Quotations/Comments

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670-640

670

       Mais, dans des cas pareils, c'est toujours la chose ģenitale, toujours! toujurs! toujours!

[ Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) ]

The renowned French neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot, one of whose students for a brief period was Sigmund Freud, is here stating the fact that in every case of mental illness he had investigated at his famous Parisian clinic, the underlying cause of the illness was invariably related to sexual (genital) disturbances in the individual so afflicted, be it male or female - "always! always! always!"

Charcot's teaching had a profound influence on the development of Freud's later theories, which up to that time had not stressed the overwhelming importance of repressed sexual factors in the development of mental illness.

The second greatest influence on Freud's thinking in this field was Dr. Wilhelm Fliess, an otorhinolaryngologist from Berlin, who was the first person ever to broach to him the subject of the innate bisexuality of all humans. Freud was skeptical of this insight in the beginning but as he progressed further into his psycho-analytic practice, he began to see how this bisexual factor appeared sooner or later in the reports of all his patients, albeit in most cases only after very severe resistance to its recognition on their part.

Freud eventually began to accept the fact that everyone is a "bearded lady", some more than others, and that is was the repression of this conflict between the two sides of the person, the male and the female, that lay at the root of all the neuroses and also of the psychosis he called paranoia, now called paranoid schizophrenia.

Unfortunately, Freud believed paranoia and schizophrenia were two different illnesses with different early fixation points, and therefore that investigators must look elsewhere for the cause of schizophrenia. Because of this critical error in judgment on his part the vast majority of investigators who followed in his wake has ever since been conducting a fruitless search for the supposedly elusive cause of this devastating illness.

The fact that schizophrenia, originally called dementia praecox (precocious dementia), begins most often in individuals at or shortly thereafter the onset of puberty, should certainly have alerted investigators to the fact it must be closely connected to sexuality in some manner, even though its bisexual conflict/gender confusion component was not so clear at first and required some serious psychological digging to uncover.

Through the brilliant pioneering work of Charcot to Fliess to Freud lay the path of discovery allowing future generations of investigators finally to uncover the ultimate secrets of mental illness.

669

       Sex is messy, passionate, unclear, tentative, anxious, liberating, frightening, embarrassing, consoling, and cerebral. It's contradictory, different for different people and different for the same person at different times. It operates at three or four levels simultaneously. And all that covers only masturbation.

[ Pepper Schwartz, professor of sociology, University of Washington, USA. ]

In this brilliant analysis, Professor Schwartz treats the universal phenomenon of masturbation with the profound wisdom, depth of insight and respect that the subject deserves. We are all intimately connected with it and what he has to say about it, whether we acknowledge it or not.

668

       Hysterical symptoms hardly ever appear so long as children are masturbating, but only afterwards, when a period of abstinence has set in; they form a substitute for masturbatory satisfaction, the desire for which continues to persist in the unconscious until another more normal kind of satisfaction appears when that is still obtainable.

[ A Case of Hysteria, Sigmund Freud, p.79, Vol.7, The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Hogarth Press, London. ]

What Freud is basically postulating here is that all hysterical symptoms are fueled by, and have their genesis in, old masturbatory fantasies once enjoyed by the patient but now long repressed. Obviously, then, the cure for these present day hysterical symptoms requires a return to those old masturbatory fantasies and the orgasmic satisfactions connected therewith. This results in the diminution and eventual eradication of the hysterical symptoms to the point that the patient is no longer bothered by them and can then proceed to change these archaic orgasmic satisfactions into "more normal kind of satisfaction" if hopefully that outcome "is still obtainable." But as long as these fantasies remain repressed in the unconscious, no real psychosexual growth for the individual so afflicted is possible.

Thus we can see that one of the primary goals in any person's psycho-analysis is to uncover these archaic and predominantly "perverse", or bisexual/gender confused, masturbatory fantasies which are still clinging tenaciously to life in the patient's unconscious psyche, where they assert such a powerful, regressive effect on the person's overall striving towards psychosexual health and maturity, and then abreact them by orgasmically discharging them as many times as needed until they finally lose for good their sexual power to disturb the psychic equilibrium. Only in this manner will these heretofore repressed masturbatory fantasies at last be robbed of their power to wreak havoc on the individual’s psychic health, and the hysterical symptoms will be eradicated, a beneficial result much to be desired in all cases of mental illness.

667

       ...It has dawned on me that masturbation is the one major habit, the ‘primal addiction’, and that it is only as a substitute for it that the other addictions - for alcohol, morphine, tobacco, etc. - come into existence.

[ “Extracts from the Fliess Papers”, Sigmund Freud, Letter 79, p. 272, Vol 1, The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, the Hogarth Press, London. ]

In many ways this is the most profound insight uncovered by Freud during his lifetime. For truly, masturbation is mankind's "primal addiction", lasting a lifetime. And not only does this hold true for all humans, without exception, but for all other mammals as well, both the young and the old. Masturbation is not just mankind's "primal addiction", it is the universal one.

Freud, far more than most, realized the immense importance of masturbation to the physical and mental wellbeing not only of his own patients but of everyone else as well. Fully one-and-a-half pages in the index to his 24 volumes of collected works have citations directly under the heading "Masturbation."

In essence, what Freud was trying to explain in the above quotation is that the addictive cravings for alcohol, tobacco, drugs, gambling, etc. arise as substitutes for the powerful sexual satisfactions once provided by masturbatory fantasies, fantasies which have long been repressed and denied due to their ego--dystonic nature. By that is meant that these masturbatory fantasies eventually became threatening to the person's self-esteem and self-regard, in the great majority of cases because these now ego-dystonic masturbatory fantasies are fantasies of being of the opposite sex. These type of opposite-sex fantasies occur universally and naturally during the early, androgynous state of development common to the young of all cultures.

Once repressed into the unconscious these early masturbatory fantasies can only grow in strength and urgency until later in life they are finally able to break out of their psychological/ physical confinement and find release by converting their frustrated sexual energy into the addictive cravings mentioned by Freud.

Thus the cure for these later substitute addictions is for the addict to return consciously to those long-repressed, primal, now ego-dystonic masturbatory fantasies and de-repress and abreact them masturbatorily until they lose their power and ability to fuel the addictive, substitute cravings, cravings which can be so hugely destructive to the individual so afflicted.

This de-repression and abreaction of long-repressed masturbatory fantasies is one of the primary goals to be reached in anyone's psychoanalysis, male or female. (See also Quotation 528 in the book, Schizophrenia-The Bearded Lady Disease, to gain an understanding of how this de-repression and abreaction mechanism can be accomplished, always to the great benefit of the individual concerned.)

666

       She included a previously unknown Auden poem in the form of a letter written on Christmas Day 1941, in which the events of the Nativity are given outrageous counterparts in the relationship between Auden and Kallman.

        It reads, in part:

        ‘Because mothers have much to

        do with your queerness and

        mine, because we have both

        lost ours, and because Mary is

        a camp name:

        As this morning I think of Mary I

        think of you. '

[ Douglas Martin, The New York Times, Obituary page, November 2, 2003, eulogizing the life of Dorothy J. Parnan, and referencing her book, Auden in Love, Simon & Schuster, 1984. ]

The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, as the old saying goes.” The most profound psychological truth is contained in this observation. If the mother is emotionally mature and mentally stable (one and the same thing, really), her children will grow up to be likewise. If she is not, then her children will suffer accordingly. And only too often this suffering will result in the development of the warped sexual and emotional attitudes leading to homosexuality, or, if the latter is repressed and denied, to schizophrenia.

Obviously, as we can see from the above poem and from other knowledge of their lives, the poet, W. H. Auden and his lover, Chester Kallman, were certainly not repressing their homosexual feelings, and thankfully so, for if they had tried, they would both have become insane. We can also see that both men had great insight into the all-important role their mothers had played in the development of their "queerness".

The psychiatrist G.W. Socarides has referred to homosexuality as a "neurotic" adaptation that in males stems from emotionally-demanding, all-possessive mothers who are wed to emotionally and/or physically absent fathers. Still another way to describe these mothers of homosexual sons is that they are close, binding and intimate with them, as well as with their daughters, leading to the same result in both sexes – children who are conflicted and confused as to which sex they belong and to what sexual orientation most fits their neurotic needs.

She is the classic masculine mother who rules the roost, or ‘wears the pants’ in the family, as she has steadily been described down through the ages, and who is married to the similarly classically-ineffective, effeminate man who often tries to disguise his feckless behavior behind a shield of disruptive, psychopathic behavior, such as alcoholism, drug addiction, satyriasis, etc.

665

       Even the most glamorous hookup – J.F.K. and Marilyn Monroe – lost some of its film noir allure after a report of how Marilyn had robotically described it to her shrink: ‘Marilyn Monroe is a soldier . . . the first duty of a soldier is to obey her commander in chief.’

[ Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, op-ed page, December 31,
2005. ]

Marilyn Monroe is generally considered to have committed suicide by ingesting an overdose of drugs. And as we know, suicide is the most serious symptom of schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease. That Marilyn was seriously mentally ill when she took her own life is obvious and it can fairly be said that she suffered from this malignant illness.

Specific mention is made in the above quotation that during her psycho-therapy she reported to her psychiatrist that she was a “soldier” obeying the orders of her superior, her commander-in-chief, when she acquiesced to the presumed entreaties of President Kennedy to sleep with him. Note must be taken here of her strong unconscious identification as a male in this remark to her psychiatrist, as there is no doubt that she meant it from a male soldier’s viewpoint. (This was before the days of increased enlistment by females in the military services.) It may be difficult to conceive of the ‘glamorous’ Marilyn as suffering from the ‘bearded lady disease’, but her severe bisexual conflict / gender confusion, as evidenced in the above quotation, marks her as a victim of it. For in her unconscious mind she really was a male “soldier”, doing the bidding of her commanding officer, as insane as this idea may appear at first glance. (It would be interesting to know if her psychiatrist pointed out this Freudian slip-of-the-tongue to her and explored with her its deeper meaning and direct relationship to her mental distress.)

A manicurist who once worked on her hands was quoted as having observed that she had very “masculine hands.” This would fit in with the concept of a basic unconscious masculine identification, an identification which she spent her entire life defending herself against conscious knowledge of, by projecting onto both herself and the world, an ultra-feminine, girlish persona.

664

       ELIZABETH WURTZEL'S DEPRESSION IS of such mammoth proportions, she might as well be famous for it. Or at least that's what she seems to think. ‘I'm starting to wonder if I might not be one of those people like Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath,’ she writes in the prologue to PROZAC NATION (317 pages, Houghton Miflin, $19.95). ‘I might as well be Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra,’ she says on the following page. And later: ‘I felt like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's,’ or perhaps, ‘like Mary Tyler Moore, throwing her hat, as if it were caution, to the winds of Minneapolis.’ Wurtzel's depression is apparently of the megalomaniacal sort. At various other points in the book she compares herself to Virginia Woolf, Natalie Wood, Axl Rose, Miss Havisham, Brian Jones, Gregor Samsa and the title character in the film ‘Betty Blue.’

[ “To be Young, Gifted and Blue”, Karen Schoemer, Newsweek, August 29,1994, p. 58. ]

At least three of the people Ms. Wurtzel identifies with were afflicted with schizophrenia – Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf – and all three were driven to suicide as a result of their mental illness. They were victims of the ‘bearded lady’ disease, just as Ms. Wurtzel seems to be when she identifies herself with both female and male persons, the latter being Axl Rose, Brian Jones, and Gregor Samsa. Her so-called depression "is of such mammoth proportions", according to the author of this article, that "she might as well be famous for it." The author also states that Ms. Wurtzel's depression "is apparently of the megalomaniacal sort." The term ‘megalomaniacal’ refers to a symptom always found in paranoid schizophrenia, as is also the symptom of depression. So it would appear Ms. Wurtzel definitely fits into the category of those persons who could be called ‘schizophrenic’ – that is, persons afflicted with the ‘bearded lady’ disease.

663

       If they knew who D'arcy was they'd cheerfully lock her up for good. Then John could wait forever. I incorporate John into the witch fantasies. The one permitted male, the sorcerer, the broad figure in white who wears a coat and whose face is puffy from incarceration. Much like Agatha here, who in her age and continuously narcotized state has come to resemble a man. If John is here as Agatha, who is D'arcy then? My eyes rove the room but can find no parallel for the nonpareil. My God, then she was here. It happened. There is no opposite number here - the clue. That would mean that she has left John here in Agatha for solace while she is gone.

[ The Loony-Bin Trip, Kate Millett, Simon & Schuster, 1990 by Kate Millett, p. 238. ]

This passage vividly illustrates Millet's intense sexual confusion. "If John is here as Agatha, who is D'arcy then?" And then there is Agatha, "who in her age and continuously narcotized state has come to resemble a man." Finally, Millet believes that D'arcy "has left John here in Agatha for solace while she is gone." The sense of severe schizophrenic sexual confusion exhibited by Millet in this passage should be readily apparent to the ‘normal’ reader.

662

       Case C - Patient was a twenty-eight-year-old single woman suffering from severe depression. During the course of her therapy, which consisted of over sixty hours of Freudian psychoanalysis, supplemented by face-to-face ‘talk’ sessions with a female therapist at another location, the patient's depression deepened.

        During one of her last psycho-analytic sessions, the patient was lamenting the fact that her female therapist had gone on vacation and she expressed a deep and anguished longing for her. She mentioned that she had seen an advertisement in the ‘personals’ column of her local newspaper which she thought this therapist might have placed with the hope that the patient would see it and know that it was from her. The ad stated how much the writer, a female, missed and loved a certain unnamed person.

        At this point the analyst realized the patient had such a powerful and overwhelming homosexual love for her female therapist, the full import of which she was denying to herself, that she had become psychotic, as demonstrated by the paranoid delusion that her therapist was trying to contact her secretly through the ‘personals’ column.

        Very shortly thereafter, patient broke off her psycho-analysis while continuing her work with the other therapist, who by this time had returned from vacation. Patient then discontinued this therapy as well and started anew with a psychiatrist who prescribed heavy doses of anti-depressant drugs for her.

        She terminated this latter treatment after several months and eventually found her way into a group therapy situation where she formed a close friendship with another female member of the group. This friendship quickly grew into an intimate homosexual relationship and the two women have now lived together for a number of years.

[ An anonymous case history. ]

Simply speaking, this patient became schizophrenic as the direct result of repressing her strong homosexual feelings and then recovered her mental health as the direct result of finally being able to acknowledge and act upon them.

661

       “I do love her. But I am not in love with her. Nor with her two brothers or sister. Yes, I have four children. Four children with whom I spend a good part of every day bathing them, combing their hair, sitting with them while they weep their tragic tears. But I am not in love with any of them. I am in love with my husband.

        It is his face that inspires in me paroxysms of infatuated devotion. If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children.

[ Ayalet Waldman, “Truly, Madly, Guiltily, Modern Love”, The New York Times, March 27, 2005, p. 11. ]

If every mother could honestly make the above comments about her feelings towards her husband and her children, both mental illness and its cause (bisexual conflict and consequent gender confusion) would be eradicated from the world. A bold claim, but true. For the greatest gift a mother can give her children is to be “in love with” their father, and likewise the greatest gift a father can give his children is to be "in love with" their mother. Note that the emphasis is placed on the phrase to be “in love with” rather than just “to love”.

Why should this ‘romantic’ state of affairs between the father and mother be so vitally important for the mental health and well being of their children? Simply stated, it is because this romantic climate between the parents provides such a felicitous atmosphere of heterosexual normality for the children of both sexes to identify with, thus thankfully sparing them from the unfortunate and often malignant emotional entanglements which unhappily-matched parents all too frequently inflict upon their children, leading to the latters’ loss of self-confidence and joy in their budding sexual identity and appropriate gender identification.

An emotionally starved mother will turn to her children to fulfill her frustrated longings for love and acceptance, thus placing upon one or more of her children an enormous psychological burden which is ruinous to their emotional well being and normal psychological development. Philip Wylie, the noted author, once wrote a book titled Generation of Vipers to describe this type of mother, highlighting in it the deadly effect she has on the emotional life of her children. And of course, the emotionally starved father has a similar deleterious effect on the psychological health of his children.

The so-called ‘mama's boy’ and ‘daddy's girl’ are the direct products of a hothouse of warped emotional attachments in these types of families where emotionally frustrated parents turn to their children for the emotional satisfaction and love they should be receiving from each other in the ‘romantic’ sense. Thus the normal masculine emotional growth of the ‘mama's boy’ is stunted, as is the normal feminine emotional growth of the ‘daddy's girl’. And the end result of this sexual identity blockage in the children, if not checked and corrected early on, is a post-pubertal descent into schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease, or else its opposite, the pursuance of a homosexual lifestyle, for these emotionally warped sons and daughters of emotionally warped fathers and mothers.

And so author and mother, Ayalet Waldman, would that every child in the world be so fortunate as to have a mother like you, one who loves her children dearly but is "in love with" her husband, and not her children, and who is married to a husband with the same romantic feelings towards you that you have for him, and who also possesses a similar deep love for his children, without being "in love with” them.

660

       ‘I don't know what occurred at the end,’ Ms. Gibbs said. ‘She was excited about the future. She kept talking about how there was going to be a movie about her. She had a purpose.’

        Ms. Stone [Domino's mother] guesses that because Ms. Harvey was anxious and desperate for sleep, she took too many painkillers. No one knows how she obtained the pills. Ms. Stone described the upbeat voice mail message Ms. Harvey left on the day she died. ‘She wanted to tell me about the four people she'd employed to look after her,’ Ms. Stone said. ‘She said, ‘Mumsy, everything is going to be fine. They're really, really nice people. Boys at night to keep the riffraff away. Don't worry about me. I love you lots.’’ (Ibid., p.3)

When Domino's mother stated that Domino was "desperate for sleep", she was accurately describing one of the most malignant symptoms of schizophrenia — insomnia. This writer has personally known three persons suffering from this symptom, two of whom it drove to suicide and the other very close to it, until he was saved at the last moments by forced hospitalization. And one of the suicides ended life in a bathtub, as did Domino, and for basically the same reason, to end the intolerable pain caused by his prolonged insomnia.

In Freud's famous Schreber case, the psychotic Schreber's major complaint in the early, most florid stage of his paranoid schizophrenia, was of his inability to sleep, causing him to declare that there was nothing left for a man to do in order to end the agonizing pain of his insomnia than to kill himself, which he tried repeatedly to do. Thus it is very tragic that Domino herself had not been hospitalized before she succumbed to her painkillers as a way of ending her intolerable pain.

We can clearly see in her case how her schizophrenia, caused by her intense bisexual conflict/gender confusion, brought her life to a very sad end as it has done to so many others in the past, and will continue doing to so many others in the future, until the truth of the cause of this devastating illness can finally be acknowledged and dealt with accordingly, to the benefit of all humankind.

Domino's final tragic words to her mother, "Mumsy, everything is going to be fine”, sounds like a term of endearment (‘Mumsy’) that a small child would use. And in truth, her emotional growth really had become fixated at a very early, tomboyish stage, the remainder of her life being but an extension of this immature state of development with its consequent total blockage of any further emotional growth.

659

       'She was a beautiful girl with the height and everything else, but she had a particular look that was actually very sexually ambiguous with the tomboy thing and the shaved head,’ said Mrs. Nelson, who met Ms. Harvey when the girls were 11 and in an English boarding school. ‘Modeling is all about having the right look at the right time, and it wasn't the right time for her.’ . . . . . . . . . . .

        Ms. Harvey had a close but at times difficult relationship with her mother. ‘Her personality was completely different than her mother's,’ said Heidi Gibbs, Mrs. Morton's sister. ‘What was important to her mother was being a lady, and that just wasn't important to Domino.’

        In California, Ms. Harvey pursued various unladylike careers like work on a ranch and as a firefighter before finding her calling at Celes King Bail Bonds in South Central Los Angeles . . . . . . . . . . .

        Although tabloids frequently described her as a lesbian, Ms. Harvey dated a series of men. ‘They were all losers,’ Ms. Stone said. ‘She was captivated by anybody with a dark side.’ (Ibid., p. 3)

Here again we can see the very severe bisexual conflict/gender confusion problem that dominated Domino's life and led to her slide into madness or schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease. She certainly was a ‘bearded lady’ in every sense of the word.

658

       But the movie's subject, who was eagerly awaiting the release, will not. She was found dead in her bathtub on June 27. She died after suffering from a heart attack and had toxic levels of fentanyl, a painkiller, in her blood, said Stephen Bernard, her lawyer, citing a coroner's report. ‘Domino,’ which focuses almost exclusively on Ms. Harvey's exploits as a bounty hunter, does not dwell on the darkest part of her life: a 15-year struggle with drug addiction. What it does capture, her friends and family say, is the essence of someone who was so fascinated with danger that she organized her life around it, becoming one of the few female bounty hunters in the country and helping to capture 50 fugitives, often in life-threatening circumstances. (Ibid., pp.2-3)

The title for this article about Domino Harvey, written by Allison Hope Weiner for The New York Times, would have been more fitting if it had been headed A LUST FOR DEATH AND DANGER, rather than A LUST FOR LIFE AND DANGER, considering the fact that her entire life had been one long descent into madness and death, ending in her 35th year. There is no way to prove that Domino committed suicide, but she was facing the prospect of a jury trial and potentially long prison term if she were to be found guilty of dealing in drugs, as she had been charged with. We also know that suicide is considered the most serious manifestation of schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease.

It is an interesting, though macabre fact that many suicidal persons resort to using a bathtub to carry out their final act of self-destruction, presumably on the grounds that it would leave a less messy death scene and could more easily be cleaned up afterwards. (This commentator had a physician friend who suicided in a bathtub by slitting open several arteries.)

657

       'I tracked Domino down in Hollywood, where she was modeling and bounty hunting,’ Mr. Scott said over the phone from his Los Angeles office late last month [September, 2005]. ‘Domino lived in an apartment above the garage because she wasn't allowed in her mother's house with all her guns. We'd sit up in her apartment with the Soldier of Fortune magazines and AK-47's scattered around the room, and then I'd go and have tea with Mum and the Jack Russells and the Francis Bacons on the wall.'

[ Allison Hope Weiner, "A Lust For Life And Danger," The New York Times, Oct. 9, 2005, 'Sunday Styles,' Section 9, p. 1 ]

The very sad story of Domino Harvey, the one time model turned bounty hunter, provides us with a classic case demonstrating how severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion form the basic etiological root of all mental illness, up to and including schizophrenia. And Domino very definitely suffered from schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease. On the one hand, she had once been a beautiful model; on the other, she became a tough-as-nails, masculine, shaven-head, bounty hunter. There was no subtlety at all to her bearded lady self. It was shockingly and glaringly apparent to all who crossed her path in life.

656

       From my material, in which negative instances are consciously absent, I am forced to the conclusion that schizophrenic illnesses in the male are intimately related as a sequent to unfortunate prolongation of the attachment of the son and the mother. (Dr. Harry Stack Sullivan)

Here again we can see the all-important role the mother inevitably plays in determining the mental health of her children, for good or for ill. The so-called CBI mother, or Close Binding Intimate mother, is the cause of schizophrenia, not only in her son, but also in her daughter (See previous quotation). The children of a CBI mother either become homosexual, or, if the homosexuality is denied and repressed, schizophrenic. Of course there are gradations of schizophrenia, just as there are of homosexuality, but definitely the offspring of such a mother will inexorably suffer from some degree of bisexual conflict/gender confusion, leading in its most severe form to either outright schizophrenia or homosexuality. And proof of the fact schizophrenia is rooted in the negation and repression of homosexuality is the inescapable truth that the CBI mother produces both schizophrenic and/or homosexual children.

655

       The mother's attitude was so subtly ingratiating, and yet domineering, that she would almost have to be destroyed as a mother if the patient were to free herself from its terrible influence and win her own womanhood and independence. (Dr. Edward J. Kempf)

The above type of mother perfectly fits the definition of the "schizophrenogenic" mother, or the mother who is the direct cause of the development of schizophrenia in her daughter. The latter's only escape from this malignant fate, as Dr. Kempf so clearly points out, is somehow to free herself from this mother's "terrible influence", preferably through intensive, long-term psychoanalytic therapy.

Interestingly enough, although not mentioned here by Dr. Kempf, is the similar schizophrenogenic influence this type of mother would have on a son. Both son and daughter would be in great psychological danger when so dominated by this kind of woman/mother. Unless escape can be effected, they would be equally in grave danger of developing schizophrenia or its opposite manifestation, homosexuality. Most assuredly, either they would be afflicted with bisexual conflict gender confusion, which, if not dealt with correctly, leads to one or the other state of being.

654

       Reflecting on a visit to a reunion of his mother's relatives, the photographer Walker Evans wrote to a friend that ‘. . . How fatal it has been that all the women have ruled the men right out of their masculinity, independence, courage, will and at last, brains even.’

[ Walker Evans, by James R. Mellow, [Source not noted.] ]

The type of woman mentioned by Walker Evans in the above quotation is the type from which springs all homosexuals, male and female, as well as all schizophrenics, considering the fact that schizophrenia is caused by the repression or denial of homosexuality. This type of woman rules not only her son “out of their masculinity, independence and courage", but also her daughters out of their femininity, independence and courage, thus dooming both sexes to either outright homosexuality or mental illness. Admittedly this is a harsh statement, but unfortunately a true one.

In the insightful words of Dr. Lewis B. Hill, in his outstanding book, Psychotherapeutic Intervention of Schizophrenia, the equation goes thus:

“It would seem that the schizophrenic patient is often of the third generation of abnormal persons of whom we can gain some information. The preceding two generations of mothers appear to have been obsessive, schizoid women who did not adjust well to men. There is some evidence that they were, in a sense, immature and that within the obsessive character structure could be found hysterical difficulties. It is to be noted, also, that there are two preceding generations of men who are not masters, or equals, in their own marriages and homes, or psychosexually very successful, and who are often described as immature, alcoholic, and passive, or hardworking, self-centered, and detached from the family." In a nutshell, this is the scenario intuited by Walker Evans in the above quotation.

Dr. Hill further emphasizes his position in the following insightful summary of the so-called "schizophrenogenic" mother, and her forebears. "The maternal grandmothers of the patients are usually reported to have ruled their homes either directly or, more commonly, through tears and suffering. Mothers of the patients have learned this technique from these grandmothers and with very few exceptions dominate, in one way or another, the family situation, including the husband. Usually they employ the hurt techniques to make others feel guilty; much more rarely they are arbitrarily and angrily in charge."

Thus we can see the critical importance of the mother’s own mental stability in determining the emotional destiny of her children. The insightful words of the photographer Walker Evans takes us into his own family’s warped psychological dynamics and demonstrates to us its malignant consequences for all his relatives.

Unfortunately, in his brilliant exposition of the skewed family dynamics which produce schizophrenics, Dr. Hill neglected to mention that these same family dynamics also are operative in every case among the relatives of children who turn out to be homosexual, thus proving the thesis that the genesis of schizophrenia is denied and repressed homosexuality.

653

       'Do you believe in demon possession?' I asked

        'Why do you ask?'

        'Well, it's strange,' I said, 'but I remember that at my sickest, it was as though Gression took complete possession of me. It was as though I lost my soul and Gression's soul entered my body and I became Gression and my body did his bidding.' (Ibid., p.213)

In this paranoid delusion of persecution that his former psychoanalyst, Dr. Gression, had taken "complete possession of me", Mr. Stefan unconsciously demonstrates his passive, feminine attitude towards his former therapist. For a man to believe that another man has taken "complete possession" of him, "body" and "soul", as we can see from the remainder of this quotation, most assuredly indicates the presence of very strong homosexual feelings.

This delusion of Mr. Stefan's of being "possessed'' by Dr. Gression is remarkably similar to the one experienced by the famous paranoiac, Daniel Paul Schreber, in relation to his former physician, Dr. Flechsig. In Schreber's case, as interpreted by Sigmund Freud, his "affectionate dependence upon his physician" had "become intensified to the pitch of an erotic desire." This desire was violently opposed and denied by Schreber's ego, leading to his paranoid delusion that Dr. Flechsig had now become his persecutor, one who wished to use him sexually as a female prostitute. In exactly the same manner Mr. Stefan had repressed his own powerful erotic feelings towards Dr. Gression, leading to his paranoid delusions as outlined in the above quotation.

Mr. Stefan had further stated to his current physician that he had wanted to kill Dr. Gression for what he "did to me and my wife." (p.212.) He went on to say that "I've killed him a thousand times in my imagination. I've shot and stabbed and beat him and . . . ." For this reason it can sometime be dangerous for physicians to treat persons suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, which condition is invariably the result of repressed and denied homosexual feelings. The initial positive transference of the male patient to the male physician can quite easily become intensified to the point it becomes erotic longing, leading to the delusion of being persecuted by the physician, followed by the wish to kill or otherwise destroy and remove this object of homosexual temptation. From his own words, it is quite clear that Mr. Stefan himself was very close to crossing this fragile line into violence against Dr. Gression, fueled as it was by his unconscious, unacceptable homosexual feelings for him.

652

       At home things really began to deteriorate. I seemed to be tired all the time and I'd sleep for hours without being refreshed by the rest. I became indifferent to Laurie and my sexual appetite vanished; on those rare occasions when we did have intercourse, neither of us were satisfied. I began to doubt my masculinity. There must be something wrong with a man who can't satisfy the woman he loves. Maybe I'm a homosexual. That thought terrified me. On the streets I began to fancy that other men were looking at me. I began to see homosexuals everywhere, and all of them were laughing at me. (A terrible kind of desexualization, a loss of masculine identity, seems often to accompany schizophrenia when it develops in men, and perhaps this accounts for their morbid anxiety over homosexuality.)

[ In Search of Sanity, The Journal of a Schizophrenic, by Gregory Stefan, University Books, Inc., Hyde Park, New York, 1965, p.19. ]

The terrifying phenomenon that Mr. Stefan is experiencing, as described in the above quotation, is what is commonly known in psychiatry as a "homosexual panic." He is clearly undergoing a classic case of this very frequent schizophrenic symptom, triggered invariably by powerful, though strongly repressed and denied, homosexual feelings and desires. In fact, in this case, conflict is so acute that it has led Mr. Stefan into a floridly paranoid state where he is deluded into believing he sees homosexual men surrounding him, all of whom are looking and laughing at him. In short, his repressed homosexual conflict is the direct cause of his paranoid schizophrenia, or the bearded lady disease.

In Mr. Stefan's own explanatory note stating that, in men, a loss of a sense of "masculine identity", or "a terrible kind of desexualization", is common in schizophrenia, is certainly correct and it applies equally to women as well as to men. The latter experience a frightening loss of their sense of feminine identity to an equal degree as do men their sense of masculine identity, as they too are suffering from schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease, or of not knowing at the deepest level of their psyche which sex one is a member of.

651

       As to the revelation itself, it caused Muhammad [ibn Abdallah] considerable anguish. Sometimes he heard voices; sometimes he saw visions, sometimes, he said, the words were found in his inmost heart, and at such times their production caused him acute physical pain. When the revelations began he feared for his sanity, and only after reassurances from his wife and friends did he accept that he was the recipient of the divine gift of the Word."

[ Salman Rushdie, writing in the New York Review of Books, date not noted. ]

In today's world this violently afflicted individual would be quickly and easily diagnosed as suffering from an acute attack of paranoid schizophrenia, with accompanying florid delusions of grandeur mixed with aural and visual hallucinations. In short, when he himself is said to have feared for his sanity, he was a much better diagnostician of his diseased state of mind than were either his wife or his friends.

The same diseased state of mind must also be attributed to the man called Joseph Smith, who claimed that at the age of fifteen he had been visited by an angel called Moroni. Supposedly this hallucinated angel thereupon gave him directions on how to find and uncover the buried Golden Tablets whereon were already transcribed the words to what would later come to be known as the Book of Mormon.

It should be noted here that many cases of schizophrenia first appear in the early teens, around puberty, when the so-called "raging hormones" newly-awakened sexuality first takes hold. If a young person has a powerful, latent bisexual conflict/gender confusion issue, this is the period when severe mental illness can first occur. Schizophrenia was once called "dementia praecox" (precocious dementia), denoting that often it made its first appearance during these early years of confused sexual awakening.

The two cases mentioned in the above Quotation and Comment sections pertain to individuals who went to establish religions with a worldwide reach. As is well known, and in spite of, and due in most part to, their severe mental illness.

650

       That I command the impartiality necessary for this undertaking I believe I have proved by my former studies in the field of the life of Jesus. Should it really turn out that Jesus' object world must be considered by the doctor as in some degree the world of a sick man, still this conclusion, regardless of the consequences that follow from it and the shock to many that would result from it must not remain unuttered, since reverence for truth must be exalted above everything else. With this conviction I began the work, suppressing the unpleasant feeling of having to subject a great personality to psychiatric examination, and pondering the truth that what is great and profound in the ethical teachings of Jesus would retain its significance even if the conceptions in his world outlook and some of his actions had to be called more or less diseased.

[ The Psychiatric Study of Jesus, Exposition and Criticism, by Albert Schweitzer, The Beacon Press, Boston, 1948, Preface to 13th ed., p. 28. ]

Dr. Schweitzer's reverence for the truth, no matter where that truth may lead, reminds one of the same great reverence for truth demonstrated by naturalist Charles Darwin when he first propounded his revolutionary new Theory of Evolution. Darwin realized that many of his contemporaries would be deeply disturbed and shocked by the implications stemming from this theory, yet he, as did Dr. Schweitzer, also understood that "reverence for the truth must be exalted above everything else." For mankind to have progressed beyond its original state of primeval ignorance and superstition, nothing less is demanded, and will continue to be so ad infinitum.

Thus when it is stated here that the founders of all the major religions of the world can be proved to have been clinically insane, suffering from all the various delusions and hallucinations peculiar and ever-present in the mental illness called paranoid schizophrenia, or the bearded lady disease, is strict adherence to this one great, all-encompassing principle and foundation of science and rationality ─ namely, that the truth surpasses all else in importance.
Nor does the fact of the diseased state of mind of all these so-called religious prophets totally negate, as pointed out by Dr. Schweitzer, any positive effects their various religious teachings may have had, but it also does not excuse many of the malignant features of these teachings which exist today alongside the positive ones.

On a somewhat lighter note, the quotation attributed to an English grande dame upon first learning of Dr. Darwin's Theory of Evolution, should be mentioned here. "I hope Mr. Darwin's theory is incorrect," she declared, "but if it is correct I hope it does not become widely known."

This same attitude is relevant to all new truths that may shake the foundation of common beliefs, such as the statement made above concerning the diseased state of mind of all persons who proclaim themselves to be religious prophets. Hopefully this fact is not true, but if it is true, also hopefully it will not become widely known!

649

       Since the authors discussed by Dr. Schweitzer agree on one point, namely that Jesus suffered from some form of 'paranoia', a few words concerning this type of mental disorder may not be out of place. The word is an old one ─ it was used in the Hippocratic writings, though in a general sense, as meaning mental disease. It was introduced into German psychiatry as early as 1818 by Heinroth, but with so loose a definition that at one time from 70 to 80 percent of the patients in European mental hospitals were diagnosed as suffering from 'paranoia.' . . . .

        One may disagree with Schweitzer on one or two minor points. He takes for granted that the failure of Jesus to develop ideas of injury or persecution rules out the possibility of a paranoid psychosis. This is not necessarily true; some paranoids manifest ideas of grandeur almost entirely and we find patients whose grandeur is very largely of a religious nature, such their belief that they are directly instructed by God to convert the world or perform miracles. Again, he offers as evidence of freedom from paranoia the fact that Jesus modifies his views as to his missions. Some paranoids substantially modify their delusions in accordance with their view of environmental factors, and may indeed appear to reason logically concerning events of interest to them ─ logically, that is, if one grants their premises.

[ Winfred Overholser, M.D., President, American Psychiatric Association, Washington, D.C., 1948, in his foreward to The Psychiatric Study of Jesus - Exposition and Criticism, By Albert Schweitzer, The Beacon Press, Boston, 1948, pp. 12-15. ]

It would be a fair-minded assessment of Dr. Overholser's views, as expressed in the above quotation, that the historical figure known as Jesus of Nazareth was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, or the bearded lady disease. (The Apostle Paul was once quoted as having said that "Jesus is neither male nor female.")
Following logically from Dr. Overholser's careful reasoning, this same diagnosis could be similarly applied to the founders of all the major religions of the world, both ancient and modern. (See, for one example, the prophet Moses' hallucinatory description of having seen God's visage in a "burning bush.") These so-called, or self-described prophets have each one been afflicted with grandiose, paranoid schizophrenic delusions about their own special place in the world and of a specific, world-encompassing mission, or missions, their personal God has called upon them to fulfill.

In Jesus' time the Jewish religion had long been awaiting the coming of its Messiah, and as a Jew himself, Jesus was fully aware of this expectation. In his deluded, or "diseased" state of mind, he slowly came to the belief he was this very person, and as a direct consequence of this paranoid belief, a new world religion sprang up around him and his teachings, albeit slowly and not without having first afflicted immense suffering and hardship upon its followers.
There had been many persons prior to Jesus' time who claimed to be this long-awaited Messiah and there have been many such afterward. In modern times, however, these deluded souls have in most cases been consigned to the confines of mental hospitals after having been correctly diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenic delusions of grandeur and megalomania.

648

       I obviously lack insight and somewhat am lost confused and fragmented. Today, I have had the feeling in my chest as if I had tits . . . furthermore, I still keep on viciously pulling out hairs from my chest (removal of penis, want tits?) and from my belly-button (want a baby?) . . . I am concerned if I have returned to my real boy self or if I still remain as a girl and perhaps girl on girl. I don't want to form my sexual identity until I am 100% sure I am real boy again . . . boy on girl identity would just be disastrous and girl on girl in boy body would be pure gay(?).

        How could I tell with no insight that I am real boy again? Without alcohol I simply don't know what I want . . . what I feel . . . who I am . . . etc. . . Furthermore, I have forgotten about the girl of the bar who transmitted me love last weekend. AGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

        HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

        HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! Perhaps, when I drink, I am acting in the opposite direction of my subconscious (?? clueless). I've been sitting some time today like a lady and touching my hair, listening to rap and love songs . . . it's a tough cookie to find the way out of a labyrinth with bandaged eyes. DAMIT!!

        Is there any method or trick I could use periodically to check and be sure that Mars still wears the pants? I need to know I am not going to build a boy over girl again . . . only man trips twice over the same stone . . .

[ Personal Communication ]

This young man is obviously in the tenacious grip of schizophrenia - the bearded lady disease, due as always to a severe case of bisexual conflict and gender confusion.

There is hope, however, that this conflict will be resolved for him at a later date in favor of both a healthier emotional and physical state since he is not repressing this conflict but is wrestling courageously with it on a conscious level. If his severe bisexual conflict/gender confusion had been unconditionally repressed into his unconscious, he would consequently have developed many of the more florid manifestations of schizophrenia, such as paranoid delusions of persecution and grandeur as well as manic/depressive symptomatology, among others.

Unlike the famous paranoid psychotic, Daniel Paul Schreber (see his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness), the above young man will be able to effect "a social recovery with insight" from his schizophrenia. Schreber, on the other hand, experienced a partial social recovery, but definitely without insight, as he persisted in his psychotic belief that it was God who had wished him to turn into a woman rather than accepting these powerful sexual feelings and desires as his very own.

647

       In a surreal speech, Mr. Rader read notes from yellow legal paper about what he had in common with his victims; like Kathryn Bright, he spent time on his grandparent's farm; Delores Davis shared his love for dogs; he and Marine Hedge were both gardeners; Joseph Otero was a veteran of the Air Force.

        'She liked to write poetry – I liked to write poetry,' he said of Mr. Otero's 11-year-old daughter, Josephine, in a macabre reminder of the depraved poems and sketches the police found in his home. 'She liked to draw, I liked to draw.' . . . Also seized by the police were lewd Polaroids of Mr. Rader's 'self-bondage' in his victims' clothing, and extensive collection of Barbie-style dolls he would paint and pose in sexual positions, and books on serial killers, one subtitled, 'The Methods and Madness of Monsters' that had a mention of B.T.K. highlighted.

[ Jodi Wilgoren, The New York Times, August 19, 2005, p. A13. ]

The B.T.K killer is obviously insane, suffering from schizophrenia. A close reading of Jodi Wilgoren's reportage on his case immediately highlights examples of his severe bisexual conflict/gender confusion, always the basic pathogen in mental illness.

We can see how he strongly identified with the women he murdered; he liked to do many of the same things they did, he was quoted as emphasizing. And then we have the most obvious example of all of his severe bisexual conflict/gender confusion in the fact he took Polaroids of himself while wearing the actual clothing of his murder victims and posed in the same bondage positions he had placed them. Here his self-identification as a female is clearly apparent.

Mr. Rader hated his own feminine component so much and was so terrified of it that he had to murder other women in a psychotic attempt to kill his own repressed feminine longings. And the man he killed, Joseph Otero, had undoubtedly stirred up strongly repressed homosexual longings in Mr. Rader. By killing him, he destroyed the object of his homosexual temptation, which is a common theme in many same-sex homicides, both male and female. It should be noted that he masturbated both during and after all his murders, thus highlighting the basic etiological role played by sexual confusion and repression in all mental illness.

Finally, in a picture accompanying Jodi Wilgoren's article on Mr. Rader, a detective assigned to the case is holding up a mask used by him in one of the killings. The mask is very feminine-appearing. Mr. Rader, as well as all his victims, were destroyed by his schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease. It is but one more story in the ages-old saga of the tragedies caused by this illness.

646

       In addition to Robert, the dominant personality, the one he presents to the world, his other two active selves are Bobby, an attention-needing and affection-starved child who has grown into a quizzical young adult; and Wanda, a quiet Buddhist-like presence who was once submerged in the viciously cruel personality known only as the Witch.

[ Bruce Weber, The New York Times, October 1, 2005, in a review of the book: A Fractured Mind: My Life With Multiple Personality Disorder (Hyperion). ]

As in all cases of so-called "Multiple Personality Disorder", the person so afflicted inevitably reports that both male and female characters inhabit his or her body. If a male, he reports one or more females; if a female, one or more males.

In short, MPD is just one of the many disguises worn by the mental illness known as schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease. MPD sufferers are often described as being victims of a "split personality". Actually, this definition is the correct one – a schizophrenic is a person whose psyche is split almost evenly between male and female components, resulting inexorably in that state of severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion which fuels the myriad symptoms of mental illness.

645

       Consider C.A. Tripp and his argument that Lincoln was gay. His book, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln begins with the fact that Lincoln during his late 20's and early 30's shared a bed with a young man named Joshua Speed. As President, Lincoln may also have shared his bed with a captain of his guard in Washington . . . . As I dug into the story, I learned about the two times, at ages 26 and 32, when Lincoln broke down so severely that he came near suicide; about his profound gloom in his middle years and his deliberate work to cope with it; and finally, about how his depression both plagued him and fueled his great work as President.

[ The True Lincoln, Joshua Wolf Shenk, Time Magazine, July 4, 2005, pp. 42-43. ]

There can be little doubt that C.A. Tripp, in his book on Lincoln, has unearthed valuable material relating to Lincoln's psychological profile. From the evidence gathered, he makes a very strong case that Lincoln was beset by severe bisexual conflict, severe enough at times to lead him to the brink of suicide. Considering the fact suicide has been called the most serious symptom of schizophrenia, then Lincoln definitely suffered from this illness.

The glaring fact that he shared the same bed with his dearest male friend, Joshua Speed, for such a lengthy period of time would mark Lincoln today as being homosexual beyond any reasonable doubt. Also the fact he was unhappily married to a woman similarly beset with severe psychological (read bisexual) conflicts adds further proof to this hypothesis. (The father of a schizophrenic patient once said: "When I married I was only half a man and could only marry half a woman.")

Lincoln's life-threatening, lifelong depression was the direct result of his bearded lady conflict. Furthermore this conflict engendered his ever-strengthening religious, messianic-type certainty that he was doing God's will by freeing the slaves and saving the Union during the Civil War. In short, he was exhibiting, in a subtle manner, one of the classic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia.

Finally, it is interesting to note how many pictures of Lincoln exist today showing him at times with a beard and then without one.

644

       In discussing the magic, which is manifested in the symptomatology of schizophrenia, Schilder notes: 'The cases reported here show with great clarity that the magical is greatly surcharged with the sexual. To affect, to influence, means, on this level of development, to influence sexually. Tausk has shown that in schizophrenia the influencing mechanism is nothing else than the body, and in the last analysis, the genitals of one thus influenced. . . . One patient felt herself influenced by a Phoenix, a bastard who had no genitals, or only a shrunken penis. The patient, however, called herself a bastard and claimed to derive from this characteristic her witchcraft.' (Ibid., p. 98)

Here the patient identifies herself with a Phoenix, "a bastard who had no genitals, or only a shrunken penis." In her unconscious this is how the patient perceives herself, as a castrated woman, yet one who still possesses a "shrunken penis." She is afflicted with schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease.

This "shrunken penis" motif is found in the common folklore about witches flying around on broomsticks, i.e. their faux penises. And the term "witch" is commonly applied to females who are masculine, aggressive and castrative to men due to their extreme penis envy, and envy of the male role in life in general.

643

       I met many N.N.'s. When I went home, my family did not recognize me. Or I could not find my way home because my name was lost. Once I fell off a slope or a hill and banged myself. I lost my name when I was banged, and the same thing happened to another fellow, so that our names got exchanged. I met some girls who also had the same name, but it turned out they were Mrs. N.N. – and they were all men. They all looked like me, both the girls and the men." (Ibid., p. 174)

The patient's severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion are glaringly obvious in this quotation when he says that all the girls "were Mrs. N.N. – and they were all men" and then that "both the girls and the men" all looked like him, the patient. The patient's gender confusion here is complete and total and is even confusing to the observer transcribing it.

642

       The next night I dreamed that I wanted to have intercourse, but I could not see the girl. Somebody must be doing this to me. Then I was awake and my bedcover was thrown off. A crown prince stood at my bed with a sword, as if he were equal and going to fight. You know, as if your father had come in the morning to wake you up. There were many girls. They had yellow hair like angels, and their faces were like mine. (Ibid., p. 140)

In this dream, the patient's deep-seated confusion as to which sex he belongs to is highlighted by his statement that the faces of all the girls "with their yellow hair like angels" were like his own. In other words, he primarily identified gender-wise with these girls rather than with his own masculine sex. He is truly a "bearded lady," consequently afflicted by schizophrenia.

641

       Schizophrenia means split-mindedness, duality of purpose, lack of interpretation. Thus, a fifty-five-year-old laborer, born in Hungary but residing in the United States, complained bitterly that whenever he wanted to drink a glass of water, the baby in him protested violently or wanted a glass for itself. (His name was John, and he called the baby Little John.) It was impossible for him to buy one necktie because the baby always wanted one too. He felt an urgent need to get rid of the baby, and he would frequently tell the baby (with great emphasis and in the manner of an adult) that it should go out. He spoke in English; the baby answered in Hungarian, in a whining and pitiful voice, explaining that a baby could not live without its mother, and that if it went out into the world there would be nobody to feed it and there would be no bed to sleep in. The disputation between him and the baby went on endlessly. It is quite clear that he was both adult and baby and that the baby did not want to come out of the womb. In this case contact with reality had ceased.

[ Magic and Schizophrenia, Geza Roheim, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and London, 1970, p. 98. ]

It is quite obvious that this psychotic male patient believes he is a woman about to give birth to a baby. His severe, unconscious bisexual conflict/gender confusion has overwhelmed him to the point where he actually believes, in the delusion described here, that he is a pregnant female. His "bearded lady" disease – schizophrenia – has now seized total control of his psyche and of his life.

640

       Van Tilburg has really given us three books in one, a history of a unique society, a Gothic novel, and a powerfully moving biography. The variously furious, passive-aggressive, inept, and effective relations of Routledge and her husband with each other, with other expedition members, with islanders, and with the island priestess Angata, who gained spiritual power over Routledge – all that makes a fascinating story. Routledge wrote of herself in 1891, 'It was my misfortune to be born a woman with the feelings of a man.' Her tragic biography traces how a rich heiress with a family history of mental illness mastered her inner problems sufficiently to become one of the earliest women graduates of Oxford University, then to make her own way through a man's world, and to contribute to our understanding of Easter Island, only to succumb at last to paranoia and to die in the mental asylum to which her husband and brother finally committed her.*

[ "Twilight at Easter," Jared Diamond, New York Review of Books, New York, March 25, 2004, p. 6. ]

Katherine Routledge's paranoid schizophrenia can be traced directly to her statement that "It was my misfortune to be born a woman with the feelings of a man." She is the classic female "bearded lady," emotionally a man, physically a woman. Every woman suffering from mental illness, at the deepest level of her psyche, is similar to Routledge and would make the same plaint.

Conversely, every mentally ill man, at the deepest level of his psyche, would feel that it was his "misfortune to be born a man with the feelings of a woman." Or, as the psychotic yet insightful Dr. Daniel Paul Schreber so eloquently stated it: "I would like to meet the man who, faced with the choice of either being a demented human being in male habitus, or a spirited woman, would not prefer the latter." (The psychotic woman would reverse Schreber's statement.)