Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors

Product Information

In 1885, Freud went to Paris to study under the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, and the latter’s use of hypnosis to treat his hysterical patients led his keen student to consider the notion of the unconscious, a turning point in his career. Thereafter, Freud’s work was devoted to the scientific study of the human psyche. Nevertheless, despite working with female patients and psychoanalysts, including his own daughter Anna, Freud’s theories on female sexuality remained highly androcentric and partisan to the general sexism of the time. In 1905, he wrote that in men alone is “the sexual life … accessible to investigation, whereas in the woman it is veiled in impenetrable darkness, partly in consequence of cultural stunting and partly on account of the conventional reticence and dishonesty of women”. 5 Famously, he also once said to fellow psychoanalyst Princess Marie Bonaparte, who, after consulting Freud as a patient, went on to research and publish a study of sexuality in women: “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is: ‘What does a woman want?’” 6 This is a book with a broad scope and a bold aim: to look at the history of the study of the female mind over the past two centuries. It asks whether the contents of a woman's head need be regarded as any different to those of a man. The premise from the outset is clear: Appignanesi does not see women as inherently mad, bad or sad but is fascinated as to why, over the years, we have continued to classify them in these categories far more often than we do men. In terms of the historical account of the female malady – oppressed women struggling to articulate their anger being written off as neurotic or worse – Appignanesi wants to discover whether women's rise in the therapeutic professions has changed the status of women patients for the better. Most compelling for her, though, is the fact that there are "simply so many riveting cases" of women patients. Here, Appignanesi's novelist self (she is well known as a writer of fiction) pops up, and helps her to create a narrative method mixing historical description with illuminating biographical anecdotes, and happily wandering between America and Europe. Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex by Sigmund Freud, published in 1905. gutenberg.org/files/14969/14969-h/14969-h.htm How did the mind doctors of the 1900s view their female patients? What did they make of their variously diagnosed nerves, melancholy, mania, obsession, self-mutilation, tics, possession, hysteria, desire and rebellion? Why in the early 20 th century was psychoanalysis liberating for so many female authors and artists? Does gender determine the way we express or are allowed to express mental distress? Some of the questions explored in Mad, Bad and Sad.

Gradually the doctors abandoned these techniques. The dance between expert and patient shifted first to a linguistic stage, as Freud investigated childhood seduction and fantasies of childhood seduction, and subsequently to a chemical one. Ending her survey with a sensitive discussion of drug use and abuse, of women as self-medicators, Appignanesi also nods towards the role played by hormonal changes during the great physical turning points in women's lives, from puberty to menopause. Her conclusion is cautious: "It is clear that symptoms and diagnoses play into each other and cluster to create cultural fashions in illness and cure. Whatever the sophistication of the diagnosis, however, and its attendant treatment, this may not alter the recurrent or chronic nature of an individual's suffering."

Customer reviews

Her reading of 'the most iconic mind doctor' is generous, although she examines in detail why Freud has been portrayed as sexist. Freud believed that women were at risk of neurosis when 'idealisations of the family were at odds with lived experience'. But this, as Appignanesi seems to imply, is surely true for most people. Life is often at odds with our expectations. She concludes that Freud's perceived sexism is less relevant than his legacy: he underscored the 'shallowness of sanity' which helped to destigmatise mental illness. by ANNA McNAY In late-19th-century Paris, after decades of political upheaval and social unrest, and an era of neurasthenia, fainting spells, and “the vapours”, 1 a new psychological illness took to the stage: hysteria (from the Greek hystero, meaning womb) was pronounced “the illness of the age” by the prominent journalist, novelist and playwright Jules Claretie. 2 Her gender was not particularly an issue for her guardians, in terms of her diagnosis, as it was not with other contemporary inhabitants of asylums. These places, in fact, in her day, sheltered more men than women. Female inmates were, however, vulnerable to rape and assault. Sometimes the assault entailed forcefeeding, if the woman refused to eat. Two centuries later, as psychiatry textbooks proliferate with specifically labelled conditions, we have split off that symptom from mania and named it anorexia, a fullblown disease in its own right. With this in mind, Appignanesi does not reach a table-thumping conclusion; she prefers analysis and exploration to blame and political point-scoring. The thread running through this work is that all women - and all men - are mad, bad and sad at times, and that we must be wary of classifying those who seem excessively so, because, in labelling them, we are simply labelling the human condition. 'Narrowing or medicalising definitions too much limits the boundaries not only of so-called normality, but of human possibility.'

The view of female patients throughout the 1800s would be hilarious were it not so disturbing. Breast-feeding women were seen as having 'lactational insanity' (it was thought, quite literally, that they had milk on the brain). In 1825, in Paris came the first instance of a doctor testifying that if a patient insisted she was not mad, this proved that she must be. This was part of the extraordinary case of Henriette Cornier, a nursemaid who calmly sliced off the head of her 19-month-old charge and threw it out of the window because 'the idea presented itself'. She refused to accept the charge of insanity and was sentenced to hard labour 'in perpetuity'.

Olga Grotova – interview: ‘I started to think how soil and plants are sometimes the only witnesses’

When French-born American artist Louise Bourgeois handed over her set of 16 gouache male and female torsos to younger British artist, new friend and The early chapters on the birth of the mental health professions are fascinating and addictive. It is astonishing to think that only a few hundred years ago, doctors did not imagine that their interaction with the patient had any effect or importance; neither did they regard anything the patient told them about their condition as being especially relevant. Philippe Pinel, the doctor in charge of the Parisian madhouses during the French Revolution, invented the bedside manner and was the first to look for patterns in the patient's life story that might explain what he called their 'mental alienation'.