The medical term for madness is psychosis, which essentially implies having beliefs, attitudes and behaviour that are antithetic to social convention.  Psychosis is not the only category of mental illness; there is also neurosis.  The old adage captures the distinction nicely.  A neurotic thinks that 2 and 2 equals 4 and is worried about it.  A psychotic just knows that 2 and 2 equals five.  So neurosis is a disturbance of doubt while psychosis is a condition of certainty and conviction.  They are styles of being, different but not immiscible.   Although people may try to evade the torment of neurosis by developing  delusions , they can still be tortured by convictions  of victimisation, devastated by fears of fragmentation.  Life for somebody who is psychotic, can literally be hell!  Even when things are calm, there is no peace from their internal thoughts and voices.  No wonder so many people who have a psychotic breakdown, chose to end their own lives. 

The problem is not so much how we can distinguish between neurosis and psychosis but how we can we distinguish each from so called ‘normality’.   ‘Normal’ is a social construct, defined by reference to the culture a person comes from.  The Christian notion of God, his reincarnation as Jesus Christ, the virgin birth and the resurrection, is considered quite normal in the United States of America and much of the western world.  But as Richard Dawkins has emphasised, what is God but a massive delusion?   The only reason a religious conviction is not  considered mad is that the same delusion is shared by others.  Falling in love is another delusion that is widely encouraged by society even though it has such massive potential to shatter a person’s private web of meaning.   

Psychosis is a distortion of meaning and as such,  a logical consequence of being human.  We can all go a bit mad at times.  Human beings are creatures of meaning, compelled to find reasons for their existance and what happens.  They have a big brains that can see into the future, and a deep seated fear of what might exist in that void.  They have the imagination to invent stories and can be both comforted or tortured by the delusions they create. 

Meaning develops  through relationship with others, initially our mother, father, brothers, sisters, grandparents and later, a wider circle of family and friends , teachers, mentors, books and television.  It is conditioned by society, represents society and maintains us within that society.   Therefore, if we regard psychosis as an alternative or distorted state of meaning, it is a social disease.   It stands to reason that those who grow up isolated, conditioned by  perceptions that are incompletely normalised by others, develop their own fragile belief structure  that can set them apart from others.  Alone in a black and white world, where people are either idealised or denigrated, they can tend to be suspicious and blame others.   All the good stuff is located in themselves while the bad stuff is projected out though the opposite may attain.  

But there are shades of isolation. People who live on the cognitive borders of society are able to function quite normally for much of the time, but may exhibit uncompromising and paranoid ways of thinking when their meaning is challenged.  Mental illness might be regarded as a defence against the loss of meaning induced by change.     

As  creatures whose identity is created from meaning, we are all vulnerable to change.   Any of us can be overwhelmed and devastated by an event that is completely outside our experience,  and most of us, especially the more solitary, adopt strategies to prevent the devastation caused by a breakdown of meaning.  Some may assume an idealised persona, a special identity that offers a role and purpose.  This may be reinforced by special musical, literary or artistic talents perfected through the years of isolation.   Others may mould themselves to their environment, sensing what others want and adapting to it. Women are said to be better at this, readily adapting their personality to the needs of a new partner.  And finally some keep it all together by encapsulating themselves in an all consuming interest, an obession for work, a dedication, a faith.   

We can see examples of such behaviours in our colleagues, friends, family and in ourselves, but some people are more fragile, more susceptible to change and more clearly defended against it.  But fragility is no reason for segregation.  Society needs to achieve a democratisation of belief and thought.  People with conviction and creativity can be exciting and inspiring.  Most effective politicians have some spark of madness in them.  They can be dangerous unless reined in by their civil servants.  Society advances, not by the most stable, healthy members of society, but by those independent thinkers,  who may at times be considered mad by their colleagues.  Darwin, Einstein, Newton, and many of the great writers, artists and composers have all been considered mad at times.   Ignaz Semelweis, whose hygeinic principles saved the lives of millions of women from puerperal fever, spent much of his life incarcerated in mental institutions.

Some of the ideas in this article were inspired by a talk on psychotherapy and the psychoses given by Darian Leader at the Biennial Conference of the Hallam Institute of Psychotherapy on October 2nd.  

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The governess is both an unreliable and uninformed narrator and as such gives the tale its edgy somewhat hysterical character.   She has been employed by their uncle to look after Flora and Miles’, in effect to become their parent.  We assume their real parents have died.  On the day of her departure for Bly, the large country house, where they live, she is given a letter saying that Miles has been expelled from school for some undisclosed misdemeanour. 

She meets the children and is instantly charmed.  They are polite, intelligent and kind, but there is something a little too knowing about them.  She leans from the housekeeper,  Miss Grose, that both Miss Jessel, her predecessor and Peter Quint the butler, died shortly after leaving Bly,  but she sees what Miss Grose identifies as apparitions of them in the grounds and the house.  Jessel and Quint  seem to have some malign hold over the children, and the governess fears for their safety.  What on earth has been going on?  There are dark hints of sexual abuse.  The apparitions increase and the children appear to collude in the deception but by the end we begin to wonder whether they are just creations of the governess’s overheated imagination.  Flora is taken away for her own safety by Miss Grose.  Miles remains with the governess but dies in her arms while she is trying to prevent him from looking at Quint.

The Victorians were very interested in ghosts and long exposures required to take contemporary  photographic images reated ‘evidence’ of all kinds of ephemera and phantasms; lost objects.  The children, we assume, had already experienced loss, first of their parents, then of their uncle and the servants he employed to look after them.  The governess, we learn,  has also experienced loss and perhaps her neediness creates strong attachments first with the absent uncle and with the children,  but does she also create ghosts?  Are not only Peter Quint and Miss Jessel but also Ms Grose and even the children projections of her fearful imagination? 

If what happens cannot be processed (with the aid of a parental figure), then they become very frightening.  Is this fear what the governess experiences and transfers to the children?   Benjamin  Britten, who wrote an opera of the same name, had a deep empathy with the character, Miles.  He was sent away by his beloved mother to boarding school where he was abused.  But did he later abuse his choir boys, as suggested by Alan Bennett’s new play, A Habit of Art? 

The richness of James’s story lies in the gaps, which create space for the authors interpretations.  There are links with mourning and melancholia, for example.  Mourning is a process of working through memories until they wear away, but in melancholia, the aggrieved identifies with the lost object (the ghost) and blames himself.  ‘The shadow of the object falls on the ego’.  The tendency for the melancholic to identify with the person who has let them down is known in psychoanalytical terminology as projective identification.  This process defends against the realities of separation by assuming the absent identity; in other words, becoming the ghost.  We sense the horror of this in the two innocents. 

 Melancholia may be thought of as a condition of too much empathy, too much forgiveness.  It’s a disease of therapists; too much ruth; ruthful instead of ruthless.   The one who is lost remains as a ghost inside us and because we can’t evict them, we have to suffer.  Natasha Kampusch was kidnapped as a child and held in a cellar for 8 years but felt protective towards her kidnapper and guilty about escaping and telling.  Children often think its their fault when parents split up.  Lovers frequently blame themselves when they are rejected because they can’t bear to lose their beloved.

Ghosts in the Nursery was an event organised by the Harry Guntrip Psychotherapy Trust on October 9^th to coincide with a performance of Britten’s ‘A Turn of the Screw’ by Opera North. 

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Rude and opinionated, he didn’t mind what he said to people and was given to blurting out his opinions in a way that seems to resemble what we now know as Gilles de la Tourette’s disorder but his utterances were snatches of sayings or prayers,  the preoccupations of a man who  lived in his head rather than the blasphemies and vulgarities associated Tourette’s.  Dr Johnson knew how to behave when he had to.   

Yet, for all his oddities, he was one of the most respected men in the country. His prose is lucid, insightful and reads well  two and a half centuries later.  His compilation of the first English Dictionary was an amazing feat of intellectual achievement.  During his lifetime he was admired by the most intelligent and creative in the land; Walpole, Pope, Defoe, Garrick, Reynolds, Fanny Burney; anybody who was anybody.  They provided much needed recognition and meaning to his life.  He enjoyed conversation immensely

But it wasn’t just the great and the good that he befriended.   People of all walks of life called on him and were guaranteed an audience.  His compassion for the underprivileged was legendary.  People were drawn to him; he looked after them and they in turn took care of him. 

Dr Johnson feared madness all his life.  He had good reason to; his behaviour was, to say the least, eccentric.  Nowadays, his idiosyncrasies might be considered features of severe obsessive compulsive disorder, while his dedication to his dictionary, his habit of always making lists, might suggest Asperger’s Syndrome.  But how much of his strange behaviour, especially touching railings, counting paving stones and leaping over the threshold a consequence of severe visual impairment and deafness? As a child, he was so severely myopic that he once crawled all the way back home in the gutter.  After that his friends would give him piggy-backs home in return for help with their work and protection from bullies.  Children with severe sensory deficit from birth can be extremely gifted, artistically and intellectually.  Was Dr Johnson such a person? 

But was there also an emotional reason for his strange personality? Did young Samuel inherit a melancholia along with a love of books from his father?  Did his mother’s snobbery and grievance play its part in creating an unhappy home environment?  It appears that she may have suffered post partum depression; she found it difficult to bond to her son, who contracted scrofula from his wet nurse and was once taken to London to be cured by Queen Anne (Scrofula, tuberculosis of the lymph nodes in the neck, was also known as the King’s Evil and was reputed to be cured by the touch of the monarch).  Another son, Nathaniel, Samuel’s brother, died in mysterious circumstances.  So did Samuel compensate for the emotional deficiencies of family life by finding meaning in words and writing?  He was a child prodigy, so far in advance of everybody at his Lichfield school that he got a place in Oxford, but he didn’t fit the Oxford scene.  Unable to pay the fees, he left after a year.  For a time he thought he could become a schoolmaster, but his strange behaviour distracted the pupils and undermined his authority.  

Dr Johnson always had a deep dread of loneliness.  He needed human society desperately.    Without companionship, he was all too vulnerable to guilt and melancholy, the black dog that stalked him all his life. 

Many of his friends were also marked out by their idiosyncratic genius.  James Boswell, his biographer and travelling companion, depicted the Hebridean Johnson in a brown travelling coat with pockets so deep they could hold the two folio editions of his dictionary.  On the face of it, there could hardly have been two such dissimilar friends.  Boswell was a man of great appetites.  He could not manage without casual sex, which he would procure from prostitutes, and suffered chronic gonorrhoea throughout his adult life, dying early from  urinary retention and renal failure.  Johnson was, it seems, somewhat sexually repressed but shared Boswell’s desperate need for human contact.    

Another close friend was the artist Joshua Reynolds, founder president of the Royal Academy.  Like Johnson, Reynolds had problems with perception and communication. He was deaf all his life and had a hare lip, making his speech difficult to understand.  Later in life, he suffered from  cataracts, but wore glasses and carried on painting.  Reynolds was, for a time, linked romantically with Fanny Burney, a witty, amusing woman, who wrote the Bridget Jones novels of their time, but Fanny wisely noted that Reynolds had already had two ‘shakes of the palsy’, and she herself had survived a mastectomy without anaesthetic and  wasn’t prepared to take him on. 

But Dr Johnson need people around him all the time.  When Hetty, the wife who was 20 years older than him, died, he filled his house with waifs and strays, like blind Annie Willamson and her eccentric father and his black servant, Frank Barber, who inherited his estate.  He also developed a strong attachment to the blue-stocking,  Hester Thrale, and was so devastated when she fled to Italy with Senor Piozzi, the opera singer that he refused to communicate with her ever again.     

Perhaps Johnson could never abide solitude because he was not at peace with himself. Life, according to Johnson,  was to be endured.  He always considered himself unworthy. He prayed to God to forgive his slothfulness and selfishness.  He feared that if he became too self conscious, it would cut him off from God and then he would be truly mad. He even gave Mrs Thrale a padlock to chain him up with if he went mad.  

In his dictionary, Dr Johnson defines mad as ‘disordered in the mind, broken in the understanding, overrun with any unreasonable or violent desire’.  But over the years, madness acquired social connotations. People are considered mad if they don’t fit in with the accepted conventions of society.  As Boswell wrote, madness discloses itself by deviation from the ways of the world. The Soviets incarcerated writers, who dared to criticise the system in state asylums

From a social perspective, Johnson might well be considered mad.  He just didn’t fit in.  he didn’t dress or behave like others in the intellectual society he might have belonged to. He was strange, bigoted and politically incorrect.  Johnson didn’t just behave like other people; he didn’t think like them either.  People came from far and wide to listen to his unconventional take on life.  It is the same now.  Those who express their ideas freely and with confidence are given an audience.  We celebrate their ‘madness’.  We might think of Grayson Perry or Alan Bennett or even Stephen Hawking.  Johnson was  regarded as a national treasure in his day.  His oddness was recognised to be the mainspring of his creativity.

Compiling his dictionary provided a whimsical outlet for his idiosyncrasies and probably  kept him sane.  Under the entry Oats, is written, ‘a cereal which in England is generally given to horses but in Scotland supports the people’.  Horse is defined as ‘a quadruped that neighs.’   The definition of a Lexicographer is – ‘a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge!’  Surely not! 

Johnson has a touch of the Edward Lear about him, but he was no dangerous lunatic.  He wasn’t disordered in the mind or broken in understanding.  On the contrary, it was his mind, his struggles to discover the meaning of things that made him one the sanest people of the age.   

An unshakeable faith in the existence of a man who was born of a virgin and sprang to life again after he had been murder could be regarded as a severe psychotic delusion, but for the society in which Dr Johnson lived, not to believe in that would have marked him out as mad.  Perhaps Johnson thought too much.  Perhaps he had too many doubts. He genuinely feared he might go to hell for his beliefs, but although the guilt of it all threatened to drive him mad,  his struggles for meaning kept him sane. 

Johnson debates the nature of madness in his allegory, ‘Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia’.  In it, he does not disavow a person’s beliefs as long as those as the meaning of those beliefs can be explored.  Anxiety, guilt, remorse, frustration is how we react to unliveable situations.  They are the drivers of change.  Life exists in the striving after meaning.  If melancholy is your situation, poetry is your deliverance.  Writing the dictionary saved Johnson from the purgatory of his indolent thoughts and slothfulness. Prince Rasselas had to escape the Happy Valley of CBT,  in order to find the real world. 

When patients in a mental home cease to rail against their incarceration and begin to comply, they may seem less mad,  but they have relinquished  their sense of self and the meaning of their suffering.  To get over a crisis, people have to see things differently and that takes courage.  You have to risk madness in the pursuit of meaning. 

Adam Phillips (Going Sane), as ever, goes one stage further.  He writes that madness is a moral obligation.  Too many people are trapped by convention.  They cannot take the risk.  The dangers are too great.  Nevertheless, it is the possibility of change, the frisson, the anticipation, that makes people happy and for that they must risk madness.  It was all too painful for Lear; he did indeed become disordered in the mind to escape from his own intolerable reality.   But when change is impossible, people can only manage.  Freud did not claim to bring happiness into people’s lives; just to help them change misery into everyday unhappiness.  

Towards the end of his life, Johnson couldn’t see and he couldn’t afford candles.  He gave way to the madness that he’d struggled with all his life.  He burnt all his papers, diaries everything; he fed the fires of hell so they would consume his guilt.  Then he stuck a knife into his painfully swollen leg to release the poison.

The Madness of Dr Johnson was the topic of an Inner Circle seminar convened by Dr Anthony Stadlen at Dr Johnson’s house in Gough Square on November 8th 2009.

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I listened but couldn’t identify with Ron’s experience. It felt disloyal to do so. Hadn’t Dad been sent up to Orkney to risk his life protecting the Arctic convoys?  Hadn’t he crashed and nearly died up there?  Did he deserve to have his wife stolen, his family disrupted by one of the sailors he protected?   So I suppressed my curiosity. 

Many years later, I grew to love Northern Finland.   So when I spotted  ‘Running with Reindeer’, that described an exploration of the Kola Peninsula,  the destinations of the Russian convoys, over 10 years in the nineteen nineties, I had to find out more.  

But it was the author, Roger Took, who intrigued me.  Why on earth would a sensitive, rich middle -aged man, an art historian and museum curator, an establishment figure, want to spend so long in  what he described as one of the most unfriendly and inhospitable places on earth? 

But Took was a man obsessed.  In just one month, he learnt to speak Russian well enough to get by and arrived alone in the derelict port and abandoned goods yards of Murmansk with its grim government buildings and decrepit five story apartment blocks.   His stated purpose was to find the remnants of the Saami, the Lappish peoples, still living in the far north of Russia, and to discover how much of their culture still survived.  

But there was more to it than that.  Took went out of his way to court suspicion, discomfort and danger.  There was little that was uplifting in his book.   He trudges across the tundra in freezing rain with inadequate shelter and food, he falls up to chest into bogs, he spends a night in a filthy cabin where he witnesses a drunken homosexual gang rape,  he visits restricted inlets where decommissioned  submarines rot, their reactors disintegrating and turning the sea radioactive, he sees mountains devastated by open cast mines and  he records a landscape blasted and polluted by nickel smelting.   He does finds isolated pockets of Saami, but realises that their traditional way livelihood of reindeer herding, hunting and salmon fishing was ruined collectivisation, their culture corrupted by alcohol and prostitution. 

His is a grim tale with no redemption.   So why wasTook so attracted to this, the most devastated and corrupt aspects of civilisation that he returned again and again.  That question bothered me increasingly as I persevered with the turgid academic prose of his punishing narrative.  What was it about this guy?  There was an unrelenting darkness about him.  But why?  I had to consult Google.  

I was shocked to discover that Roger Took is in prison.  There is a long article, written for The Spectator in 2008 by Carol Metcalfe.   He had bragged in his blog about being part of a group of men, who raped and murdered a 5 year old girl in Cambodia.  Although Took dismissed this as fantasy, there were scores of incriminating images on his computer and he had been paying his step grand-daughter to have sex with him.  Wikipedia lists difficulties in his marriage, another woman he could not forget, sexual frustration and a fragile, sensitive personality.  Any review of his book, which was nominated for an international prize for travel writing, has been removed.           

 So were Took’s expeditions deliberately punitive or just an escape from the perversity of his privileged lifestyle?   Was his book an attempt to purge himself of some dreadful shame? 

What made Took a paedophile?  Did an unduly close and controlling relationship with his mother make committed  mature relationships with women seem too threatening.   Did the difficulties he had in his two marriages instigate the need for the kind of controlling sexual relationships, he could procure only  with emotionally needy and vulnerable children?  Did his celebrity and privilege create a sense of entitlement; the feeling that he could indulge his perversions?  

His book fails to provide any answers to these questions, but the final chapter does allude to encounters with teenage prostitutes in Murmansk in 1998.  Ron had also mentioned picking up Russian women in Murmansk; the Winston Churchill House of Friendships catered for the needs of foreigners,  but few sailors ever realised the terrible price the women would pay for friendship.

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The Scream, Edvard Munch’s most dramatic and important work, is a potent symbol of terror, but terror of what; an existential loneliness?  – the death of God? – the meaninglessness  of materialism?   Whatever, Munch projects this unbearable dread and isolation into this painting. 

But artists always project their innermost feelings into their work.  All creative people do.  So why was Munch so anguished?   Was it the death of his mother from TB, the combination of love and fear he felt for his father, the death of his older sister from the same dread disease, his own brush with death, or his feelings of guilt and devastation from two failed love affairs?   That’s enough trauma for anybody, particularly one as sensitive as Edvard Munch.  Love and death dominate his work,  but representations of love were never joyous; they were always linked in his art with threat and death.  And it was his experience of home and family that provided the inspiration for his creative expression.     

As he wrote, ‘When I cast off on the voyage of my life, I felt like a ship made of old, rotten material sent out into a stormy sea by its maker with the words.  If you are wrecked, it’s your own fault and you will be burnt in the eternal fires of hell.’  Not the most inspiring message to set sail on.     

Edvard Munch came from the bourgeois suburb of Christiania, just outside Oslo, a society redolent of protestant hypocrisy.  The state controlled brothels were regularly inspected to ensure that their upright clients did not take VD back to their protestant wives.   But the Munches were more bohemian;  middle- class priests, scholars, artists and poets with elements of genius and  degeneration.   His father  was an impoverished army doctor.  His wife, Laura, was one of his patients and  half his age, but she shared the same deep religious convictions.  They had five children in seven years but it exhausted Laura.  She died of TB when Edvard was just 5.  Karen, Laura’s sister, brought a breath of fresh air into the family home.  It was she who encouraged Edvard to draw.  By the age of 12, he was spending many hours a day drawing.  But Edvard’s father was not consoled by Karen; he sank into his own introspections and used to frighten the children with stories of Edgar Allen Poe and warnings that their mother was watching them.  Edvard suffered from nightmares and nearly died of TB when he was 13, and the following year his elder sister, Johanna died. 

But Edvard found solace in drawing and painting and confidence in his success.  At 22 he exhibited his work at the World Fair in Antwerp and was embarking on an affair with a married woman.  ‘Young and inexperienced from a monastery like home, knowing nothing of this mystery, I met a salon lady and stood before the mystery of women.’   No doubt this ‘education’ informed  his depictions of women as  vampires, creatures that would seduce, tempt and destroy men.  ‘Behind the prettiness lies death; the medusa’s head.’   Whereas Ibsen was writing about the entrapment of women by marriage, Munch saw men as the victims.   

In 1889 he went to Paris, where he came into contact with the Impressionists, but it was Van Gogh’s suicide that probably had the greatest impact on him.  The  shock opened up a space in Edvard’s painting.  He came to believe that painting should not just be about representation, it should express those feelings, emotions, states that you couldn’t see.

‘People will understand  what is sacred in them and will take off their hats as if in church  I shall paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love’. 

In 1892, Munch was invited to exhibit his paintings in Berlin, but his exhibition upset the sensibilities of the narrative, romantic style of German art.  Munch painted it as it was.  His Frieze of Life, depicted the trajectory of a love affair through the kiss, love, pain, jealousy, betrayal and despair.    Painting for Munch did not express one moment, but could, like a poem or a novel, illustrate an unfolding narrative.   The exhibition was withdrawn after a week.  This pleased the entrepreneur in Munch immensely as he realised that the negative publicity would do him nothing but good. 

But appeals to his darker needs were never far away.  His relationship with Tulla Larson, the 30 year old unmarried daughter of a rich wine merchant  was one from which neither would ever recover.  He was shocked and frightened by the strength of Tulla’s passion.  He expressed his regret that this on-off affair has robbed him of 3 years of creative life and the use of his left hand, which was wounded when his pistol was accidentally discharged  during their final argument.  Bereft and traumatised, he threw himself into excesses of work, drink and gambling.  He became ill, paranoid, developed hallucinations and in 1908 broke down and was admitted to Dr Jacobsen’s clinic.  In time, he recovered and carried on working until his death in 1944, though some said that the life, the intensity had gone out of his work.                      

Before I knew anything about Munch, I was using his images to illustrate my talks on the bodily expression of human emotion.  His  expressive paintings  capture the anguish of emotion more clearly than any other artist I know.  He was a man on a mission, a mission to discover meaning through the depiction of love, fear,melancholia and death.  He believed that you had to spill your guts for art.  So Munch made art from his life, his depressed sick childhood, the deaths of his mother and sister, his morbidly introspective father, his tortured romances.  He marketed the flaws in his personality for people to recognise and identify with.  He offended people, of course.   Even Adolf Hitler regarded his work as degenerate art.  With such enemies, however, he had no need of friends.  His legacy was assured. His emotionally charged landscapes had launched the German expressionist movement while his ability to get under the skin to the raw bleeding core of his subjects inspired such contemporary masters as Frances Bacon and Lucian Freud.      

Schopenhauer once wrote,  ‘The limit of the power of art is its inability to reproduce a scream.’  Perhaps Munch wished to show him his error.

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Vincent was the eldest of a large close knit family.  His father was a preacher and for a time Vincent tried to find an outlet for his zeal in religion, as a minister in a poor coal mining region of Belgium, but his attempts to get close to his parishioners by living like them shocked his elders and they refused to support him.  He worked in his uncle’s firm of art dealers, but his intensity put people off.   He was a rebel.  He had strong inflexible views about religion and argued constantly with his father.  His passionate nature, his need for love, could lead him to form intense attachments, like the one to his widowed cousin, but he was all too often rebuffed.  

After his father died, his sister, Wilhelmina, told Vincent to leave home because his eccentric behaviour was causing comment in the village and upsetting his mother.   Vincent would have felt this rejection keenly, but the fact of the matter was he was too much, too much for other people and too much for himself.   

His brother Theo persuaded Vincent to go to Paris to meet other artists and learn from them and continued to support him both emotionally and financially.  His work in Holland had been poetic, dark and melancholic.  His move to Paris led to a thawing of his palette.  He visited all the greats; Pissarro, Gauguin, Manet, Seurat and absorbed everything they had to teach him while developing his own unique style using a combination of vibrant brushwork, delicate draughtsmanship, an emotionally charged palette and everyday motifs.  He worked tirelessly at his craft, single minded, focussed and remarkably lucid, constantly improving refining in his quest to capture the essence, the source of meaning.  

What Vincent was struggling with was the dilemma of the creative artist.  While he needed to have the creative space to develop his own unique expression,  that expression, his identity, could only be validated  through his art.  It was a paradox; he had to be alone to belong, his obsessional  intensity fended people off though he desperately needed their love.   He wanted more than anything else to be accepted and he never stopped working.  His entire oeuvre was accomplished in a brief 10 year period between 1880 and 1890.  He was entirely self taught,  using a frame he had read about in a book to master perspective.  He learn to master expression, character.  It was as if he needed to get beneath their skin, to really connect.   His most fervent wish was to mean something to the people around him, to make a useful contribution.  ‘Man is only here to accomplish things’, but his work was little appreciated during his lifetime . 

Work had always been a lifesaver  for Vincent, his reason for living, his entire meaning in life.  Nothing else mattered.  So what went wrong?   Why did he cut off his own ear?  Why did he shoot himself?   As ever, it was a combination of events.  Theo’s plans to get married may have prompted him to move down south and get his own place.  Arles was different, strange, and had an intensity of light a vividness of colour that seemed to resonate with something inside Vincent.  Things were more extreme there, more dangerous, and he was lonely.   And then there was Gauguin’s visit.  Vincent had loaded so much meaning on this visit.  They would be brother artists, paint together, start a colony of artists in the south.   But Paul Gauguin was more self sufficient that Vincent, more of a loner.  He was sociable enough but he distrusted intimacy and would have found Vincent’s needs intrusive.  He became irritated.  Vincent was too whinging.  They argued.   Vincent lost his temper and threw a glass at him.  Gauguin decided to leave.  In desperation, Vincent cut off his ear.   If that was intended as a gesture to make him stay, it backfired.  He was left alone and desperate, and admitted himself to an asylum.  He recovered for a while.  His paints allowed him to focus his thoughts on something outside his own morbid preoccupations, but eventually it all got too much for him.  He began painting images of death.  His work was not selling.  Nobody cared.  It was hopeless.  And one sunny morning in the corn field, he shot himself. 

Vincent Van Gogh wasn’t born an artistic genius, he made himself one though the most intense focus and dedication.  What created the brand Van Gogh;  self belief, courage, imagination, perseverance, and faith could so easily be transformed into the single minded obsession, the  fanaticism, the lack of compromise and the escape from reality that could slip into a darker palette without human comfort or hope.  He needed the unflinching of Theo, faith is the meaning of his own art and the approval of artists he admired.   His genius need to be held, to be contained.   Like specialist plants and animals, he was all too sensitive and vulnerable to changes in his social environment.  Without Theo, he could not survive.  A year later, Theo died too.    

The real Van Gogh; the artist and his letters, is currently exhibited at the Royal Academy until April 18th.  Don’t miss it! 

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‘Every Good Boy Deserves Favour’ was written at around the same time.  It was Andre Previn’s suggestion that Stoppard write a play for orchestra while he write the score.  Stoppard originally thought of building it around a triangle player who imagined he owned an orchestra.  But Russian dissidents were being imprisoned in mental institutions, so conceived the idea of having two men imprisoned in a mental institution, one, the triangle player, who was really mad and the other, just politically insane.  Madness is always a cultural diagnosis.  If it weren’t, all devout Christians would be considered mad. 

The orchestra becomes a theatrical device, not to say, gimick.  It not only expresses the emotion, but when the musicians are abused and their instruments smashed, it shockingly depicts the state sanctioned assault on feeling and truth; the madness in the system.    Alexander Ivanov is an embarrassment.  He refuses to retract his criticism or to admit that his treatment has worked.  He refuses to save himself, even when his son pleads with him to do so.

Human behaviour is predominantly driven by emotion.  Civilisation and its institutions; medicine, the law, government, protect us against uncontained emotional reactions by setting rules and customs for behaviour.  But what happens when those rules break down into anarchy and when those responsible for maintaining the rules ignore them or commit atrocities themselves?.  Then people become conditioned to corruption and brutality; they cease to notice any more. Terrorism and war can do dreadful things to men.  Remember the SS, Smersh and the guards at Abu Graib and Guantanamo Bay as well as terrorists anywhere.  They become brutalized.  The veneer of civilization is scraped off leaving the rust of repression, the erosion of fear.    

My companion at breakfast was from Johannesburg.  I asked her how she survived the constant threat of attack.  ‘You get used to it,’ she said. ‘Very few muggers or thieves get prosecuted.  Many of the police were freedom fighters and they just turn a blind eye when it comes to arresting ‘their own.’   

But strangely, Stoppard’s play failed to shock me – perhaps because the theme seemed too familiar or perhaps because I’ve become too cynical.  I am less easy to shock these days.  .   

Every Good Boy Deserves Favour is currently playing at The Olivier Theatre with the South Bank Symphony Orchestra. 

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When they met, they recognized each other immediately.  They perceived the same zest for life, the same desire for the unconventional.  They were different, special, they had found the one they had been waiting for all of their lives.  As long as they had each other, anything was possible. Then children, his job, the nice suburban house on Revolutionary Road closed the door on their enchanted future. There was nothing to look forward to.  Their parents’ past had caught up with them. 

So when April suggested they just give it all up and take off to Paris, it rekindled the passion of their relationship.  But Frank gets offered a promotion.  ‘Such opportunities only occur once or twice in life, you’ve got to grab them by the balls.’, his boss tells him.  How ironic.  April finds out she is pregnant.  Only John, their neighbour’s son who is ill with depressive psychosis, has the clarity of thought to hold up a mirror to themselves. And so, they fail to achieve escape velocity and fall to earth in mutual destruction.  She gives herself an abortion and bleeds to death.  He is devastated and the meaning of his life ends as well.   

Frank and April could not come to terms with the mundane reality of life.  Without anything to look forward to, there was no point.  They had great expectations and now they have great disappointment and that is intolerable. That’s all there is. They realized that the good stuff is just a dream and is unattainable. The only satisfaction was  in themselves, but they were empty and could only look to external excitement to fill them up  Even sex couldn’t rescue them anymore.  They tried other partners but they didn’t arouse them.  They became locked into a meaninglessness, a hopelessness, an existential depression, a living death.  And so the only way out was to kill the thing they had produced and in so doing kill themselves.

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Charlie met Agnes again after his mother’s funeral.  She was kind to him.  They made love, but by that time Agnes was married and he was getting involved with Nora,  a disturbed younger woman who suffered from traumatic nightmares.  Nora was also having an affair with his artist brother, Walt, though Charlie didn’t realize it at the time.  As Charlie’s mind begins to unravel under the stress of his situation, he moves to work in an isolated mental home in the Catskills.  But the town where he got an apartment, was also the scene of his own trauma, which was rekindled when Walt and their father, Fred, come to visit him.  Years ago when he and Walt were very young, Charlie witnessed a fight between his parents in their hotel bedroom just down the street. In his recurrent nightmare, it was Fred who was holding the gun to his head, but Walt explains it was it his mother; she had squeezed the trigger but it didn’t fire. ‘This is what you get when you come into a room without knocking.’ It’s then that he goes mad.  

Trauma is Patrick McGrath’s latest novel.  It lacks the power of Asylum, Spider and Dr Haggard’s Illness, but like them explores the meaning and method of madness, making it frighteningly accessible and storing  up the tension until the final denouement.  Only then can you see the patterns of his trauma, the ghosts of what has happened in the events that befall him and the choices he makes; his everyday life. 

The sight of Dannys exploded head, the blood and brains that splattered the wall, that reminded him of what nearly happened to him led to him leaving Agnes. It was his intrusiveness that led him to enter his parents bedroom and become a psychiatrist. It was his need to put things right that made him care for his mother in the confusion of her old age. But she hated him for it. Shame is so often a cause of hatred, as McGrath explains.  Charlie’s shame over Danny’s suicide made him leave Agnes. He looks after Nora; indeed he is attracted to her because she is so disturbed like his mother. But there are echoes of his early relationship with Walt in this. Walt always let Charlie take responsibility for dealing with their parents. And so although he was having an affair with Nora, Walt couldn’t handle her neuroticism and so encouraged the relationship with his brother. 

Trauma generates ghosts, thoughts that we cannot get rid of, memories that that continue to haunt our lives, influencing our actions and behaviour, determining the choices we make.  For the most part, what happens to us is not a matter of luck or fate, it is conditioned by the events and situations that have made us who we are. And so a traumatic situation that occurred many years ago can continue to reverberate in every choice we make, especially those intuitive choices that do not require analysis. In that way we re-experience the things that matter most to us over and over again, in the hope of resolution or at least the achievement of an understanding that will help remove the stain of shame.   

Charlie had protected himself from his trauma by dedicating his life to care and understanding, to trying to make it better. But the dreadful realization that his efforts might have actually made things worse led him to escape into madness. So what hope is there for recovery?  Medications can only dull an intolerable reality.  Psychotherapy may provide a safe space where his stuff can be experienced through the agency of the therapist, but the therapist and the therapeutic situation has to provide a suitable object or space for projection and transference.  No, perhaps his salvation is only possible through the redemptive power of love. Agnes husband has died.  Charlie is devoted to his daughter, Cassie.  Perhaps their love can restore the stability to exorcise the ghosts and heal his troubled mind.

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Psychoanalysis was (and still is) very incestuous.  There were not many psychoanalysts and most of these lived and practiced in NW5, near Maresfield Gardens where Freud lived and worked.  They still do. They were all in supervision or analysis with each other.  They reinforced the ideas of their ideological leader, but at the same time were intensely jealous of each other.  Given the Jewish origins of psychoanalysis, it is surprising to encounter how much psychoanalysts cling defensively to ideological dogma, despite evidence that it may damage some people and how suspicious, dismissive and paranoid, they can be to those who do not share the beliefs.

Although Mrs Klein was not as profilic, wide ranging or eloquent as Professeur Docteur Sigmund  Freud, her work has been very influential.  She was the first to appreciate that the child, even a child as young as two or three, inhabits a symbolic world of meanings, phantasies (her spelling)  and needs the agency of the ‘mother’ to understand and work through it.   In particular, Klein postulates, young children find it difficult to reconcile  contradictory elements in their mothers’ behaviour.  They split them apart.  There is the loving mother and the disapproving mother; the good breast and the bad breast.  She called this the paranoid – schizoid position.  We all know it well. The suspicious and defensive, remain locked into all their lives and the media encourage such splitting;  the government is either good or bad, wrong or right.  Most of us return to such polarized attitudes at times of stress.  Anger, envy, resentment, grievance, condemnation and lack of compromise are, if not everyday, at least frequent examples of this. 

The project of Kleinian analysis might be said to be the reconciliation of the polarities of human behaviour to achieve what she called the depressive position.  This doesn’t sound much fun and it’s not, but the concept is crucially important.  It is only by healing the split, that we gain understanding, empathy, concern, forgiveness and reconciliation.  We learn to accommodate and integrate our own behaviour and that of others.  We find ways of working with other people. But we have to experience the depressive position time and time again.  Every time we experience a loss, we have a choice, either withdraw and cut off or find a way through.  It’s a state of mourning.  Klein would say that we mourn the loss of the idealized ‘mother’ and discover the reality.  ‘Is that all there is?’  

But working through The Depressive Position,  leads to personal growth.  Loss is often associated with change and a burst of creativity. 

Klein drew on her own family extensively for her ideas; her archetypical Jewish mother, her unhappy marriage and her children.  The children were her first analysands. Melitta, her daughter, has 370 hours of analysis with her mother before the age of 9.  The idea seems repellant.  It is a wonder she survived it.      

Nicholas Wright’s powerful and disturbing play is about mothers and daughters.  It is 1933. Mrs Klein, powerfully depicted by Clare Higgins, has just learnt of her son’s death in a climbing accident.  Paula, a refugee analyst, fleeing from Germany, has offered to be her secretary.  Melitta (little Melanie) her daughter, also an analyst, arrives with a letter that she has written, informing her mother that Hans has committed suicide, but this is the latest and most powerful act of vengeance on the hated mother. . 

Melanie found Melitta interesting as a child, but could not show her the love she needed.  It seems that she suffered post natal depression after the birth of her daughter and went away for an extended period leaving Melitta to be brought up by her baba (her grandmother).  And when her mother returned, she didn’t so much love and care for her daughter; she analysed her. Klein inaugurated the British School of ‘object relations’  The chilling aspect of the play is the realisation that Melitta is an object, an object of interest and curiosity. There is interpretation but no human warmth.  

As she later complained, Melitta had no life of her own.  Her mother has appropriated it; her marriage, her career, everything.  Wright’s play shows her locked into an unresolved rebellion with her herself, caught between the mother she idealises and the mother whom she hates.  She cannot reach the depressive position.  She has to attack the mother she hates while craving the affection of the one she loves.  The letter about Hans suicide is a murderous attempt to rid herself of the mother who dominates her life.  Melanie, for her part, is also split, she wants her daughters love, but hates her betrayal.  In the  transference, Melitta assumes the symbolic impact of her baba, her mothers mother.  As the situation builds to a crisis,  provoked by the disclosure that Melitta has gone into analysis with a competitor, consorted with the enemy as it were, Mrs Klein throws a glass of wine at her and rubs the torn up letter in the waste paper bin in her hair. As Paula notes, she makes a symbolic attempt to drown her daughter in urine and rubs faeces in her hair.  The awful irony is that we can only understand this because of the writings of the mother.  There was no father to rescue either of them, to find the third position, to make sense and space off the pernicious diad, to lead them out of the claustrophobic forest onto the savannah.     

And what of Paula?  She plays the role of the good daughter with Melitta locked out of the house as the bad daughter. She selects Melanie as the idealized mother, she never had.  The play ends with Paula in her first session of analysis with Melanie, which cannot be interrupted while Melitta rings the door bell.             

So should we think any less of Melanie Klein because of the way she damaged her daughter?. Theory is all very well but a child still needs to know she is loved. And doesn’t the analysand, the symbolic daughter, also need containment and support to gain the confidence to grow.  Surely to withhold that can lead a fragile person into a unhealthy state of dependence.

Or should we think more of Mrs Klein because she had worked through her own  depressive position and offered her insights so that the rest of us might understand? 

Or should we just accept and make a balanced appraisal? Understanding  doesn’t mean we have to follow the teacher.  That must be a reconciliation of our depressive position.    

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