from any further threat of madness, Don Quixote died "having gained his reason and lost his reasons for living."
[11]
It should be clear to the reader who has accompanied me through the labyrinth of this chapter that I do not feel that I have any once-and-for-all clear understanding of madness.
Sometimes it seems like it is the only way to travel in a dully sane and destructively stable world.
In other instances it seems to me to be an irresponsibly willful cop-out.
And in any given situation, it may seem like some of each.
My hope would not be to totally avoid madness, but rather to hold out against that face of it that turns me away from the courage I need in the presence of threat, away from Hemingway's "grace under pressure."
As for its other face, I value my own craziness and the creative places it can take me, free of the constraints of pedestrian Reason and unimaginative predictability.
Let me describe one instance in which I felt that encouraging the craziness of another was a way of helping him along the way of his pilgrimage.
Dan was an intellectual warrior, a super-competent, though somewhat over-gunned, young man.
He leaned heavily on Reason to make his way, working at all he did with clarity of purpose, sharpness of intent, and an air of weariness born of cognitive overexertion.
In therapy, he told his tale in a well-organized fashion, presenting a careful self-analysis, a report replete with answers, but empty of solutions.
I responded by being confounded by is irrelevant "insights" and fatigued by his continued efforts to be rational.
And too, I let him know that the blunt sanity of his explanations was beginning to confuse me, and the only thing that made me feel we might be getting somewhere was my own growing confusion.
His exasperation over our "lack of communication" and the growing deterioration of his illusion of clarity led Dan to redouble his efforts to master the situation.
Of course, it got worse and worse.
Then one day he came in upset, but triumphant, to report a dream which explained to him why he was getting so irritated with me.
"I dreamed last night that I was at sea, aboard a battleship.
I couldn't see you, but I sensed that you were out there somewhere beyond the horizon.
It was awful!
My ship was falling apart.
The seams were buckling, and sections of the steel armor plate were breaking loose and dropping off into the water.
Everything was crumbling.
I began to get panicky because I knew the ship would surely sink.
As soon as I woke up, I realized that the dream was about what's going on in therapy.
The more I talk with you, the more I feel like I'm coming apart at the seams.
What the hell are you trying to do to me anyway, drive me crazy?"
Of course, I was trying to drive him crazy, and I told him that this was a fine dream, that I really liked it, assuring him that the only reason that it bothered him was because he thought he understood it.
Even more disgusted, he countered: "All right, if you're so smart, you explain it!"
I pointed out that dreams can be understood, but they cannot be "explained."
If he wanted to really understand his own dream, he would have to re-experience it by letting himself go crazy enough to become the sea, instead of restricting his place to the helm of that crumbling toy boat.
For a moment, he looked at me as though he couldn't get too angry because I was surely mad.
Then, as if to indulge me, he sat quietly with his eyes closed for a few minutes, trying to let himself get hold of the nonsense of being the sea.
When he finally opened his eyes, they were wide with wonder.
His usual penetrating gaze was gone, his expression transformed.
His face and voice were animated in a new way, and the muscles of his strong, tense jaw seemed relaxed for the first time.
It was difficult for him to bring his usual precision to the description of the experience he had just had.
"It's all so different," he said.
"When I'm the sea, it's as though I have no boundaries.
I move so easily, and feel so free of struggle.
And then I could see that even if the ship fell apart and went under, it would just sink into the water, and rust away to become part of the sea.
It's as though nothing is ever really lost, so there's no problem, nothing that has to be defended."
There was much work yet to be done in therapy.
But after his experience of being the sea, Dan was more often undefended and spontaneous.
Sometimes when he felt uptight, ready to struggle for control of a situation, he remembered that he could go crazy and let himself be the sea, and his need to do battle would run out like the tide.
[From pages 90 - 102.]
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NOTES
1. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra,
"Don Quixote
(The Ingenious Gentleman,
Don Quixote de la Mancha)",
in "The Portable Cervantes",
translated and edited by Samuel Putnam,
New York,
Viking Press, 1951, pages 48 - 702. [?]
2. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra,
"Don Quixote
(The Ingenious Gentleman,
Don Quixote de la Mancha)",
in "The Portable Cervantes",
translated and edited by Samuel Putnam,
New York,
Viking Press, 1951, page 59.
3. Jose Ortega y Gassett,
"Meditations on Don Quixote",
translated
by Evelyn Rugg and Diego Marin,
New York,
W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1961, p. 51
4. Joseph Wood Krutch,
"Five Masters:
A Study in the Mutations of the Novel",
Bloomington, Indiana,
Indiana University Press,
A Midland Book, 1959, page 81
5. Joseph Wood Krutch,
"Five Masters:
A Study in the Mutations of the Novel",
Bloomington, Indiana,
Indiana University Press,
A Midland Book, 1959, page 98
6. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra,
"Don Quixote
(The Ingenious Gentleman,
Don Quixote de la Mancha)",
in "The Portable Cervantes",
translated and edited by Samuel Putnam,
New York,
Viking Press, 1951, page 110
7. Joseph Wood Krutch,
"Five Masters:
A Study in the Mutations of the Novel",
Bloomington, Indiana,
Indiana University Press,
A Midland Book, 1959, page 78
8. Sheldon B. Kopp,
"Guru: Metaphors From a Psychotherapist",
Palo Alto, California,
Science and Behavior Books, Inc., 1971, page 163
9. Donald D. Lathrop, M.D.
Quoted by permission from
a personal, unpublished letter.
10. . Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra,
"Don Quixote
(The Ingenious Gentleman,
Don Quixote de la Mancha)",
in "The Portable Cervantes",
translated and edited by Samuel Putnam,
New York, Viking Press, 1951, page 34.
11. Salvador de Madariaga,
"Don Quixote: An Introductory Essay in Psychology",
London, Oxford University Press,
Oxford Paperbacks, 1961, page 185
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