Dancing with Ophelia

Reconnecting Madness, Creativity, and Love

Jeanne Ellen Petrolle

• Publisher: Excelsior Editions
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781438468808
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

"Twenty-two years ago, I lost my mind." So begins Jeanne Ellen Petrolle's fascinating personal narrative about her mental illness and recovery. Drawing on literature, art, and philosophy, Petrolle explores a unique understanding of madness that allowed her to achieve lasting mental health without using long-term psychiatric drugs. Traditionally, Western literature, art, and philosophy have portrayed madness through six concepts created from myth—Escape into the Wild, Flight from a Scene of Terror, Visit to the Underworld, Dark Night of the Soul, Spiritual Passion, and Fire in the Mind. Rather than conceptualizing madness as "illness, " a mythopoetic concept assumes that madness contains symbolic meaning and offers valuable insight into human concerns like love, desire, sex, adventure, work, fate, spirituality, and God. Madness becomes an experience that unleashes extraordinary creativity by generating the spiritual insight that fuels artistic productivity and personal transformation. By weaving her personal experiences with the life stories and work of surrealist painter Leonora Carrington and modernist novelist Djuna Barnes, Petrolle shows how poetic thinking about severe mental distress can complement strategies for managing mental illness. This approach allowed her, and hopefully others, to produce better long-term treatment outcomes.

CHAPTER ONE

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

Twenty-two years ago, I lost my mind. Although I would not recommend it as a lifestyle, insanity is something I wish everyone could experience once. Now I understand why madness has fascinated artists and philosophers across millennia, and why the Surrealists, who strove to live life as poetry, considered madness the ultimate adventure in selfhood. For me, as for many others, the suspension of reason and judgment, before becoming dangerous, cast enchantments across perception, remaking the ordinary into the wonderful. As the mind loosens its grip on reality, daily life acquires the strange beauty of dream, fairytale, and myth—a world filled with marvelous characters, landscapes, and events. Exquisite. Astonishing. Occasionally frightening. When I went to see The Walls, a play about madness developed from psychotic women’s journals, I identified with a central character, who says about her hallucinations, “there are times when you just can’t imagine the impossible beauty of it.”1 Although my experience of madness did not include hallucinations, it did include a condition for which the clinical term is hyperacusis—a state of heightened perception in which hearing becomes more acute, sight more vivid, and the faculties of taste, smell, and touch wildly responsive. Beauty strikes the senses in a deluge of glory. And terror can spring out of the most ordinary daily activities. Insanity initiates the mind into depths of beauty—and depths of terror—unimaginable to the sane. This aspect of madness deserves more airtime.

We live in an age of faith in science and medicine. So we take a biomedical approach to madness. We call madness mental illness, placing it firmly in the category of sickness, focusing single-mindedly on its negative effects, which we try to eradicate with drugs. In our fascination with the chemistry of madness, we tend to ignore the poetics of madness—the connection of madness to beauty, truth, creativity, spirituality, and the sublime. In the three millennia of literature and philosophy that preceded psychiatry, madness was associated with all these things. Whenever poetry, creativity, love, and madness are mentioned in the same sentence, it raises the question of whether there is danger in romanticizing madness. There is. There is also a danger in de-romanticizing madness. Madness is dangerous, romanticized or otherwise. Experiencing madness is dangerous, and receiving treatment for madness is dangerous. There is no way to make madness or its treatment completely safe.

Romanticizing madness too much can result in a failure to provide medical care and personal safety for persons suffering madness. De-romanticizing madness too much can lead to oversimplification—reducing the experience to a chemical reaction that we try to subject to chemical control while ignoring its social, spiritual, and aesthetic dimensions. This oversimplification can result in a failure to perceive value in the experience, or to make the experience meaningful. When we are unable to find value and meaning in our most difficult experiences, we cannot integrate them into a process of personal development that leads to positive long-term outcomes such as suitable work, rewarding relationships, emotional stability, spiritual vitality, and a sense of belonging to the human community.

I use the term “madness” rather than “mental illness” not to insult anyone and not to be deliberately unfashionable or unscientific, but to restore the millennia-old associations between madness and various forms of intellectual and spiritual power. Shakespeare, whose plays frequently portray madness, wrote in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact.”2 Shakespeare’s line connects madness with love and creativity—this is the connection at the heart of a poetic understanding of madness. A poetic approach assumes that madness, like literature and dreaming, contains meaning and offers insight into such central human concerns as love, desire, sex, adventure, work, fate, spirituality, and God. Madness—defined as any atypical mental state severe enough to cause social difficulty—has a history in literature long before Shakespeare. Faced with the task of recovering from what looked like a manic episode, I balanced my use of the biomedical tools available to me with a poetic understanding of madness drawn from the long history of madness in literature, art, philosophy, and religious writing.

As I emerged from my mental health crisis, a psychiatrist offered me the label “bipolar,” along with dire predictions about my future. Without lifelong medication, he explained, I would suffer more episodes and hospitalizations, becoming chronically unstable and professionally unproductive. But that is not what happened when, against medical advice, but under medical supervision, I ended my use of medication after six months and began a process of religious reflection, psychotherapy, and behavioral change, guided by insights drawn from literature. Instead of becoming a career psychiatric patient, I completed a PhD, obtained a tenure-track job, traveled to Europe and Africa, published two books, earned tenure, married, gave birth to a son, bought and sold real estate, produced a film, learned a martial art, and, eventually, sought treatment for anxiety and substance abuse, two hallmarks of post-traumatic stress. These two psychological distress symptoms, which had dogged me since adolescence, had long prevented me from fully realizing my creative potential. Undertaking trauma recovery eventually resolved those symptoms and transformed my life, propelling me toward ever-increasing levels of productivity and contentment. During the two decades after my breakdown, I experienced two milder mental health challenges, both of which I managed with short-term medication, behavioral change, and talk therapy. With the exception of about a week—the same amount of time a flu keeps me down—I didn’t miss work or become unable to meet domestic, parental, and financial responsibilities. I don’t believe I would have recovered so fully and gone on to build a successful life had I not balanced biomedical technologies with poetic understanding.

I also don’t believe I would have recovered so completely and achieved my present level of health had I used long-term drugs. While there are certainly people whose wellness depends on lifelong drugs, there are others who can enjoy mental health without them. This second group, if they are more compliant patients than me, risk becoming victims of psychiatric overkill. Psychiatric drugs have side-effects ranging in severity from dental caries and excess weight to obesity, sexual dysfunction, neurological damage, and death. They should be used only when necessary. My experience with overprescription illustrates a problem with late twentieth- and twenty-first-century psychiatry. Treatment protocols have become so uniform, drug-based, and aggressive that even people who are capable of recovering from breakdown and leading productive lives without long-term drug use are being urged to make illness a permanent part of their identity and to adopt lifelong, nonstop use of medications with serious side-effects. Prescribing long-term medication for people whose disturbances can be resolved with short-term medication and behavioral change is defensive medicine at its worst.

Becoming Ophelia

In literature and art, madwomen are often pictured with streaming tangles of hair wandering through natural landscapes filled with flowers. In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the young woman Ophelia, driven mad by love and grief, wanders the countryside making garlands of flowers and singing. Decked with her flower-garlands and still singing, she falls into a brook overhung by willows, where she lets herself drown. John Everett Millais’s painting Ophelia pictures the heroine floating downstream in a floral landscape, her golden gown and brown hair billowing in the water, amidst violet, buttercup, poppy, pansy, meadowsweet, and purple loosestrife. Jean-Martin Charcot, a nineteenth-century theorist of madness—then called “hysteria”—imagined his female patients as real-life Ophelias.3 Charcot photographed his female patients so frequently that he built a photography studio at the hospital where he worked and hired a professional photographer.4 Charcot’s favorite photographic subject was his patient Augustine, whom he and his colleagues liked to photograph with long, wild hair falling across a bare shoulder, neck, or partially exposed breast—visual effects accomplished with a strategically loose-fitting hospital gown.5 Fifteen-year-old Augustine, who had been raped by her employer, cooperated enthusiastically, posing for her doctor’s camera in attitudes drawn from French silent film and pre-Raphaelite paintings of Ophelia.6 The madwoman, as an image, or archetype, often embodies a girlish innocence, with hints of an unknowing sexuality and blind, mindless trust.

In the moment my mind broke with reality, my arms were filled with roses. Roses, irises, lilies, peonies, and lilacs, feathered with ferns. They had been given to me by Mark Sandman, the hypnotic, crooning front man for Morphine, a minor indie-rock sensation of the early nineties. After creating a clinical-strength romantic fantasy about Sandman out of photographs and music, I met and reveled with him on the three consecutive nights of the band’s 1995 engagement in Chicago—a series of events that inflamed my romantic obsession beyond reason and triggered ever-further departures from reality. On the third night of my revelry with Sandman and the other members of Morphine, I wore a blue dress so long it brushed the ground. Wild brown curls streamed over my shoulders and down my back, mingling with the flowers Sandman had given me after the last of his three shows in Chicago. The armful of blossoms practically buried my small body. Their fragrance transformed my taxi ride home into a mobile Garden of Eden. A friend sat beside me in the taxi. She was speaking, but I had ceased to be there. I could hear and understand her words, but she seemed far away, as if she lived in a parallel world that I could perceive but to which I did not belong. My mind had wandered into a paradise of its own design. Gazing out the window into the starry sky, intoxicated by flowers and fantasy, I lost myself to ecstasy. I could simulate normal behavior, so it appeared to my friend that I was there. In truth, my body was there, but my mind had spun off into bliss. I fancied myself in love with a rock star who had filled my arms with flowers.

At the height of my disturbance, I found myself wandering through neck-high Kentucky blue grass in a daisy-print sundress, captivated by buttercups and burying belongings in the forest. Having seen my rock star one last time, and imagining myself spurned in love, I had decided never to go home. I left my car at a truck stop and began hitchhiking south, feeling I could shrug off my old life like a sweater, disappear, and start a new life somewhere else. Somewhere warmer. Somewhere south. Maybe Mexico. Frightened by the riveted attention of the two men who gave me rides, I quit hitchhiking. In a moment of serious danger, I bolted into the woods and continued on foot. Wishing to abolish all traces of my identity, I destroyed my credit cards, flushed my identification, and began using a new name. Concerned that my shoes might give away my true identity, I left them by a river and walked on, barefoot. Eventually, confused and out of cash, I started wandering around a small Kentucky city in a fugue, struck into ecstasies by early-blooming roses. I wandered into a private garden, drawn by the largest, most fragrant roses I had ever beheld. Thirsty, I helped myself to water from the garden hose. Tired, I wandered into the house in search of a sofa. The terrified homeowner, upon seeing me, escorted me promptly back outside and called the police. I sat on the porch, enjoying the fragrance of the flowers and petting the cat. The police arrived and, to their credit, drove me to a hospital, where I checked myself in.

Clinically speaking, my bizarre thinking, impulsive behavior, euphoria, and confusion—all fueled by sleeplessness and consumption of marijuana, caffeine, and nicotine—could rightly be called a “manic episode.” Despite the fact that I had never (and would never) experience clinical depression, a psychiatrist suggested the label “bipolar disorder” for what ailed me. That was a reasonable enough twentieth-century name for my condition. In an earlier time, it might have been called “hysteria complicated by ecstasy.”7 In an even earlier time, it might have been called “love madness.”8 If we were to depart altogether from medical description and draw for understanding from the world of myth, poetry, and Jungian psychology, we could say that I had brought to life an archetype—the madwoman—that has for millennia been an expression of feminine frustration and despair. I had turned myself, spontaneously, into an Ophelia.

Before I became Ophelia, I had become an English professor. I had not yet earned my PhD, but I had my master’s degree and was teaching literature and writing at DePaul University in Chicago. My symptoms began when a student in one of my classes turned in an essay describing the molestation she had experienced as a child. I became unaccountably anxious while helping her develop the essay, which was so strong she later published it in a newsletter for an organization that serves abuse survivors. My student, whom I’ll call Ruth, was fifteen years older than me. She had returned to college after having been a wife. When her financier husband ran off with his secretary, Ruth decided to earn a degree in psychology in order to become a therapist specializing in treatment of abuse survivors, who often suffer psychological after-effects. (And who frequently marry unreliable or abusive partners.) Ruth told the story of growing up in India, where the family cook had repeatedly molested her. For reasons I could not understand at the time, my anxiety intensified throughout that semester.

I was moved by Ruth’s life story and maintained our acquaintance after the course ended, listening to Ruth work through the pain of her divorce and supporting her as she undertook her new life as a college student in her forties. At some point, as a result of reading Ruth’s work and listening to her describe her struggle with the after-effects of abuse, it struck me that I myself exhibited almost all the symptoms about which Ruth had written. The more Ruth educated me about abuse survivor symptoms, the more I realized they described certain aspects of my own history. I had begun experimenting with cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana at the tender age of thirteen, stopping at age sixteen only because I contracted pneumonia. I had also suffered intermittently from insomnia, night terrors, panic attacks, difficulty swallowing, binge/starve behavior, body image problems, fear of darkness and home invasion, anxiety, and low self-esteem. I wanted to change my name. Although the symptoms fit, I had no recollection of ever having been molested. I didn’t know how to act on the information and didn’t want to act on the information, not wanting to see myself as an abuse survivor. The idea revolted me. I banished it from my mind, thinking the similarity between Ruth and me was probably imaginary.

At the same time that Ruth’s essay began stirring these questions, two parts of my personal life reached a breaking point. I was involved at the time with a marriage-minded man who wished to build a life and a home with me. While he worked on a PhD, I worked to support our matrimonial and domestic hopes, unhappily underemployed as a bookstore manager, and then happily employed but woefully underpaid as an adjunct faculty member, scrambling every summer to find any work at all. There seemed no relief in sight for the punishing financial stress, which compounded my painful ambivalence about marriage. Even at thirty, I still lacked the emotional maturity and communication skills necessary for navigating conflict in a relationship. Unable to commit, and unable to end the relationship responsibly, I remained paralyzed, awash in guilt and dread. Financial despair compounded this commitment anxiety.

To manage that anxiety, I began smoking marijuana—something I had not done since my teenage years. To combat the mental fog that came with marijuana use, I began drinking excessive amounts of coffee. This combination of drugs enabled me to stay up all night writing, drawing, and developing plans to remedy my dismal career prospects and financial insecurity. During these late nights, I discovered Morphine. The first time I popped in a Morphine CD, the sultry bass lead and melodious voice that slinked out of the speakers mesmerized me, seemingly offering to fulfill the opioid promise of the band’s name. Soon, I couldn’t stop listening. Soon after that, I heard music in my head even without listening. Nonstop Morphine songs took over my inner airwaves.

Obsession works like a tornado gathering speed. I became convinced that the band was a profoundly important cultural phenomenon that warranted scholarly attention. I wrote to their manager and asked to interview the band members for an article when they came to town. I nursed my obsession before the interview, listening to songs and memorizing lyrics. It took my mind off the inklings stirred by Ruth’s story and enabled me to avoid my ambivalence about marriage and the appalling state of my career prospects as an MA in English without a private fortune. My excitement spiked the day Morphine came to town. I interviewed the band members during their sound check at the Metro and enjoyed their hospitality before and after the show. All three days they played the Chicago venue, I went to the shows, visited with the band members, and smoked the potent Brazilian marijuana circulating among the rabble backstage. Instead of slaking my excited curiosity, these experiences fed it. My thoughts started racing. I intoxicated myself with substances and experiences around the clock and, eventually, my mind gave way. I ran away from my life like a wayward child, fleeing home, job, and relationship without a word of explanation or warning to anyone. I saw Morphine one more time but, instead of chasing them to the East Coast, I headed south, dreaming of a new life in Mexico. My mind spun increasingly out of control, leading me to that Kentucky hospital, where I spent three days. After this, I went to my childhood home in Connecticut to recover. Once there, I checked myself into a better hospital. Controlling my sleeplessness, confusion, impulsivity, and strange thinking with prescription drugs, I left the hospital after a week, and then spent a month in the country recuperating from the ordeal.

While I was recovering, I received a visit from a family friend who, after a black sheep adolescence and violent early adulthood, had become a man of faith. In an act of extraordinary courage, digni...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Chapter One Through the Looking Glass
• Chapter Two Where the Wild Things Are
• Chapter Three Escape, Flight, Freedom, and Survival
• Chapter Four Mad Love
• Chapter Five Passions of the Mind
• Chapter Six Traveling in the Underworld
• Chapter Seven Dark Nights of the Soul
• Chapter Eight Burning Alive and Rising from the Dead
• Chapter Nine The Power of the Paradigm
• Chapter Ten Things We Do with Words
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Back Cover