Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl

Reality Lost and Regained

Marguerite Sechehaye, Grace Rubin-Rabson

• Editorial: Muriwai Books
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781789124989
• Categoría: Psychology
• Categoría: History & Theory in Psychology

Marguerite Sechehaye, a Swiss psychotherapist, followed the work of Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget closely, believing there was a link between psychosis and trauma experienced as a child. One of her most notable cases was undertaken with a psychotic patient referred to as "Renée", a pseudonym used for Louisa Düss, whom she and her husband Albert Sechehaye eventually adopted.Over the course of their work together, Dr. Sechehaye took the unique approach of chronicling "Renee's" journal entries and personal reflections in tandem with her own clinical commentary. The approach significantly influenced mental illness research by introducing an antipsychiatry framework that positioned the patient's experiences as a valid means of establishing their case histories.As a result of this work, Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl: Reality Lost and Regained was first published in 1951, highlighting the most memorable aspects of the disease. The book remarkably reveals to the "normal" mind the emotional shadings, perceptions, confusions, and tortures of a mind at the brink of dissolution. It is at once a harrowing experience and a magnificently moving testimonial to the capacity of a human being to survive and triumph.

PART 1: THE STORY

I. Appearance of the First Feelings of Unreality

[This is Renee’s intimate story as she recounted it shortly after her recovery. It begins with her first feelings of unreality when she was five years old.]

I remember very well the day it happened. We were staying in the country and I had gone for a walk alone as I did now and then. Suddenly, as I was passing the school, I heard a German song; the children were having a singing lesson. I stopped to listen, and at that instant a strange feeling came over me, a feeling hard to analyze but akin to something I was to know too well later—a disturbing sense of unreality. It seemed to me that I no longer recognized the school, it had become as large as a barracks; the singing children were prisoners, compelled to sing. It was as though the school and the children’s song were set apart from the rest of the world. At the same time my eye encountered a field of wheat whose limits I could not see. The song of the children imprisoned in the smooth stone school-barracks filled me with such anxiety that I broke into sobs. I ran home to our garden and began to play “to make things seem as they usually were,” that is, to return to reality. It was the first appearance of those elements which were always present in later sensations and unreality: illimitable vastness, brilliant light, and the gloss and smoothness of material things. I have no explanation for what happened, or why. But it was during this same period that I learned my father had a mistress and that he made my mother cry. This revelation bowled me over because I had heard my mother say that if my father left her, she would kill herself.

[In the years that followed until she was about twelve, Renee experienced unreal feelings many times. From then on, the sensations became more and more intense, more and more frequent. She remembers that the most striking of these was related to school, the school she had attended for two years.]

One day we were jumping rope at recess. Two little girls were turning a long rope while two others jumped in from either side to meet and cross over. When it came my turn and I saw my partner jump toward me where we were to meet and cross over, I was seized with panic; I did not recognize her. Though I saw her as she was, still, it was not she. Standing at the other end of the rope, she had seemed smaller, but the nearer we approached each other, the taller she grew, the more she swelled in size.

I cried out, “Stop, Alice, you look like a lion; you frighten me!” At the sound of the fear in my voice which I tried to dissemble under the guise of fooling, the game came to an abrupt halt. The girls looked at me, amazed, and said, “You’re silly—Alice, a lion? You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Then the game began again. Once more my playmate became strangely transformed and, with an excited laugh, once more I cried out, “Stop, Alice, I’m afraid of you; you’re a lion!” But actually, I didn’t see a lion at all: it was only an attempt to describe the enlarging image of my friend and the fact that I didn’t recognize her. Suddenly I saw the resemblance of this phenomenon to my nightmare of “the needle in the hay.”

It was a dream that recurred often, especially when I was feverish, and it caused me the most frightful anguish. Later I always associated my unreal perceptions with the dream of the needle.

Here is the dream: A barn, brilliantly illuminated by electricity. The walls painted white, smooth—smooth and shining. In the immensity, a needle—fine, pointed, hard, glittering in the light. The needle in the emptiness filled me with excruciating terror. Then a haystack fills up the emptiness and engulfs the needle. The haystack, small at first, swells and swells and in the center, the needle, endowed with tremendous electrical force, communicates its charge to the hay. The electrical current,{2} the invasion by the hay, and the blinding light{3} combine to augment the fear to a paroxysm of terror and I wake up screaming, “The needle, the needle!”

What happened during the rope game was the same sort of thing: tension, something growing inordinately, and anxiety.

From then on, the recreation period at school was often a source of the unreal feeling. I kept close to the fence as though I were indeed a prisoner and watched the other pupils shouting and running about in the school yard. They looked to me like ants under a bright light. The school building became immense, smooth, unreal, and an inexpressible anguish pressed in on me. I fancied that the people watching us from the street thought all of us were prisoners just as I was a prisoner and I wanted so much to escape. Sometimes I shook the grating as though there were no other way out, like a madman, I thought, who wanted to return to real life.

For the street seemed alive, gay and real, and the people moving there were living and real people, while all that was within the confines of the yard was limitless, unreal, mechanical and without meaning: it was the nightmare of the needle in the hay.

I caught myself in this state only in the yard, never in class. I suffered from it horribly but I did not know how to get free. Play, conversation, reading—nothing seemed able to break the unreal circle that surrounded me.

These crises, far from abating, seemed rather to increase. One day, while I was in the principal’s office, suddenly the room became enormous, illuminated by a dreadful electric light that cast false shadows. Everything was exact, smooth, artificial, extremely tense; the chairs and tables seemed models placed here and there. Pupils and teachers were puppets revolving without cause, without objective. I recognized nothing, nobody. It was as though reality, attenuated, had slipped away from all these things and these people. Profound dread overwhelmed me, and as though lost, I looked around desperately for help. I heard people talking but I did not grasp the meaning of the words. The voices were metallic, without warmth or color. From time to time, a word detached itself from the rest. It repeated itself over and over in my head, absurd, as though cut off by a knife. And when one of my schoolmates came toward me, I saw her grow larger and larger, like the haystack.

I went to my teacher and said to her, “I am afraid because everyone has a tiny crow’s head on his head.” She smiled gently at me and answered something I don’t remember. But her smile, instead of reassuring me, only increased the anxiety and confusion for I saw her teeth, white and even in the gleam of the light. Remaining all the while like themselves, soon they monopolized my entire vision as if the whole room were nothing but teeth under a remorseless light. Ghastly fear gripped me.

What saved me that day was activity. It was the hour to go to chapel for prayer, and like the other children I had to get in line. To move, to change the scene, to do something definite and customary, helped a great deal. Nevertheless, I took the unreal state to chapel with me, though to a lesser degree. That evening I was completely exhausted.

The remarkable thing was that, when I chanced to return to reality, I thought no more of these terrible moments. I did not forget them, but I did not think of them. And still, they were repeated very frequently, pervading a larger and larger segment of my life.

II. The Struggle Against Unreality Begins

From the point of view of scholarship, my last year at the elementary school was good enough. I took three prizes, two of them firsts. I seemed to have, then, everything necessary for success in the secondary school. Unfortunately, this was not the case, and the cause lay in the “unreality.”

At first I had trouble in adjusting to the schedule and to the new teaching procedure. Then three subjects literally terrified me: singing, drawing, and calisthenics, and I might even add sewing.

It seems that I had a pleasant high soprano voice and the teacher counted on me for solo parts in the chorus. But he noticed pretty soon that I sang off key, singing sharp or flat as much as a whole step or two when I wasn’t watching. Furthermore, I was unable either to learn solfeggio, to beat the measure or to keep the rhythm.

These lessons aroused an immeasurable anxiety quite disproportionate to the cause. It was the same in drawing. I don’t know what happened during the summer vacation, but I seemed to have lost a sense of perspective. So I copied the model from a schoolmate’s sketch, thus lending a false perspective from where I sat.

In the gymnasium I didn’t understand the commands, confusing left and right. As for the sewing lesson, it was impossible to understand the technique of placing patches or the mysteries of knitting a sock heel. Varied as these subjects were, they presented similar problems, so that more and more, despite my efforts, I lost the feeling of practical things.

In these disturbing circumstances I sensed again the atmosphere of unreality. During class, in the quiet of the work period, I heard the street noises—a trolley passing, people talking, a horse neighing, a horn sounding, each detached, immovable, separated from its source, without meaning. Around me, the other children, heads bent over their work, were robots or puppets, moved by an invisible mechanism. On the platform, the teacher, too, talking, gesticulating, rising to write on the blackboard, was a grotesque jack-in-the-box. And always this ghastly quiet, broken by outside sounds coming from far away, the implacable sun heating the room, the lifeless immobility. An awful terror bound me; I wanted to scream.

On the way to school in the morning at seven-thirty, sometimes the same thing happened. Suddenly the street became infinite, white under the brilliant sun; people ran about like ants on an ant-hill; automobiles circled in all directions aimlessly; in the distance a bell pealed. Then everything seemed to stop, to wait, to hold its breath, in a state of extreme tension, the tension of the needle in the haystack. Something seemed about to occur, some extraordinary catastrophe. An overpowering anxiety forced me to stop and wait. Then, without anything having actually changed, again realizing the senseless activity of people and things, I went on my way to school.

Happily for me, I fell ill with pulmonary tuberculosis and had to leave school at once for a mountain sanatorium. There, after a few days of anxiety due to the change, I made a ready adjustment because of the regularity of the life.

The crises of unreality decreased noticeably, to be replaced by states of fervor, of exaltation over nature. I was alone in a small room. To listen to the autumn wind rushing through the woods was my greatest joy. But the shrieking and groaning of the forest treated thus roughly aroused an uneasiness that spoiled the pleasure. I believed the wind blew from the North Pole, traveling over the icy Siberian steppes, moaning and protesting in the forest; it was alive, monstrous, bending everything in its way. Then my room became enormous, disproportionate, the walls smooth and shining, the glaring electric light bathing everything in its blinding brightness. The violence of the wind outside rattling the blinds, the rustling, the strangled sighs of the pine branches bowing under the wind, furnished a striking contrast to the quiet and immobility within. Again the terror mounted to a paroxysm. Desperately I wanted to break the circle of unreality which froze me in the midst of this electric immobility.

When we were not engaged in treatment, I asked a friend to play or to talk to me. But despite the play and the conversation, I could not get back to reality. Everything looked artificial, mechanical, electric. To get rid of it I tried to rouse myself. I laughed, I jumped, I pushed things around, shook them to make them come to life. These were horribly painful moments.

How relieved I was when things remained in their customary framework, when people were alive and normal and especially when I had contact with them!

I came down from the mountain for three months, only to go up again for a full year. It was during this year, the first of January to be exact, that for the first time I felt real fear. I should emphasize that the unreality had grown greater and the wind had taken on a specific meaning. On windy days in bad weather I was horribly upset. At night I could not sleep, listening to the wind, sharing its howls, its complaints and despairing cries, and my soul wept and groaned with it. More and more I imagined the wind bore a message for me to divine. But what? I still did not know.

It was New Year’s when I first experienced what I called Fear. It literally fell on me, how I know not. It was afternoon, the wind was stronger than ever and more mournful. I was in the mood to listen to it, my whole being attuned to it, palpitating, awaiting I know not what. Suddenly Fear, agonizing, boundless Fear, overcame me, not the usual uneasiness of unreality, but real fear, such as one knows at the approach of danger, of calamity. And the wind, as if to add to the turmoil, soughed its interminable protests, echoing the muffled groans of the forest.

Fear made me ill; just the same I ran out to visit a friend who was staying at a nearby sanatorium. To get there, a way led through the woods, short and well-marked. Becoming lost in the thick fog, I circled round and round the sanatorium without seeing it, my fear augmenting all the while. By and by I realized that the wind inspired this fear; the trees too, large and black in the mist, but particularly the wind. At length I grasped the meaning of its message: the frozen wind from the North Pole wanted to crush the earth, to destroy it. Or perhaps it was an omen, a sign that the earth was about to be laid waste. This idea tormented me with growing intensity. But I remained unaware of the basis for the fear which from then on came over me at any moment of the day.

I told the doctor about it. He wanted to help me by hypnosis, but not wanting to lose control of my own personality; I fought vehemently against it, preferring to endure both the fear and the cries of unreality.

Outwardly, however, no one suspected the inquietude or the fear. People thought I was hysterical or manic. Actually, I was indeed always agitated, cutting capers, laughing at the top of my voice, playing the fool. Yet these symptoms were not those of an excited girl, unable to control herself, but an attempt to master the fear, which, when it came over me, made me agitated, anxious, waiting imminent misfortune. I sought distraction in games and conversation but soon the fear grew again and the help I hoped to find in my friends proved of no avail. Then I tried to flee the fear in excitement. I shouted and laughed, as an escape from the fear and a defense against it.

Little by little I brought myself to confide to my friends that the world was about to be destroyed, that planes were coming to bomb and annihilate us. Although I often offered these confidences jestingly I firmly believed them and, to feel less alone, I wanted to share the fears with others. Nonetheless, I did not believe the world would be destroyed as I believed in real facts. Vaguely I had some misgivings that this belief was linked to my own personal fear, that it was specific and not generally held.

So I passed a year, suffering the fear and unreality. Except for these manic periods, I was myself. The children in the hospital were fond of me and treated me like a little mother. I read them the letters they received and wrote for the little ones.

I returned to the valley, physically recovered, but with worse morale. Now I had to reckon with “the Fear” which abruptly overcame me and robbed me of all joy in living. In addition, the difficulty of readjustment to family and school life was incredible.

Just the same I was a good student. Drawing, sewing and singing remained weak subjects. Concluding my efforts were in vain, I hardly tried to understand perspective, rhythm, or the placing of fabric; I had completely lost the sense o...

Índice

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• PART 1: THE STORY
• PART II: THE INTERPRETATION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER