Session 4: Madness and Literature

2nd Global Conference

Monday 14th September – Thursday 17th September 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford

The Beast Within: A Metaphor of Madness in Autobiographies of Schizophrenics 1920s-1940s
Renana Elran
Department of Psychology, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel

It seems that for the lay person, the schizophrenic may come to represent the sheer image of madness and the archetype of the madman. But although this severe form of mental illness, characterized by bizarre delusions and vivid hallucinations, may appear as old as mankind, it is in fact a modern psychiatric nosology, approximately one hundred years old. One way to historicize schizophrenia is to examine diachronically the ways in which it is culturally constructed by reading professional psychiatric and psychological literature. Another option, albeit less common, would be to look for representations of psychotic experiences in “psychopathographies,” i.e., autobiographical literature written by the patients themselves, thus examining the cultural construction of the experience of being mentally ill.

I wish to examine three cases of psychopathographies in English: Jane Hillyer’s 1926 Reluctantly Told; Lara Jefferson’s 1947 These are My Sisters; and John Ogdon’s 1947 Kingdom of the Lost. I will argue that these autobiographies of people suffering from schizophrenia all contain a common metaphor that portrays madness as “the beast within.” I will focus on the characteristics of this inner “beast” and on the connections between this metaphorical description of experience and contemporary psychoanalytic conceptions of psychosis. Another common quality of these three psychopathographies is their allusions to Freud and to psychoanalysis, which was not only employed as a treatment method in some psychiatric institutions but had also pervaded into popular culture and greatly influenced 20th century man’s self-perception. Thus I suggest that the metaphor of madness as “the beast within” resonates with the Freudian conception of the human unconscious as a dark and mysterious underworld, the abode of animal-like drives and inner demons.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

Examining the Effect of Madness on Creative Output in the Poetry of Ivor Gurney
Georgina Willms
University of Exeter

I would like to propose a paper focusing on the work of the English war poet Ivor Gurney. Gurney was a soldier and musician who exhibited a fragile mental state before the war. After being wounded twice in battle Gurney’s mental condition showed a marked decline, and he was eventually discharged and sent home. From late 1918 through 1922 his health continued to decline, and in 1922 was committed to a mental institution, where he died in 1937. I would like to examine the effect that his mental health problems had on his writing, especially in his work from 1919-1922. During this period Gurney was quite prolific in both his writing and music. In letters to friends from this period he shows a disturbing tendency to ramble and not make sense, and eventually describing lucid hallucinations and threatening suicide. While his health was deteriorating, his writing was intensifying, and it is during this period that he wrote some of the best poetry of his career. I’d like to examine how his ‘madness’ was exacerbated by his wartime experiences and exactly what this meant for his creative process. It is my contention that the recollections of his war experiences from this period are more ‘honest’ due of his mental condition, because his illness helped to strip away layers of denial and institutionalization that another poet would be working under. Gurney’s illness meant that what he put on the paper had no hidden agenda. This poetry, produced by a ‘sick’ mind may be the closest we can get to understanding the war from a soldier’s point of view.