TIMES CHANGE WITH THE TREATMENTS:
ON ASYLUM WRITING
This essay has three parts. Click here for the second part, “TOTALLY INSTITUTIONAL”. Click here for the third part, “THROUGH THE CLOUDS”.
1. February 8, 1959, quoted by Diane Wood Middleton, Anne Sexton: A Biography (London: Virago Press, 1991), p. 98.
2. R. D. Laing, Self and Others (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), p. 131.
3. See studymore.org.uk/xpowell.htm.
Nay, he reserved a blanket,
else we had been all shamed
(King Lear)
else we had been all shamed
(King Lear)
I
IT’S A KIND OF MAGNET
IT’S A KIND OF MAGNET
“It bothers me that you use poetry this way. It’s all a release for you, but what is it for anyone else except a spectacle of someone experiencing release?” John Holmes urged Anne Sexton for decency’s sake not to go public about her stay in a mental hospital. “Don’t publish it in a book,” he wrote her in 1959. “You’ll certainly outgrow it, and become another person, then this record will haunt and hurt you.”1 Holmes wasn’t in tune with the times, however. Robert Lowell was at that very moment including asylum poetry in his collection Life Studies, and many other writers soon joined him in lifting off the institutional lid. The next three decades witnessed the gradual abolition of mental hospitals across the western world and asylum writing of this period reflected changing attitudes to nervous breakdowns, shrinks, and loony bins. Stigma was lessened as forbidden subjects began to be openly discussed, though that wasn’t enough for militants who wanted a society that didn’t impose stigma in the first place. So-called insanity had been vilified for a long time and some anti-psychiatric thinkers decided it was necessary to remake a Procrustean world in the anarchic image of madness (for more, SEE “The X Process”). Few regret such a project’s failure but after the last patients walked out through the asylum gate they had to fend for themselves in an ever more subtly manipulative society, far from utopia.
Sexton answered her friend with a terse, equivocal poem in To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), the volume she published against his advice. The hospital in “For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further” is an orderly place for a stint of soul-searching, and nothing more. Perhaps, after all, a person who had certain experiences couldn’t just become somebody new, somebody healed and unhaunted. Holmes assumed the institution could be left behind through cure or catharsis, but such therapeutic endgames weren’t part of Sexton’s picture. Maybe there was no such thing as complete release from the asylum, whatever well-meaning outsiders imagined. The book’s title placed the still-troubled poet somewhere between ward and world, hinting that institutions didn’t always let go of people.
A sense of capture figured in other books about mental hospitals as well, both literary and theoretical. In Self and Others (1961) the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing, who turned against his profession, quoted a patient’s dream: “I am running as hard as I can away from the hospital, but the hospital, and you in it, is a gigantic magnet. The harder I try to run away, the more I am pulled towards it.”2 The dreamer felt the institution’s power even outside its walls. In 1961 the British Minister of Health J. Enoch Powell announced the Conservative government’s long-term plan to close mental hospitals and move psychiatric treatment into the community. “We have to get the idea into our heads that a hospital is a shell,” he said, “to contain certain processes.”3 If, under this policy called deinstitutionalization, asylum processes weren’t going to be confined to hospitals, once they migrated they might become difficult to spot and dodge. This was the magnet dreamer’s fear. She had an inkling of the coercive social side-effects of infirmary processes emerging from their institutional shell, and so like Sexton she felt unreleased.
GO TO PART 2