Operators and Things: the inner life of a schizophrenic

By Barbara O'Brien

Psychedelic memoir of the healing power of schizophrenic hallucinations in the 1950s

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barbara O'Brien
• Release date: Apr 21, 2010

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Operators and Things:

The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic

Barbara O’Brien

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 1958 Barbara O’Brien

Contents

Introduction, by Michael Maccoby

Prefatory Note, by L. J. Reyna

Schizophrenia: The Demon in Control

PART ONE

The Operators Leave

Before the Operators Came

PART TWO

The Operators

PART THREE

The Dry Beach and the Waves

The Subterranean Craftsman

Something

Something Extends

My Unconscious Friend

The Freudian

Sparring Partners

The Pictures

PART FOUR

The Reasoning Machine

The Textbooks

The Bronco

The Psychiatrists and the Schizophrenics

The Guidance and the Planning

Hook Operating

The Doctors

That Something

Private Univac

Mutating Man

Hinton: Departmentalized Man

Memo on Mental Institutions

The Knife and the Hatchet

APPENDIX

Introduction

Everything about this psychology is, in the deepest sense, experience; C.G. Jung has written, the entire theory, even when it puts on its most abstract airs, is the direct outcome of something experienced. Jung also writes "To experience a dream and its interpretation is very different from having a tepid rehash set before you on paper." [C.G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, New York: Meridian, 1956. Page 127. The essay, General Remarks on the Therapeutic Approach to the Unconscious, of which this quotation is a part, is particularly relevant to Barbara’s account of her hallucinations. Jung, much more so than Freud, is aware of the healing and creative as well as the destructive elements in the unconscious.]

This book is one person’s experience of living a dream which does not fit easily into abstract theory, even the author’s own. As she tells us, the dry beach of the conscious mind is a poor relation to the unconscious. Although we speak a common conscious language, socialized by our common culture, it is no easy thing for a man to communicate with even his own unconscious. For psychology, everyone’s experience must be relevant; the experts in this field depend on the experience of others. Theory is little more than an organizing myth, and myths become powerful theories only by remaining sensitive to experience.

Ideally, we would like to be able to apply the content of Barbara’s schizophrenic world to some myth or model, no matter how inadequate, of the unconscious processes. In this connection, two points made by Barbara are particularly interesting to me. The first is her feeling that the drama staged by her unconscious was an attempt to save her from the unbearable, an idea that supports Freud’s hypothesis that the hallucinatory (hysterical) mechanism is an attempt at recovery, not the disease itself. [Sigmund Freud, On the Mechanism of Paranoia, in Collected Papers Volume III, London: The Hogarth Press, 1925 Pages 444-470. In fact, Freud credits the idea of hallucinations as attempts at recovery to Jung’s observations that the flight of ideas and motor stereotypes occurring in this disorder (dementia praecox or paraphrenia) are the relics of former object-cathexes, clung to with convulsive energy. Barbara places herself in the diagnostic category of paranoia. It is probably more correct to call her illness paraphrenia, which, as Freud points out, is close to paranoia and can develop from it. The differences are described briefly in the above paper. This paper is worth reading from another angle, also. Barbara’s description of the cure offered by the psychoanalyst she saw is quite different from Freud’s theories about paraphrenia and its aeteosis, which he considers less sexual in the normal sense, more related to early infant problems which might better be called problems of trust and autonomy.] Barbara’s hallucinations are not, however, the gods and devils common to another age; they are horrors of Organization Man; they are reactions to forces blocking attempts at creativity in work and attempts to enjoy relationships of trust with others.

Those who are creative in Barbara’s world are impaled by the hook and those who trust are removed. For most of us, these problems of creativity and intimacy are the difference between a meaningful and satisfying life as opposed to a life of quiet: desperation. To Barbara, they are matters of staying alive, and this is perhaps as good a way as any to state simply the difference between the meaning of a problem to a normal person and to a schizophrenic. As Barbara admits honestly, her problems are not solved; she cannot claim a complete cure. The hallucinations are gone and her conscious mind can hold down a job; but the hook operators are still, unbearable, and there is no indication that she can trust enough to enjoy human contact.

In fact, she tells little of her feelings about the people who are and were significant in her life. The only interactions we witness (other than in her hallucinatory dramas) are her contacts with a busy, uncaring psychiatrist and with a caricature of an orthodox psychoanalyst, who seems alternately amazed at Barbara’s unconscious (understandably so) and intrigued by her femininity (a Frenchman, he suggests bed with an experienced European lover as a cure, an idea that Barbara wisely considers would create, for her, more problems than it would solve). For Barbara, the world remains hostile; survival is the central problem. The only optimistic elements in the story are Barbara’s considerable intelligence and the creative urge which led to her novel and to this book.

Psychology does not know much about creativity. Freud analyzes Dostoevsky as a neurotic, but he admits: Before the problem of the creative artist analysis must, alas, lay down its arms. [Sigmund Freud, Dostoevsky and Parricide, in Collected Papers. Volume V, London: Hogarth Press, 1950.] In a similar way, one can explain William Blake’s hallucinations and his denunciations of the Royal Academy’s Hook Operators, but the music of Blake’s words, the form of their content, and the fact of creativity, rather than stagnation, remain an awesome mystery. Barbara writes and she writes well; creativity is a therapy by which Barbara transcends the psychiatrists’ work-a-day world of confessions and standardized inkblots. She imposes regularity and form over chaos, socializing the unconscious language in a way only the best therapies ever approach. Yet, as I have said, there is a great distance between bare survival and a satisfying life.

Barbara gives us another idea which has to do with some of the most interesting research into the connection between mental illness and physiological imbalance. She feels that her unconscious presented her with a drama with at least one moral to it: get your adrenal working, get angry or you will destroy yourself. Recent research indicates that depressive psychotics and some schizophrenics (indeed some normal-neurotics) who react to stress with fear show a different physiological pattern to stress than do those who react with anger or cunning. For example, those who fear (the anger-in people as Funkenstein [D. H. Funkenstein, S. H. King and M. E. Drolette, Mastery of Stress, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957.] calls them) secrete less noradrenalin. Perhaps the anger-in people fear the feeling of anger itself more than they fear retaliation by real others. Perhaps the reaction of fear is a physiological poison which threatens a person’s life. Perhaps only a psychological change, a willingness to be angry, can support a physiological reorganization. It is also possible that the fear of being angry spreads to become the fear of doing anything active which becomes the wish to crawl into a hole. Barbara’s mad dash across the country seems to me like a first step toward curative activity as well as the abandonment of an environment from which her mind has already fled.

If the reader shares my curiosity, he or she will have the wish to know more about Barbara. What does she look like? What was her childhood like? What is she doing now? What kind of people have been important to her, other than people in authority? All we know is that she is a creative and independent woman, with intelligence, a strong sense of morality, and a talent for playfulness. Her playfulness and humor is to me Barbara’s most impressive quality. Faced with a matter of life and death which lasted not for a moment but for months, her unconscious produced, along with Kafka-esque judges and Edward G. Robinson-type gangsters, characters like Nicky who are warm and playful. This book itself has an element of a Hollywood script, but a script which illustrates man’s most endearing quality, the ability to translate the dangers within him, the fears about good and evil, into an external drama with heroes and villains, with pathos and humor. [For a discussion of the value of man’s playfulness and his ability to reflect fearlessly on the strange customs and institutions by which... (he) must find self-realization, see Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society, New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1950, particularly the chapter The Fear of Anxiety. One of Erikson’s observations helps me to understand Barbara’s case in a way different from the approach taken by Barbara herself. Barbara reports that her greatest fear from the operators is that of being dummetized, being made empty. And she finally believes that this has happened. Erikson writes: "The fear of being left empty, and, more simply, that of being left, seems to be the most basic feminine fear, extending over the whole of a woman’s existence. It is normally intensified with every menstruation and takes its final toll during the menopause. No wonder, then, that the anxiety aroused by these fears can express itself either in complete subjugation to male thought, in desperate competition with it, or in efforts to catch the male and make him a mere tool." Page 366.] Psychology, if it is to be science rather than dogma, must learn from people like Barbara that the unconscious is not at all like the mechanized models of human behavior upon which we depend all too much.

MICHAEL MACCOBY

Harvard University

Prefatory Note

In this book, an intelligent, observant, and talented woman returns from a world of hallucinatory characters to join therapists and researchers in their pursuit of the causes of schizophrenia.

In her attempt to understand how she suddenly entered this world and emerged after six months from it, the author presents a startlingly clear account of our present state of knowledge and ignorance about schizophrenia. Her detailed and systematic report and interpretation of her illness and recovery provide a valuable and rich source of data and hypotheses which will place researchers in mental illness in her debt.

I believe that not only will professionals regard this work as an outstanding contribution to studies on the etiology, treatment and sociology of mental illness, but that all readers will view this work as brilliant literature and see in it the emergence of an artist.

L. J. REYNA

Research Consultant, VA. Hospital, Bedford, Mass. Associate Professor of Psychology, Boston University

Schizophrenia: The Demon in Control

Let us say that when you awake tomorrow, you find standing at your bedside a man with purple scale-skin who tells you that he has just arrived from Mars, that he is studying the human species, and that he has selected your mind for the kind of on-the-spot examination he wants to make.

While you are catching your breath he walks casually to your best chair, drapes his tail over it, and informs you that he will be visible and audible only to you. Fixing his three eyes sternly upon you, he warns you not to reveal his presence; if you attempt to do so, he threatens, he will kill you instantly.

You may wonder, perhaps, if you are sane. But the Man From Mars is standing before you, clear and colorful, and his voice is loud and distinct. On the basis of what you can so clearly see and hear, you accept the fact, astounding as it is, that the stranger is what he says he is.

If your temperament were such that you would not be able to accept the fact that a Man From Mars might just pop into your room, the vision appearing before you would not be a Man From Mars. It might be, instead, the awesome figure of God. Or the terrifying figure of the devil. Or it might be a much less conventional figure. In all probability the figure, regardless of the form it took, would have three characteristics: it would represent authority; it would have superhuman powers; and its weirdness would, in some way, seem plausible and acceptable to you.

Let us say that you are faced with the Man From Mars and that prior unresolved speculations concerning flying saucers give the figure a certain plausibility. You are rattled but you attempt to go through your normal activities, keeping your tremendous secret to yourself. You converse with your friends, perform your job, and eat your meals, even while the figure stands at your side. The Man From Mars advises you that it is not necessary to answer his questions, that you need only to think your answers, for he will be able to read your mind. You find this is no idle boast; the Man proceeds to demonstrate his ability to do just that.

If you are sufficiently controlled you may carry your secret around with you for some time before anyone suspects that something unusual has happened to you. A friend may notice that you seem somewhat distraught and suggest that you unburden your troubles. You ignore his advice. Obviously, such an action would result only in the instant death of you and your confidant. Instead, you become more careful of your behavior, hold onto yourself with everything you’ve got, and pray desperately for the Man From Mars to complete his research and depart.

It is possible that the Man From Mars may actually disappear within a few days or a few weeks. There is about a .05 per cent chance of this happening. You are physically exhausted after the Man has gone back to Mars, and your mind, which had been racing like a jet plane while the Man was with you, slows down and almost refuses to function at all. But as the days pass, you gradually revert to normalcy. In time, you may discuss your experience with some one and you may even discover, at this point, what was really happening to you while the Man From Mars was with you.

There is a 99.55 per cent chance, however, if something like the Man From Mars appears in your life, that he is still in your life after a few months. By that time it is very probable that you are in a mental institution, undergoing periodic electric or insulin shock treatment. There is a chance of the Man’s disappearing after a few shock treatments.

There is a much better chance that the Man is still with you after the hundredth dose of shock. By that time you may become so demoralized that you don’t care whether the Man kills you or not; or the doctors may inject drugs which induce you to talk. You find yourself eagerly telling the doctors and anyone else whose ear you can capture about your visitor and his purpose in haunting you.

They don’t believe you. This doesn’t altogether surprise you. After all, other people can’t see and hear the Man; he’s not tuned in on them. The Man may get nasty after your revelation of his presence and you may get angry enough to take a few punches at him— and feel jubilant about doing just this. While you are glorying in this first release of your months-old tension, you find that you are being fitted snugly into a restraining jacket and that strong tranquilizing drugs are being stuffed down your throat, or that the shock treatments have been increased to reduce your aggressiveness.

The tranquilizers or the shock therapy have the desired effect and your impulse to challenge the Man disappears. You review your situation despondently and finally resign yourself to the inevitable, realizing that there isn’t a thing any human being in the world can do for you. You wait wearily for the Man to go back to Mars. You might be in the institution for the rest of your life and the Man From Mars might be there with you.

You have a common variety of the mental disease, schizophrenia, a mental disorder more prevalent in America than it is anywhere else and one which is mounting in rate of increase with each year. Your mind is split, and a subconscious portion of it, no longer under your conscious control, is staging a private show for your benefit. The kind of show it stages will depend upon the kind of stuff that is in it and upon the relationship that existed between your conscious and unconscious while your mind was whole. It may, with each passing day, tear you to smaller and smaller pieces. It may, on the other hand, patiently stitch together the segments of you that have split apart.

One thing is certain: when you sit on your ward bench, staring at the wall, studying your apparition and despondently concluding that no other human being in the world can help you, your deduction will be a sane and reasonable one. If you develop schizophrenia which cannot be arrested by a few doses of shock therapy or tranquilizers, then there is no other human being in the world who can help you. The only thing that can help you at that point is the demon in control, your own unconscious mind.

According to statistics released by the National Association for Mental Health, your chance of being hospitalized for a severe mental illness during your lifetime is, in 1957, if you are an American, 1 in 12. In 1946, it was 1 in 16; in 1936, it was 1 in 20.

An 11 out of 12