Going Down to Come Up

...But once the sought trust had sprung up between them it flourished into possessiveness "Joe" was hers She wanted Joe in attendance at all times She would take food and discourse only from Joe She smeared excrement over walls or over herself-into her hair, too-confident that Joe would bathe her clean...

...Mary stresses the consequences for her of her brother's birth when she was two, her parents' continual expectations from her of "nice" behavior, her sense that her body remained separated from her mind, and sometimes from parts of itself, her parents' tendency to hurt one another unawares, their disinclination to face, let alone talk through, any unpleasantness, her mother's frequent retreats, when bewildered or offended, into physical sickness, real or imagined Such data are canonical Laing...

...from the Divided Self and Self and Others...

...Such information may or may not hint at the makings of five or six distinct psychic crises Yet it gives us only shadowy intimations of the woman Mary Barnes was and is In his chapters Joseph Berke pays tribute to her unusual spirit, intelligence and tenacity-most of all the tenacity, whether one interprets it as courage (nothing could stop her from going all the way with her cure) or as ruthlessness (she didn't scruple to exploit the people who were trying to help her...

...Mary's paintings, illustrated m the book, have a directness and gaudiness that scream her disquiet and her release from it They splatter her IT (or, as Berke remarks, her shit) unabashedly in the world's eyes as a mixed act of defying and giving Radial flashes, whorls and sunbursts from a quivering center, ramifying trees, perpendiculars that climb greedily off the picture-these are executed with the ecstasy of a six-year-old backed by the purposefulness of an adult bent on conquest And, according to a press release from the publisher, they sell For "as much as $720 apiece ". What are we to make of this story9 To start with Nothing beats self-help, painting liberates, mad girl makes good, a new personal therapy frog-leaps over the need for drugs, shocks and incarceration Clearly, there is a considerable lesson here to apply to our own fetid, loveless "mental institutions" where patients sit about stupefied when they are not being demeaned by herding, brutality and indifference...

...We learn that as a child she had speech difficulties and was mocked at school She could not determine whether she wanted to be a girl or a boy She could not draw well She resented not having the chance to go to college Later she trained and worked as a nurse out of a desire to help others and be dutiful She became a Catholic She had no love affairs and no close relationships with men As a teenager she felt proud when strangers took her for her father's wife...

...What I find most interesting about this praxis is its treatment of psychic disorders as art forms Such artistic treatment implies a deference toward the patient that has been missing from therapy since the death of the founders of psychoanalysis...

...The entire unmad majority...

...Going Down to Come Up Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey Through Madness By Mary Barnes and Joseph Berke Harcourt Bi ace Jovanovich 351 pp $7 50 Reviewed by Albert Bermel Playwright, translator, former theater critic of "The New Leader When I was a boy in England it was said that a madman had the strength of 10 men I vaguely remember having nightmares of mass breakouts from some unspecified Bedlam Battalions of disarrayed lunatics ripped up trees, buckled metal plates with a blow, took buildings apart, and burst every thickness of chain forged to hold them They advanced unstoppably, but on whom...

...That beast kept prowling in and out of my memory as I read the story of Mary Barnes, a former schizophrenic In describing her down years and her up years she refers constantly to "IT," the anger she felt against herself At times IT would free itself from her with a detonating force...

...Here we get some glimmering of what Laing and Cooper have been up to in their recent attempts to assume madness by the sheer exercise of will power, much as Strindberg did during his "inferno" year Their behavior and writings have sometimes seemed not so much mad as an insult to the plight of the mad Do they believe that they might become more truly artists ("inspired") by venturing, as Jung did, into private dreams, fears, memories, wishes, and fantasies...

...Her co-author and former analyst, Joseph Berke, writes "This rage was so earth-shattering, so people-destroying that Mary could not refer to it by name 'Anger' was a quasi-magical word for her To pronounce this word was tantamount to conjuring up a cataclysm 'IT' came m on/over on Mary whenever she felt she was being punished This was quite often...

...Berke drops one clue Since Christ features prominently in her pictures he speculates that she saw herself as a figuration of Christ during His passion But Mary provides further clues m such asides as, "My mother spoke as if there was something wrong, not 'nice,' about having long hair I felt somewhat consoled m remembering [that] Mary, the Mother of God, probably had long hair" OI "Joe rang I told him, 'I've got to go away Your baby is being born ' " Or, apropos of the blue dress and blue cape she chose to wear for her first exhibition, "Blue, colour of the Mother of God, my mother used to dress me in blue ". A woman in her early 40s, still fertile and a virgin, still a devout Catholic How could she earn the right to be worthy of the name of that other Mary9 Perhaps by undertaking the hardest mission she could imagine, a pilgrimage back to her beginnings and forward again, so that she might come out of it lmmaculate, the health) child of her own suffering And by an almost providential fluke, as though to confirm her decision, the man closest to her during the ordeal proved to be a Jew named Joseph...

...In dealing with Mary, Berke had to tap hidden and forgotten personal resources They played together at sharks, crocodiles and bears, they bit, squeezed, growled, clawed He let her "bash" him when IT took her by storm-all this m part to reach her, in part to assuage her guilt by demonstrating that she did not hurt him, much less kill him, by venting IT...

...Mary's rebirth was a sort of modern miracle The miracle's product, her offspring, was the journey itself In the course of it she slew monsters of the imagination, culminating in her victory over IT Like the questing heroes of antiquity she passed all the trials Her army consisted of that superhuman, tenfold strength once attributed to madmen, for alter she had tamed IT she made it work for her, not against her She has hypostatized the journey in the form of her book, her work of art, conceived by her and fathered by Berke, a reminder of such mythical antecedents as Io's tortured flight from the gadfly to Egypt, where she would be miraculously cured by Zeus, give birth to a son, and found a new race...

...My own guess is that they have acquired tremendous respect for the strength of madness, its refusal to give up its language codes, its undauntability This represents anything but a selfish point of view for a professional healer, it bespeaks the utmost in humility The disease these men fear is not a patient's madness but their own dwindling into assumptions of godliness As if to confirm this, most of Berke's contributions to the book stoutly demythologize the all-knowing, all-powerful "Joe" created in Mary's chapters...

...Still, the book uncovers as many tough questions as it proposes inspirational precedents For instance, is Mary a special case, and why9 My own experience of growing up in England suggests that she shares every circumstance in her family background as she describes it with millions of other English people In other words, some peculiar susceptibility in her, rather than the unnatural pressures from her environment, drove her mad Correspondingly, there is something peculiar, individual (fanatical7), about her resolve to be cured...

...But Mary is victim, not analyst She is so intent on transmitting the impact of events and other personalities upon her that the impact takes precedence while the events and personalities come across sketchily, particularly the people in her family and in the Kingsley Hall community...

...In her portions of the book Mary Barnes never hesitates to call herself mad She even wears the word as a badge of honor Did she ever realize that it is the first syllable of Madonna...

...Needing to break away from Mary, to make her dependent on others and, more slowly, on herself, Berke introduced her to crayons and then oil paints She took passionately to painting, dispensing with brushes, in an extreme version of action painting she slashed lines of color on to hardboard, wood, walls, any surface she could find, with her fingers...

...Nightmares of the incredibly potent mad at large, either will-less or possessed by a terrific, singleminded rage for destruction, must he behind all those sci-fi concoctions of "It"s and other creatures from oceanic depths, prehistoric slime, or unheard-of planets A mythologist is probably right to point out that these latter-day Plutos and dripping Poseidons stand for our fears of our own irrationality, our potential madness, our adjusted selves unraveled and running amuck At any rate, the part of the tale (or nightmare) I find most troubling is the endeavors-and initial failures-to manacle, imprison, control the beast, to keep him down...

...Themselves...

...The question that nagged at me most through these pages is How did Mary think that her "cure" could repay her for all the pain she was bound to incur by going down"9 Surely the condition of being she was pursuing was not as vague as peace of mind or mental stability Nor did she expect beforehand to become a successful artist Taking up painting was Berke's idea, not hers...

...Berke, a young American psychiatrist, had gone to Britain to associate with Laing, David Cooper and Aaron Esterson, and they later invited him to join the Kingsley Hall community In common with them he had a distaste for the "medical" approach to analysis, by means of which a doctor diminishes Ins patient with definitions, boxing and wrapping the symptoms into a recognizable package (an "illness" or "disease") Berke felt that a patient tries to transmit his or her own language, by garbled talk or certain gestures or even (that is especially) by a catatonic silence The psychiatrist's first task is to learn the vocabulary of this individual language by encouraging the patient to let it flow...

...Laing had a new kind of rally in mind He wanted to found a community of therapists, artists and patients, who would collaborate as equals in trying to come to an understanding of psychoses And here at Bow m London, the 42-year-old Mary was determined to be reborn by regressing through her life as a fetus, baby, child, and young woman (Her brother did not join her at Kingsley Hall until much later ) Mary recounts her early years, first as she lived them and then as she revisited them across the murk of schizophrenia and the blaze of triumphant recovery Although her jagged sentences have a lot of hyped-up drama, as well as contempt for chronology, at times she seems uncannily knowing, even clinical, about herself As an admirer of Laing she has thought about the "existential" reasons for her breakdown, in contrast to the conventional "deterministic" reasons She goes on to recapitulate the family "knots" and "binds" that read like case materials...

...On these frequent occasions Mary experienced an all-pervasive badness This badness was so awful, so terrible, so twisted up in her guts, that Mary would easily have killed herself, or others, in order to alleviate it " She initiated her "journey through madness" by going to R D Laing after reading his books and insisting that he take her and her severely withdrawn brother under his care as soon as he found a "place " The place turned out to be Kingsley Hall, a rambling structure once popular for political rallies...