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795-731

795.

Nongqawuse

Wikipedia article, click here.

[ Many thanks to Wikipedia for use of the above article. ]

This is the case of a young teenage-girl whose paranoid schizophrenic delusions and hallucinations, that is -- meeting with the spirits of three of her ancestors who had then given her certain instructions and prophesies to relay to her countrymen -- and which instructions, when later followed, had resulted in severe repercussions both for her people and for herself, illustrates once again the potentially enormous power of paranoid thinking to cause great harm to both individual persons and sometimes even to entire nations, as shown, for example, by the horrendous actions of the paranoid schizophrenic leaders Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung.

One final note: The photograph which accompanies the Wikipedia article shows Nongqawuse as being a big, masculine-looking girl, and her girlfriend Nonkosi as being much more petit and feminine-looking. It is almost as if they were husband and wife. Thus it is very easy to surmise that Nongqawuse was afflicted with the severe bisexual conflict and gender-confusion pathology which is invariably the root cause of all paranoid schizophrenic delusions and hallucinations.

794.

A.

      Washington -- A month before the murderous rampage at the Washington Navy Yard, Aaron Alexis called the police in Rhode Island to complain that he had changed hotels three times because he was being pursued by people keeping him awake at night by sending vibrations through the walls.
      When officers came to his hotel room early on Aug. 7, Mr. Alexis told them that a person he had argued with at an airport in Virginia "had sent three people to follow him and keep him awake by talking to him and sending vibrations into his body" via microwave machines, according to a Newport, R.I., police report. Mr. Alexis said he had heard "voices speaking to him through the wall, flooring and ceiling," the report said.
      Mr. Alexis identified himself to the police as a Navy contractor, and he sought treatment from the Veterans Affairs Department for psychiatric issues, according to a senior law enforcement official. [ ...... ]
      One co-worker, Barry R. Williams, said Mr. Alexis had held onto grudges. Some small thing would happen, something so small I couldn't even remember the details, but two, three weeks later he'd still be bringing it up, be upset about it," Mr. Williams said.

[ "Suspect's Past Fell Just Short of Raising Alarm / The Navy Yard Gunman", by Trip Gabriel, Joseph Goldstein and Thom Shanker, The New York Times, Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2013, pp. A1, A14. ]

B.

Washington -- The man who killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard last week left behind electronic documents saying that the government had been attacking his brain for the past three months using "extremely low frequency" electromagnetic waves created by the Navy, and that was the reason he needed to lash out, senior law enforcement officials said on Wednesday. [ ...... ]
      "Ultra low frequency attack is what I've been subjected to for the last three months," Mr. [Aaron] Alexis wrote in one document found by investigators, Valerie Parlave, the assistant director in charge of the F.B.I.'s Washington Field Office, said at a news conference Wednesday.
      "And to be perfectly honest, that is what has driven me to this," Mr. Alexis wrote.
      Mr. Alexis also said he "was prepared to die in the attack and accepted death as the inevitable consequence of his actions," Ms. Parlave said. It is not clear whether he sent the documents to anyone. [ ...... ]
      A month before the shootings, Mr. Alexis told the police in Newport, R.I., that he had been hearing voices sent by a "microwave machine." [ ...... ]
      The Navy has used low frequency electromagnetic waves, or E.L.F., for submarine communications. But some conspiracy theorists say the government has weaponized the frequencies to monitor and manipulate unsuspecting citizens, Ms. Parlave said. The phrases "my elf weapon," "end to the torment," "not what ya'll say" and "better off this way," were etched into the side of the shotgun that Mr. Alexis used to kill many of the victims, she said.

[ "Shooter Said Electronic Brain attacks Drove Him to Violence, F.B.I. Says", by Michael S. Schmidt, The New York Times, Thursday, Sept. 26, 2013, p. A17. ]

This is but one more of countless tragic tales of a man driven insane by his severe, repressed homosexual conflict and gender confusion, and, as in so many similar cases the end result was a bloody massacre of innocent persons by this paranoid schizophrenic, "bearded lady" madman -- Mr. Aaron Alexis, 34.

The "vibrations" he complained so much about in his body that he attributed to "microwave machines" being aimed at him by hostile forces, sprang directly from the toxic affect of his repressed, therefore undischarged, homosexual excitations.

He had grown very fond of the man he was living with in the Ft. Worth, Texas, area, until the latter married his girlfriend and then the relations between the three of them became very strained, due to Mr. Alexis's intense jealousy and resentment of his friend's new wife. Because of this, Mr. Alexis soon moved out and relocated to the home of another couple he knew who lived in the same area. From there he then embarked on his ill-fated trip back to Washington, D.C.

Mr. Alexis was acting just like a jilted lover might have done when he had poured sugar into the gas tank of his friend's car.

Finally, the fact that he had joined a Buddhist temple and sometimes took part in its rites wearing the female-like flowing robes of a priest, could very easily have exacerbated his fragile and insecure masculine gender-identity.

Mr. Alexis was as insane as it is possible for a person to become, and the fact that he was never involuntarily committed to a locked-down mental hospital, both for his own protection and that of unsuspecting others, could be termed almost criminal negligence on the part of the civil and mental health authorities. Let us hope that something of value has been learned from this very avoidable and unnecessary tragedy.

(Please also refer to the links AMOK and ACUTE ANXIETY on this website.)

793.

Dec. 14, 2012
Newtown, Conn.

A School-Day Calm Shattered

Sometime around 9 on the morning of Dec. 14 a young man identified as Adam Lanza entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., clutching two handguns: a Sig Sauer and a Glock [ plus a semiautomatic, AR-15 Bushmaster "long rifle" ]. Before long, 28 people were dead--among them Lanza's mother, a Sandy Hook kindergarten teacher, and 20 schoolchildren, none of whom had yet celebrated their 11th [ actually 8th ] birthday. In any sane society, events such as these would serve as a shock to the system. In America, it has become sickeningly routine. The United States can now claim 11 of the 20 worst mass shootings of the last half century; half of the dozen deadliest shootings in U.S. history have taken place in the past five years alone. Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Va., 2007, 32 dead. Binghamton, N.Y., 2009, 13 dead. Fort Hood, Texas, 2009, 13 dead. Aurora, Colo., 2012, 12 dead. Geneva County, Ala., 2009, 10 dead. And now Sandy Hook, where a scream, intended as a warning, echoed over the public-address system; where terrified students hid in closets, and huddled, crying, in the corner of the gymnasium; where the surviving children were told to "hold hands and close your eyes" as they were led past the bodies of their playmates.

[ Andrew Romano, "Newsweek" magazine, December 24, 2012, p. 15. ]

A.

HARRY STACK SULLIVAN, M.D.

      From my material, in which negative instances are conspicuously absent, I am forced to the conclusion that schizophrenic illnesses in the male are intimately related as a sequel to unfortunate prolongation of the attachment of the son and the mother. That schizophrenic disorders are but one of the possible outcomes of persisting immature attitudes subtending the mother and son relationship must be evident. The failure of growth of heterosexual interests, with persistence of autoerotic or homosexual interests in adolescence, is the general formula. The factors that determine a schizophrenic outcome may be clarified by a discussion on the one hand of the situations to which I shall refer as homosexual cravings and acute masturbation conflict - often immediate precursors of grave psychosis – and of the various homoerotic and autoerotic procedures, on the other. [ ..... ] In any case, the appearance within awareness of the homoerotic interest stirs such violent self-reproach that a dissociation or a vigorous defensive process results. If the self is able to dissociate the abhorrent system, the personality thereafter continues to be in grave danger of panic with succeeding schizophrenia, unless the sexual tensions are being drained off by some collateral procedure such as frequent masturbation or more or less definitely auto-sexual intercourse with women. Moreover, under cover of the dissociation, experience in any case continues to be integrated into the dissociated system, and its partition of energy in the personality to grow.

[ Harry Stack Sullivan, M.D. -- "Personal Psychopathology / Early Formulations". With Introduction by Helen Swick Perry. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. New York. Copyright 1972, 1965 by the William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation. First Edition, pp. 211-12. ]

B.

AMOK

      Amok or running amok is another syndrome first described in Malaysia, but also found in many other parts of the world, for example in the Philippines, in Africa, in the Caribbean, in Tierra del Fuego, etc. The 'going berserk' of the old Vikings was probably similar to running amok. It used to be common in Malaya until the beginning of this century. According to van Wilfften Palthe, [151] it was observed with regularity among the patients of the old Batavia Hospital until the old building was replaced by a modern structure and until modern medical care was instituted in 1914. Since then, amok has become rare among the hospital's patients. Van Wilfften Palthe claims that he has never observed or heard about a case of amok among the many Malayans living in European countries.
      In the early days of American occupation of the Philippines, a number of American soldiers became victims of amok Moros, a Moslem tribe. When the Moros' level of education was raised, amok disappeared. Maguigad [102] claims that amok is still quite frequent in the Philippines. It also appears to be fairly common among the Papuans of New Guinea under the name of 'Negi-negi' or 'Lulu,' and in Melanesia.
      The 'Puerto Rican Syndrome,' or 'Mal de Pelea' is, in my opinion, similar to amok, although the outcome is usually less gruesome. As in amok, the patient withdraws at first and gets into a brooding mood. All of a sudden and without any recognizable provocation he becomes violent and strikes out at anyone near him.[43]
      According to Zaguirre[159] and Kline,[74] the pre-morbid personality is impulsive, emotionally hyper-reactive, according to other authors schizoid. However, the psychodynamic interpretation is probably the same. The patient's attempt at conflict-solution by repressing his hostility is failing. He makes a last desperate attempt by withdrawing within himself. According to Maguigad, amok derives from the Malayan word 'amoq,' which means engaging furiously in battle. It is a life or death battle against a feeling of complete disintegration. I have sometimes sensed this feeling in a patient who from a catatonic [schizophrenic] stupor suddenly switched to catatonic excitement. It is a last-ditch attempt at survival against the inner forces which are about to disintegrate him.
      The Bantus express this idea in their belief that a person destined to die may escape death by killing someone else in his stead.
      In other words, the amok patient externalizes his desperate need to destroy the death-bringing inner conflict by killing other persons. [.....]

[ Johannes M. Meth, "Exotic Psychiatric Syndromes," in the "American Handbook of Psychiatry, Second Edition. Silvano Arieti, Editor-in-Chief. Volume Three. / Adult Clinical Psychiatry. Silvano Arieti and Eugene M. Brody, Editors." -- Basic Books, Inc. Publishers. New York. 1974. p. 729. ]

C.

ACUTE ANXIETY

      As the term implies, acute anxiety is usually sudden in onset and occurs in attacks. These may last for only a few moments, and disappear without major sequelae, or they may continue with waxing and waning intensity for many minutes or hours at a time. In some, the attack is an isolated episode that occurs rarely if ever again; in others, a series of attacks may occur in cycles lasting for days or weeks. Generally, the patient is unable to specify any precipitant of his symptoms, though in some a clue is provided from their associations, if one allows them to talk freely about the experience. In this connection, mention should be made here of one special form of anxiety that is encountered with some regularity and frequency, the so-called homosexual panic. Occurring usually in late adolescent or young adult males, often at a time when they are first exposed to the intensive contact with other males, such as exists in army barracks, male dormitories, or camps, homosexual panic is characterized by particularly severe anxiety associated with the idea that one may be homosexual or that other people think so. Those afflicted with this condition may verge on being delusional, are at times strongly impelled to suicidal [or homicidal] acts, and are frequently driven by the emotional pain of their symptoms to seek medical help, especially in general hospital emergency wards.

[ John C. Nemiah, "Anxiety: Signal, Symptom, and Syndrome," in the "American Handbook of Psychiatry. Second Edition. Silvano Arieti, Editor-in-Chief. Volume Three. / Adult Clinical Psychiatry. Silvano Arieti and Eugene M. Brody, Editors." -- Basic Books, Inc., Publishers. New York. 1974, p. 95. ]

792.

[ ..... ]
      Mr. Castro's interest had been piqued by the declassification and release of Soviet and American documents in 1991 and 1992, which both surprised and angered him. These included long-suppressed passages from memoirs, released 20 years after [Nikita S.] Khrushchev's death, in which he wrote that Mr. Castro had become irrational and possibly suicidal and that the crisis had to end before Cuba ignited a nuclear war. [ ..... ]
      After the American-sponsored Bay of Pigs debacle, Fidel Castro, then just 35 but already Cuba's unquestioned ruler, drew an astonishing conclusion. "The result of aggression against Cuba will be the start of a conflagration of incalculable consequences, and they will be affected too," he told the Cuban people. "It will no longer be a matter of them feasting on us. They will get as good as they give."
      For the next 18 months, Mr. Castro prepared for nuclear Armageddon, while Kennedy and Khrushchev sleepwalked toward the abyss. [ ..... ]
      However, Mr. Castro believed the fundamental purpose of Soviet nuclear weapons was to destroy the United States in the event of an invasion. "After centuries of humiliations and irrelevance," he concluded, Cuba would matter fundamentally to the fate of humanity. Cuba couldn't prevent the onslaught, nor could it expect to survive it. He insisted that the Cubans and Russians on the island would resist "to the last man, woman and child capable of holding a weapon." [ ..... ]
      While Cuba was preparing for nuclear war, Khrushchev and Kennedy were, unbeknown to Mr. Castro, moving toward a peaceful resolution of the crisis. Terrified that a catastrophic war might break out, Khrushchev took the initiative even as Kennedy was preparing an offer of his own. [ ..... ]
      Unaware of Kennedy's and Khrushchev's progress toward a deal, at 2 a.m. on Oct. 27 [1962], Mr. Castro decided to write to Khrushchev, encouraging him to use nuclear weapons to destroy the United States in the event of an invasion. At 2 a.m., he arrived at the Soviet embassy and told Alekseev [the Russian ambassador to Cuba] that they should go into the bunker beneath the embassy because an attack was imminent. According to declassified Soviet cables, a groggy but sympathetic Alekseev agreed and soon they were set up underground with Castro dictating and aides transcribing and translating a letter.
      Mr. Castro became frustrated, uncertain about what to say. After nine drafts, with the sun rising, Alekseev finally confronted Mr. Castro: are you asking Comrade Khrushchev to deliver a nuclear strike on the United States? Mr. Castro told him, "If they attack Cuba, we should wipe them off the face of the earth!" Alekseev was shocked, but he dutifully assisted Mr. Castro in fine-tuning the 10th and final draft of the letter.
      From his bunker, Mr. Castro wrote that, in the event of an American invasion, "the danger that that aggressive policy poses for humanity is so great that following that event the Soviet Union must never allow the circumstances in which the imperialists could launch the first nuclear strike against it." An American invasion, he added, "would be the moment to eliminate such danger forever through an act of clear, legitimate defense however harsh and terrible the solution would be, for there is no other." [ ..... ]
      According to his son and biographer, Sergei Khrushchev, the Soviet premier received that letter in the midst of a tense leadership meeting and shouted, "This is insane; Fidel wants to drag us into the grave with him." Khrushchev hadn't understood that Mr. Castro believed that Cuba was doomed, that war was inevitable, and that the Soviets should transform Cuba from a mere victim into a martyr.
      By ignoring Mr. Castro's messianic martyrdom, both Kennedy and Khrushchev inadvertently pushed the world close to Armageddon. [ ..... ]

[ "How Castro Held the World Hostage", By James G. Blight and Janet M. Lang, The New York Times OP-ED, Friday, October 26, 2012. ]

791.

      He has been seen as something of an unlikely if stumbling terrorism suspect, a used-car salesman from Texas accused of being the American nexus of a global terrorism plot that called for assassinating the Saudi ambassador to the United States.
      But the suspect, Mansour J. Arbabsiar, an Iranian-American who had been jailed pending trial, recently told a psychiatrist, a new report shows, that he has an idea about how he might resolve his legal stumble.
      "I have spent my life making deals," Mr. Arbabsiar was quoted as saying. "If America wants to make a deal with me, they can do it." He added: "If you want information, I will give you information. If you want addresses, I will give you addresses." [ ..... ]
      Prosecutors have said that after his arrest on Sept. 19, 2011, Mr. Arbabsiar waived his right to a lawyer and confessed to his part in the plot. He has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers, citing findings by two other experts that he was suffering from bipolar disorder, have asked that his statements be suppressed or that the case be dismissed. [ ..... ]
      Mr. Arbabsiar said he had been married three times; his third wife is the mother of his son, who has since had a boy of his own. [ ..... ]
      The report also describes an unusual incident related by Mr. Arbabsiar, which he said occurred around 2004. Mr. Arbarsiar was on a flight from Europe to Iran, and bought duty-free cologne for the pilot. Calling the gift a "nice gesture," the pilot invited Mr. Arbabsiar into the cockpit, allowed him to sit in the co-pilot's seat for about five minutes, and gave him "a special tour of the controls," Dr. Saathoff wrote, noting that the incident occurred but a few years after the Sept. 11 attacks. Dr. Saathoff also interviewed F.B.I. agents involved in the bombing case. [ ..... ]
      Dr. Saathoff said that Mr. Arbabsiar, because the crime he was charged with involved the planned assassination of a Saudi official, "felt that it would have the attention of top U.S. leadership, including President Obama."
      F.B.I. agents also told Dr. Saathoff that in their dealings with Mr. Arbabsiar, they had portrayed one agent as being President Obama's "right-hand man."
      " 'That impressed him. He wants to be important,' " Dr. Saathoff quoted the agent as saying about Mr. Arbabsiar.
      Mr. Arbabsiar's suggestion that his case might be resolved through a deal appears to have grown out of his view that because no one had been hurt or killed in the plot, such a resolution might be acceptable.
      He said that if he had killed someone, he should go to prison. "But nothing happened," he is quoted as saying, "so I think that there is a chance to make a deal that works for both of us."
      The psychiatrist depicts Mr. Arbabsiar as being open about his responsibility and his interest in being considered for lenient treatment.
      "I said to the F.B.I., 'Yes, I made a mistake. I am not looking for forgiveness,'" Mr. Arbabsiar says. " 'We all make mistakes. Some are big and some are little' " he continued.
      "I know that this is a big mistake so I felt, 'Yes, O.K., put me in jail. Just not for too long,' " Mr. Arbabsiar added.

[ "Psychiatrist Details Talks With Suspect in Bomb Plot / Report Describes a Proposal to Cooperate" -- by Benjamin Weiser, The New York Times, Oct. 5, 2011, p. A18. ]

790.

Subtitled "The Case for Feminist Revolution," "The Dialectic of Sex" was published by William Morrow & Company in 1970. In it, Ms. Firestone extended Marxist theories of Class oppression to offer a radical analysis of the oppression of women, arguing that sexual inequity springs from the onus of childbearing, which devolves on women by pure biological happenstance.
      "Just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself," Ms. Firestone wrote, "so the end goal of feminist revolution must be ... not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally."
      In the utopian future Ms. Firestone envisioned, reproduction would be utterly divorced from sex: conception would be accomplished through artificial insemination, with gestation taking place outside the body in an artificial womb. While some critics found her proposals visionary, others deemed them quixotic at best.
      Reviewing "The Dialectic of Sex," in The New York Times, John Leonard wrote, "A sharp and often brilliant mind is at work here." But, he added, "Miss Firestone is preposterous in asserting that 'men can't love.'"
      The book, which was translated into several languages, hurtled Ms. Firestone into the front ranks of second-wave feminists, alongside women like Betty Friedan, Kate Millet and Germaine Greer. It remains widely taught in college women's-studies courses. [ ..... ]
      Her only other book, "Airless Spaces," was issued in 1998 by the experimental publisher Semiotext(e). A memoir-in-stories that employs fictional forms to recount real-life events, it describes Ms. Firestone's hospitalization with schizophrenia, which by the 1980s had overtaken her. [ ..... ]
      In "Airless Spaces," Ms. Firestone writes of life after hospitalization, on psychiatric medication. The account is in the third person, but the story is
her own: [ ..... ]
      The story continues: "She was lucid, yes, at what price. She sometimes recognized on the faces of others joy and ambition and other emotions she could recall having had once, long ago. But her life was ruined, and she had no salvage plan."

[ "Shulamith Firestone, 67, Feminist Writer, Is Dead", by Margalit Fox, The New York Times OBITUARIES, August 31, 2012, p. B14. ]

789.

A.

AURORA, Colo. -- Throughout this growing city, which tumbles from the edge of Denver out onto the plains and stretches across three Colorado counties, there are red, white and blue signs that declare "Aurora All-America City" -- a proud reminder of a national civic award for demonstrating deftness at dealing with municipal challenges.

Just days after a gunman [James Eagan Holmes, 24] opened fire on a midnight showing of "The Dark Knight Rises," killing 12 people and injuring 58, the signs took on a darker, more complicated meaning.

Aurora, Colorado's third largest city, now joins the ranks of American communities that have endured a mass shooting. Like nearby Littleton [site of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre], its immediate future will now be spent searching for an answer that will almost certainly never become fully clear.

"We've dealt with violence in this city before. But I've never seen people here shaken as much as after this," said Adam Goldstein, a reporter for the Aurora Sentinel who grew up here. [ ..... ]

[ Dan Frosch, "An 'All-America City' Turns Inward in a Search for Answers That May Never Come", NYTimes.com, July 21, 2012. ]

B.

Milwaukee -- Around the middle of June, Wade M. Page [40] split with his girlfriend, moving out of the home they shared in South Milwaukee. In mid-July, he suddenly stopped showing up to his job as a machine operator. About two weeks later, he bought a nine millimeter handgun, testing it by firing 50 rounds at a target in the gun shop's basement.
      Within the next six days, Mr. Page would send a text message to his landlord saying he was having a horrific week, according to the landlord's former stepson, and he would then gun down six people at a Sikh temple in nearby Oak Creek before fatally shooting himself in the head, the authorities said on Wednesday.
      Authorities have yet to find a note or any clear indication of Mr. Page's motive. As they continue combing through mounds of evidence, including e-mails, telephone records and security footage, and as relatives of the Sikh victims prepare for funerals and memorial services, interviews with Mr. Page's former colleagues depict a troubling final few weeks in his life.
      "We are still pursuing all aspects of his behavior, the motivations for his actions," said James L. Santelle, the United States Attorney for the eastern district of Wisconsin. "We may never know for certain; we may never know exactly what was animating him."

[ "Investigators Seek Clues In Gunman's Last Weeks Before Temple Murders" -- by John Eligon, The New York Times NATIONAL Thursday, August 9, 2012, p. A13. ]

C.

A teenager killed eight people with a knife and wounded five more in northeast China after falling out with his girlfriend, the state news media said Thursday. The 17-year-old suspect killed two of the girl's family members and six other people before fleeing, the state-run newspaper Legal Daily said. It reported that he had been caught but did not describe the circumstances. The official Xinhua News Agency said the attack took place on Wednesday night in Liaoning province. News reports said that the suspect was from Fushun and that his surname was Li. The attack happened in the town of Yongling. The police in Xinbin County, which oversees the town, declined to comment.

[ "China: Teenager Kills 8 With a Knife" -- The New York Times. August 3, 2012, p. A7. ]

D.

Manny Fernandez

COLLEGE STATION, Tex. -- On his Facebook page, Thomas Caffall posted a list of "inspirational people." One was Carlos Hathcock, one of the most famous snipers in the United States Marine Corps who recorded 93 kills during the Vietnam War. Another was Vasily Zaytsev, a Russian sniper during World War II who was known for his skills with the Mosin-Nagant rifle.
      On Monday afternoon, Mr. Cafall, 35, became a deadly sniper himself, shooting law enforcement officers and innocent bystanders in a quiet neighborhood near Texas A&M University where he rented a home.
      The authorities said Mr. Caffall killed a local constable who was serving him with an eviction notice and a 51-year-old man. Four other people were wounded, three College Station police officers and a 51-year-old woman, before Mr. Caffall was shot and killed by the police.
      Unlike other police standoffs that end with a brief burst of violence, Mr. Caffall exchanged gunfire with officers for about 30 minutes, terrorizing a residential area that is home to many students. Police officials said on Tuesday that it was too early in their investigation to determine Mr. Caffall's motive. [ ..... ]
      Mr. Caffall's relatives have told reporters that he was a disturbed young man who had mental problems and that he quit his job several months ago. "We're just so sorry for this tragedy, and we feel for the families that are all involved, said Mr. Caffall's sister, Courtney Graham Clark, who also lives in College Station. "We're still in shock."
      Ms. Clark declined to discuss her brother's mental state. On his Facebook page, Mr. Caffall listed his relationship status as divorced and his religious views as Christian, writing: "God loves us all. We are all capable of redemption, if we are willing to change." [ ..... ]

[ "Gunman in Texas Wrote Of 'Inspirational' Snipers / Rifle Purchase Was Noted on Facebook Page" -- by Manny Fernandez. The New York times. August 15, 2012, p. A11. ]

E.

The defense team for a teenager charged with killing three students and wounding three others in a high school cafeteria in Chardon asked a judge on Friday to move the trial out of the community. "Geauga County has been in an ongoing state of mourning and community support for the victims and their families," Lawyers for the teenager, T.J. Lane, 17, said in their request. Every major roadway and every neighborhood in Chardon and in surrounding communities has memorials to the victims, defense lawyers said, and the grief poses a risk that any local jury will be biased against him. The defense said news coverage of the shooting had been so extensive and the subject "so disturbing" that it would be impossible to find an unbiased jury in Geauga County, east of Cleveland. Mr. Lane has been charged with aggravated murder, attempted aggravated murder and felonious assault in the shooting at Chardon High School on Feb. 27. He could face life in prison if convicted. No motive has been established for the shooting.

[ "Ohio: Change of Venue Sought In Trial Over Cafeteria Killings" -- The New York Times. August 8, 2012, p. A13. ]

AMOK

Amok or running amok is another syndrome first described in Malaysia, but also found in many other parts of the world, for example in the Philippines, in Africa, in the Caribbean, in Tierra del Fuego, etc. The 'going berserk' of the old Vikings was probably similar to running amok. It used to be common in Malaya until the beginning of this century. According to van Wilfften Palthe, [151] it was observed with regularity among the patients of the old Batavia Hospital until the old building was replaced by a modern structure and until modern medical care was instituted in 1914. Since then, amok has become rare among the hospital's patients. Van Wilfften Palthe claims that he has never observed or heard about a case of amok among the many Malayans living in European countries.
      In the early days of American occupation of the Philippines, a number of American soldiers became victims of amok Moros, a Moslem tribe. When the Moros' level of education was raised, amok disappeared. Maguigad[102] claims that amok is still quite frequent in the Philippines. It also appears to be fairly common among the Papuans of New Guinea under the name of 'Negi-negi' or 'Lulu,' and in Melanesia.
      The 'Puerto Rican Syndrome,' or 'Mal de Pelea' is, in my opinion, similar to amok, although the outcome is usually less gruesome. As in amok, the patient withdraws at first and gets into a brooding mood. All of a sudden and without any recognizable provocation he becomes violent and strikes out at anyone near him.[43]
      According to Zaguirre[159] and Kline,[74] the pre-morbid personality is impulsive, emotionally hyper-reactive, according to other authors schizoid. However, the psychodynamic interpretation is probably the same. The patient's attempt at conflict-solution by repressing his hostility is failing. He makes a last desperate attempt by withdrawing within himself. According to Maguigad, amok derives from the Malayan word 'amoq,' which means engaging furiously in battle. It is a life or death battle against a feeling of complete disintegration. I have sometimes sensed this feeling in a patient who from a catatonic [schizophrenic] stupor suddenly switched to catatonic excitement. It is a last-ditch attempt at survival against the inner forces which are about to disintegrate him.
      The Bantus express this idea in their belief that a person destined to die may escape death by killing someone else in his stead.
      In other words, the amok patient externalizes his desperate need to destroy the death-bringing inner conflict by killing other persons. [........]

[ Johannes M. Meth, "Exotic Psychiatric Syndromes," in the "American Handbook of Psychiatry, Second Edition. Silvano Arieti, Editor-in-Chief. Volume Three. / Adult Clinical Psychiatry. Silvano Arieti and Eugene M. Brody, Editors." -- Basic Books, Inc. Publishers. New York. 1974. p. 729. ]

ACUTE ANXIETY

As the term implies, acute anxiety is usually sudden in onset and occurs in attacks. These may last for only a few moments, and disappear without major sequelae, or they may continue with waxing and waning intensity for many minutes or hours at a time. In some, the attack is an isolated episode that occurs rarely if ever again; in others, a series of attacks may occur in cycles lasting for days or weeks. Generally, the patient is unable to specify any precipitant of his symptoms, though in some a clue is provided from their associations, if one allows them to talk freely about the experience. In this connection, mention should be made here of one special form of anxiety that is encountered with some regularity and frequency, the so-called homosexual panic. Occurring usually in late adolescent or young adult males, often at a time when they are first exposed to the intensive contact with other males, such as exists in army barracks, male dormitories, or camps, homosexual panic is characterized by particularly severe anxiety associated with the idea that one may be homosexual or that other people think so. Those afflicted with this condition may verge on being delusional, are at times strongly impelled to suicidal [or homicidal] acts, and are frequently driven by the emotional pain of their symptoms to seek medical help, especially in general hospital emergency wards.

[ John C. Nemiah, "Anxiety: Signal, Symptom, and Syndrome," in the "American Handbook of Psychiatry. Second Edition. Silvano Arieti, Editor-in-Chief. Volume Three. / Adult Clinical Psychiatry. Silvano Arieti and Eugene M. Brody, Editors." -- Basic Books, Inc., Publishers. New York. 1974, p. 95. ]

788.

A.

[.....] The Kennedys have a celebrated tradition of keeping their secrets to themselves, but Bobby's affidavit, sworn September 16, 2011, and filed in New York Supreme Court in Westchester County as part of their divorce, discussed a Kennedy's family private life with sad candor. In the document, Bobby made the startling claim that Mary was physically abusing him and threatening suicide in front of the children. He said he cried often during his marriage, but not from sadness or grief. "Mary's violence and physical abuse toward me began before we were married," Bobby said in the affidavit. "Soon after Mary became pregnant with our first son, Mary, in a sudden rage about my continued friendship with [my ex-wife] Emily, hit me in the face with her fist. She was a trained boxer and I got a shiner. Her engagement ring crushed my tear duct causing permanent damage ... Mary asked me to lie to her family about the cause of my shiner." [.....]
      "On May 26, 2011, Mary ran over and killed the dog, Porcia, in the driveway," Bobby wrote of an experience after he and Mary had separated. "She had [our youngest son] Aidan call to tell me. He was disconsolate and crying. I asked to speak to mom and Mary came on the phone. She said I should come over and spend the night in my old room with the kids who were distraught. She said she intended to kill herself unless I called off the divorce and unless I promised to recommit to the marriage. She promised that if I came over she would stay in her room and wouldn't see me or harass me.
      "I drove over in a tow truck with my boat on a trailer in preparation for a planned trip to Cape Cod the following day. When I got there Aidan was in Mary's room. Mary was intoxicated. I opened the door and she leapt out of her bed and hit me with a roundhouse punch that, had I not blocked it, would have undoubtedly broken my face. Pointing to Aidan, she screamed, 'You told this child you didn't love me?' and hit me again, raining blows down on me as I backed down the hall. She struck me maybe 30 more times or more. I moved slowly backward because she was drunk and unsteady and I didn't want her to tumble over the bannister. She screamed at Aidan as she hit me. 'He is the most evil kind of man in the world. Everything he does is evil and a fraud. He is a philanderer, an adulterer, a sex addict.' Aidan was crying. I backed down the back stairs blocking her blows--and dodged out the kitchen door. She pursued me, pummeling me and pushing me with her fists all the way." [.....]
      Like the Kennedys and the Skakels, Mary came from a large Irish-American family. Her father, a college professor, died when she was barely a teenager. The Richardsons were far from wealthy, but they managed to send Mary to the progressive Putney School in Vermont. Her Putney roommate was Kerry Kennedy, Bobby's younger sister. Kerry recalls Mary as both troubled and extraordinarily creative and original. Mary was a tall, svelte young woman with long brunette hair and a windblown, natural beauty that was intimidating to most men. She was a straight-A student, but hardly the scholarly sort. She had a daring, adventurous quality, unlike the withdrawn, quiet Richardsons, and she was drawn to the excitement of life with the Kennedys. [.....]
      During their years at Putney and Brown University, and living together while working in Boston and New York, Mary and Kerry had the closeness of twins. [.....] For a while, Mary worked for Andy Warhol and was part of the artist's avant-garde set. She defined herself as a "SoHo-girl," living and partying in what was in the 80's Manhattan's bohemia. Dressed always elegantly in black as she danced through the nightlife of the city, she intimidated most men. It wasn't only that she was gorgeous, but that she had an intellect to match, a nearly photographic memory, and a promising career as an architectural engineer. [.....]
      There was something else they had in common. They were both recovering in 12-step programs, and had exhibited destructive, addictive behavior. In 1985, two years after Bobby had been busted for heroin possession and become sober, Mary was in a hospital for anorexia, which she had suffered from at least since her Putney days. Afterward, finding the structure and radical honesty of 12-step meetings helpful, she became a regular at AA, just like Bobby. Bobby had what his brother Doug called the Kennedy "St. Francis complex," always trying to do good and help people, and he reached out to Mary as if reaching out to a version of himself.
      While Bobby thrived on chaos, Mary needed structure and constancy and could not rest if there was an unmade bed in the house. [.....]
      Sometimes in the middle of the night, Bobby would awake to find Mary standing over his bed, beating him, according to the affidavit. Bobby tried to protect himself from her punches and even once jumped out of a second-story window to escape.
      In 1997, after three years of marriage, Bobby asked Mary for a divorce. Her reaction, as expressed in the affidavit, was explosive. Mary vowed that she would kill herself and before doing so tell the world what a monster he was. Whenever Bobby mentioned divorce, she would threaten suicide, but the next morning she would be calm and gentle. She would say she was sorry and didn't know why she was acting this way. For a time she would be her old wonderful self at night as well as during the day, and Bobby had renewed hope, the affidavit said.
      Mary sought the help of psychiatrists and therapists. There was all sorts of family counseling. But nothing got better. By 2003 Bobby wanted out, and he started living a single man's life. [.....]
      Almost everyone, including Mary's own therapists, thought that the marriage was so damaging to both of them that it must end. And in September 2007, Bobby hired a divorce lawyer. With that, everything bad and dangerous escalated. [.....]
      There was no greater witness to the chaos than the housekeeper. "Once, during dinner, Mary grabbed a plate of spaghetti and threw it all on Bobby in front of the children," says the housekeeper. "Once they were having a fight while Bobby was taking a bath. We heard lots of noises upstairs. Mary came down the stairs and took the car and left. Five minutes later Bobby came down. My sister asked, "Are you OK, Bobby?" Bobby's face was really white. And then my sister said, "What happened to you?" And he said, "Mary attacked me in the bath with scissors." [.....]
      Bobby repeatedly pleaded with Mary's brothers and sisters to do an intervention. On June 17, 2011, he wrote an email to them saying, "Mary is a wonderful, generous, kind, and wise person but depression and illness are now killing her. I know you have told me that her frequent suicide threats are not real. I do not believe this is accurate. I see her now sinking into a terrible darkness. She desperately needs a family intervention." [.....]
      The family feud exploded after Mary's body was found hanging from the rafter in the barn. That night, several of the Richardson siblings arrived at the house while Bobby was away, and were rifling through drawers in Mary's office, presumably looking for a suicide note or other explanation for this tragic end. [.....]
      Whatever her demons, Mary Richardson Kennedy had finally escaped them. [....]

[ "The Last Days of Mary Kennedy" -- by Laurence Leamer, Newsweek magazine, June 18, 2012, pp. 26-33. ]

B.

More than thirty years of intensive investigation of these problems permits me to make the general statement that in man every case of emotional neurosis or psychosis is the result of more or less conflict and confusion involving bisexual differentiation. ...Dementing schizophrenia is essentially a regression to the cloacal level of hermaphrodism.

[ "Bisexual Factors in Curable Schizophrenia"*, by Edward J. Kempf, M.D. -- *Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, May 18, 1948. -- "Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology." 1949 Jul Vol 44(3), pp. 414-419. NOTE: Pls see Dr. Kempf's complete article in its link on this website ]

C.

These considerations therefore lend an added weight to the circumstance that we are in point of fact driven by experience to attribute to homosexual wishful phantasies an intimate (perhaps invariable) relation to this particular form of disease. Distrusting my own experience on the subject, I have during the last few years joined with my friends C. G. Jung of Zurich and Sandor Ferenczi of Budapest in investigating upon this single point a number of cases of paranoid disorder which have come under observation. The patients whose histories provided the material for this enquiry included both men and women, and varied in race, occupation, and social standing. Yet we were astonished to find that in all of these cases a defense against a homosexual wish was clearly recognizable at the very centre of the conflict which underlay the disease, and that it was in an attempt to master an unconsciously reinforced current of homosexuality that they had all of them come to grief.1 [1 Further confirmation is afforded by Maeder's analysis of a paranoid patient J.B. (1910). The present paper, I regret to say, was completed before I had an opportunity of reading Maeder's work.]

[ "Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)". 1911. Sigmund Freud. The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. XII. The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. London, 1958, p. 59. ]

787.

A.

THE HAGUE -- Of all the men associated with the cruelties of the Bosnian war, none has been more roundly condemned by public opinion than Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb military commander who ran a deadly military campaign in the 1990's, of a kind not seen in Europe since World War II. [.....]
      But on this day, as a prosecutor, Dermot Gromme, presented his narrative of the war and what he described as Mr. Mladic's leading role, Mr. Mladic seemed revived, even animated by film shown in the court, scenes from the time he kept the city of Sarajevo under siege for 44 months of shelling and sniping at civilians. And he nodded approvingly as rousing political speeches from 1992 were replayed, calling on Bosnian Serbs to rally for war against perceived Muslim and Croatian enemies. [.....] The campaign to divide Sarajevo, which the prosecutor said was "once a model of ethnic diversity", left more than 10,000 people dead. He played the sounds of what he called radio intercepts in which Mr. Mladic was heard personally directing fire against civilian targets in Sarajevo's Old Town. [.....]
      During a break, Kada Hotic, who had traveled from Srebrenica, had lost her breath in anger. "He ordered the killing of my husband, my son, my two brothers and my brother-in-law," she said. "Now that I look him in the face, I am so disturbed, I want revenge." [.....]
      Mr. Mladic, who was arrested in a Serbian village in May 2011, faces charges of war crimes against humanity and two counts of genocide -- one for the ethnic cleansing campaign and a second for a massacre during the war's climax, when Mr. Mladic's forces overran a small contingent of United Nations peacekeepers in Srebrenica. About 8,000 unarmed men and boys were killed over several days in July 1995 in what was portrayed as acts of vengeance for Serbian deaths at the hands of Muslims.
      "By the time Mladic and his troops murdered thousands in Srebrenica," Mr. Groome said, "they were well rehearsed in the craft of murder." [.....]
      The prosecutor described how Bosnian Serbs had used strategies of ethnic cleansing to redraw the demographic outline of areas they targeted to ensure "the separation of the Serbian people from the other two national communities" -- Bosnian Muslims and Croats. "Ethnic cleansing was the purpose of military action" rather than a consequence of war, he said.
      Mr. Mladic has refused to enter a formal plea, but has said he is not guilty of wrongdoing because his mission was "to defend the Serbs." [.....]
      At the start of the session, Mr. Mladic greeted a man in the gallery; he nodded and smiled, and the man responded in kind.
      Was he connected to Mr. Mladic, a reporter asked the man, who identified himself as Satko Mujagic from Bosnia.
      "Yes, I am connected to Mladic," Mr. Mujagic replied, his voice rising in anger. "His army attacked my town, Kozarac, burned down my house, killed my grandmother, my cousins, my best friend, my schoolteachers. I spent 200 days in Omarska prison camp and was beaten until I could no longer walk. So I am connected to him."
      Why, then, did he smile and greet Mr. Mladic?
      "Because I am so very happy he is there, in the dock," Mr. Mujagic said.

[ "Former Bosnian Serb General Hears Indictment, and Insults, as Trial Opens," by Marlise Simons, The New York Times INTERNATIONAL Thursday, May 17, 2012, p. A7. ]

B.

Paranoia--An Historical Digression

      Paranoia, from Greek meaning wrong or faulty knowledge or reasoning, "antedates Hippocrates" (Cameron, 1944) when "it was most frequently used in a very general sense...as equivalent of our popular current term insanity". It was resurrected by Vogel in 1772 and further extended by Heinroth in 1818. Its application was then gradually restricted to partial insanity or monomania until Zeihen (1894) and Cramer (1895) "Threw together all the 'primary disorders of reasoning'...including the acute and chronic forms and even all the delirious disorders of no matter what origin" (Myer, 1928) under that title. [.....]

[ "Memoirs of My Nervous Illness," by Daniel Paul Schreber. Translated, Edited, with Introduction, Notes and Discussion by Ida Macalpine, M.D. and Richard A. Hunter, M.D., M.R.C.P., D.P.M. // Wm. Dawson & Sons Ltd., London, 1955, pp. 13-4. ]

786.

A.

Washington -- Federal authorities on Thursday charged a 21-year-old Idaho man with attempting to assassinate President Obama -- saying he had told one friend that the president was "the Antichrist" and that he "needed to kill him," according to a complaint filed in federal court.
      The man, Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez of Idaho Falls, who is accused of spraying bullets from an assault rifle at the residential floors ofthe White House last week, was also "convinced the federal government is conspiring against him," and had become "increasingly more agitated" before he disappeared from Idaho last month, the complaint said. [ ....... ]
      Mr. Ortega-Hernandez's family had reported him missing in Idaho Falls last month, after he drove away in the Honda Accord, the complaint said. The Secret Service has said it did not have Mr. Ortega-Hernandez on record as having made any threats against the president. But after the shooting, several acquaintances said he had been fixated on Mr. Obama.
      Besides the one friend who told investigators that Mr. Ortega-Hernandez had said he believed the president was the "Antichrist" and that he needed to kill him, another friend said he stated "President Obama was the problem with the government," was "the devil," and that he "needed to be taken care of." The second friend also said he appeared to be "preparing for something."
      Mr. Ortega-Hernandez has had legal problems in Idaho, Texas and Utah, including charges related to drug offenses, resisting arrest and assault on a police officer, officials have said. He is said to be heavily tattooed, with the word "Israel" on his neck and pictures of rosary beads and hands clasped in prayer on his chest. [ ....... ]

[ "In Gunshots, A Trail of Threats is Reported," by Charlie Savage, The New York Times, November 18, 2001, p. A16. ]

B.

These considerations therefore lend an added weight to the circumstance that we are in point of fact driven by experience to attribute to homosexual wishful phantasies an intimate (perhaps an invariable) relation to this particular form of disease. Distrusting my own experience on the subject, I have during the last few years joined with my friends C.G. Jung of Zurich and Sandor Ferenczi of Budapest in investigating upon this single point a number of cases of paranoid disorder which have come under observation. The patients whose histories provided the material for this enquiry included both men and women, and varied in race, occupation, and social standing. Yet we were astonished to find that in all of these cases a defense against a homosexual wish was clearly recognizable at the very centre of the conflict which underlay the disease, and that it was in an attempt to master an unconsciously reinforced current of homosexuality that they had all of them come to grief.1 [1. Further confirmation is afforded by Maeder's analysis of a paranoid patient J.B. (1910.) The present paper, I regret to say, was completed before I had an opportunity of reading Maeder's work.] This was certainly not what we had expected. Paranoia is precisely a disorder in which a sexual aetiology is by no means obvious; far from this, the strikingly prominent features in the causation of paranoia, especially among males, are social humiliations and slights. But if we go into the matter only a little more deeply, we shall be able to see that the really operative factor in these social injuries lies in the part played in them by the homosexual components of emotional life.

[ "Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides) 1911." / Sigmund Freud, The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. XII. The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. London, 1958, p. 59. ]

785.

A.

      The mother, a high school teacher and writer, called 911 on Tuesday morning asking for help with her teenage son's epileptic seizure. But her reason for needing assistance quickly changed.
      "He's coming after me!" shouted the mother, Karyn Kay, according to court records. "No, no, no!"
      After several minutes of screams and wails, the 911 recording captured a brief silence, which was broken by the voice of the son, Henry Wachtel, 19.
      "Mommy, mommy, please don't die," Mr. Wachtel said.
      Several hours later, Mrs. Kay, 63, died from her injuries at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.
      Mr. Wachtel was arraigned on Wednesday in State Supreme Court on a second-degree murder charge. Courtney Groves, an assistant district attorney, said the 911 recording captured Mr. Wachtel "beating his mother to death," in their apartment in Hell's Kitchen.
      To those who knew her, Ms. Kay's death was a tragically violent end to a life spent in pursuit of peaceful joys. She had raised Mr. Wachtel, her only child, on her own since divorcing his father, Edward Wachtel, in 1998. [ ...... ]
      Her son was born in 1993 on the birthday of one of her sisters, and she named him after their father.
      "Her life revolved around him," said Mr. Zinman, a lawyer and writer in Bloomington, Ind. [ ....... ]
      When the police arrived at the apartment on Tuesday morning, they found Mr. Wachtel "wild eyed" and "covered in blood," Ms. Groves, the prosecutor, said in court.
      When police asked him what happened, Mr. Wachtel uttered one sentence.
      "It was a mistake," he said.

[ "Medication Cited in Killing of Woman; Son Charged" -- by Russ Buettner, The New York Times, April 4, 2012. ]

B.

From my material, in which negative instances are conspicuously absent, I am forced to the conclusion that schizophrenic illnesses in the male are intimately related as a sequel to unfortunate prolongation of the attachment of the son and the mother. That schizophrenic disorders are but one of the possible outcomes of the persisting immature attitudes subtending the mother and son relationship must be evident. The failure of growth of heterosexual interests, with persistence of autoerotic or homosexual interests in adolescence, is the general formula. The factors that determine a schizophrenic outcome may be clarified by a discussion on the one hand of the situations to which I shall refer as homosexual cravings and acute masturbation conflict -- often immediate precursors of grave psychosis -- and of the various homoerotic and autoerotic procedures, on the other.

[ Harry Stack Sullivan, M.D., "Personal Psychopathology / Early Formulations" -- W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, 1972, p. 211. ]

C.

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 [ himself ] from its terrible influence and win her own womanhood [ his own manhood ] and independence.

[ Edward J. Kempf, M.D. "Psychopathology". C.V. Mosby Co., St. Louis, Missouri. 1920. ] *

* The extra bracketed words appearing in the above E.J. Kempf quotation have been added to emphasize how this type of schizophrenogenic mother-child relationship effects equally children of either sex.

D.

"I don't know where my mother ends and I begin."

[ A man afflicted with schizophrenia, speaking to his psychiatrist. ]

784.

A.

Horror in Kandahar /
The Pentagon investigation into a soldier's rampage must be swift and thorough

       The massacre of at least 16 civilians in three Afghan villages by an American soldier on Sunday was an unspeakable horror. The United States said Monday that an investigation is under way. It must be fast, transparent and conclusive so that Afghans can see that America is committed to justice and responsive to their outrage.
       According to American and Afghan officials, the soldier shot the civilians execution-style, including nine children, after methodically breaking into three separate homes in a district in Kandahar Province. After killing the civilians, he set some of their bodies on fire. The soldier's name has not been disclosed, but, according to The Times, he is a thirty-eight-year old Army staff sergeant and a married father of two children based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Wash. He had three tours in Iraq and was on his first tour in Afghanistan.
       This atrocity appears to be the act of one individual. No one has suggested a motive. But if the investigation reveals that the sergeant showed signs of mental illness or other forms of distress, then this tragedy clearly has significant implications for how the military identifies, monitors and treats troubled service members. The Pentagon needs to make that issue part of a thorough inquiry.

[ From the first half of the lead editorial in the New York Times, March 13, 2012, p. A20. ]

B.

AMOK

Amok or running amok is another syndrome first described in Malaysia, but also found in many other parts of the world, for example in the Philippines, in Africa, in the Caribbean, in Tierra del Fuego, etc. The 'going berserk' of the old Vikings was probably similar to running amok. It used to be common in Malaya until the beginning of this century. According to van Wilfften Palthe, [151] it was observed with regularity among the patients of the old Batavia Hospital until the old building was replaced by a modern structure and until modern medical care was instituted in 1914. Since then, amok has become rare among the hospital's patients. Van Wilfften Palthe claims that he has never observed or heard about a case of amok among the many Malayans living in European countries.
       In the early days of American occupation of the Philippines, a number of American soldiers became victims of amok Moros, a Moslem tribe. When the Moros' level of education was raised, amok disappeared. Maguigad[102] claims that amok is still quite frequent in the Philippines. It also appears to be fairly common among the Papuans of New Guinea under the name of 'Negi-negi' or 'Lulu,' and in Melanesia.
       The 'Puerto Rican Syndrome,' or 'Mal de Pelea' is, in my opinion, similar to amok, although the outcome is usually less gruesome. As in amok, the patient withdraws at first and gets into a brooding mood. All of a sudden and without any recognizable provocation he becomes violent and strikes out at anyone near him.[43]
       According to Zaguirre[159] and Kline,[74] the premorbid personality is impulsive, emotionally hyper-reactive, according to other authors schizoid. However, the psychodynamic interpretation is probably the same. The patient's attempt at conflict-solution by repressing his hostility is failing. He makes a last desperate attempt by withdrawing within himself. According to Maguigad, amok derives from the Malayan word 'amoq,' which means engaging furiously in battle. It is a life or death battle against a feeling of complete disintegration. I have sometimes sensed this feeling in a patient who from a catatonic [schizophrenic] stupor suddenly switched to catatonic excitement. It is a last-ditch attempt at survival against the inner forces which are about to disintegrate him.
       The Bantus express this idea in their belief that a person destined to die may escape death by killing someone else in his stead.
       In other words, the amok patient externalizes his desperate need to destroy the death-bringing inner conflict by killing other persons. [........]

[ Johannes M. Meth, "Exotic Psychiatric Syndromes," in the "American Handbook of Psychiatry, Second Edition. Silvano Arieti, Editor-in-Chief. Volume Three. / Adult Clinical Psychiatry. Silvano Arieti and Eugene M. Brody, Editors." -- Basic Books, Inc. Publishers. New York. 1974. p. 729. ]

C.

ACUTE ANXIETY

       As the term implies, acute anxiety is usually sudden in onset and occurs in attacks. These may last for only a few moments, and disappear without major sequelae, or they may continue with waxing and waning intensity for many minutes or hours at a time. In some, the attack is an isolated episode that occurs rarely if ever again; in others, a series of attacks may occur in cycles lasting for days or weeks. Generally, the patient is unable to specify any precipitant of his symptoms, though in some a clue is provided from their associations, if one allows them to talk freely about the experience. In this connection, mention should be made here of one special form of anxiety that is encountered with some regularity and frequency, the so-called homosexual panic. Occurring usually in late adolescent or young adult males, often at a time when they are first exposed to the intensive contact with other males, such as exists in army barracks, male dormitories, or camps, homosexual panic is characterized by particularly severe anxiety associated with the idea that one may be homosexual or that other people think so. Those afflicted with this condition may verge on being delusional, to suicidal [ or homicidal -- jmmahoney ] acts, and are frequently driven by the emotional pain of their symptoms to seek medical help, especially in general hospital emergency wards.

[ John C. Nemiah, "Anxiety: Signal, Symptom, and Syndrome," in the "American Handbook of Psychiatry. Second Edition. Silvano Arieti, Editor-in-Chief. Volume Three. / Adult Clinical Psychiatry. Silvano Arieti and Eugene M. Brody, Editors." -- Basic Books, Inc., Publishers. New York. 1974, p. 95. ]

Schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, has struck again suddenly and without any warning, leaving more death and destruction in its wake as it has always done, down through the ages, and will continue to do so far into the future -- most assuredly and most tragically. [ See also the Comment section in # 763, or else in the link AMOK. ]

783.

       In 1979, I visited Philip K. Dick for a profile I was writing. In a modest apartment he shared with dusty stacks of books, deteriorating furniture, a vintage stereo system and a couple of cats, he took the opportunity to go public about a singular experience dominating his life. For the past five years, he told me earnestly, he had been receiving messages from a spiritual entity. "It invaded my mind and assumed control of my motor centers," he said. "It set about healing me physically and my 4-year-old boy, who had an undiagnosed life-threatening birth defect that no one had been aware of. It has memories dating back 2,000 years...There wasn't anything that it didn't seem to know."
       Dick had already written more than a million words of personal notes on this topic, he said, notes he referred to as his "exegesis" -- a word that traditionally means an explanation or interpretation of Scripture. In his case he was trying to explain the voices inside his head.
       The delusions of a penurious science fiction writer might seem of marginal interest, except that Philip K. Dick was not just any science fiction writer. Shortly after his death in 1982, his book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" became the movie "Blade Runner." Since then, no fewer than 10 other motion pictures have been based on his work, including "Total Recall" and "Minority Report." He is widely regarded as one of the most conceptually innovative writers in the 20th century, whose influence has been acknowledged by novelists from William Gibson to Ursula K. Le Guin. [ ....... ]
       The struggle of a highly intelligent man to find a rational explanation for something inexplicable inside himself could make fascinating reading, if it was thoughtfully organized. Alas, the "Exegesis" pursues its target in the manner of a shotgun firing randomly in every direction. Dick ruminates, cogitates and associates freely from one topic to the next. He mulls the content of his dreams, descends into the labyrinths of metaphysical hypotheses and (ironically) wonders how he can ever use this material to create a publishable book.
       Nor does he succeed in explaining the source of his visions. Jackson and Lethem acknowledge it could have been merely a stroke, residual brain damage from drug use or temporal lobe epilepsy; but they seem unimpressed by such pedestrian possibilities. They insist that "to approach the 'Exegesis' from any angle at all a reader must first accept that the subject is revelation." [ ........ ]
       What's missing here is context. From my interactions with Dick, I know many of these musings were written while he stayed up all night, sometimes in an alcoholic haze, while perusing his favorite source, Macmillan's Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (edited by Paul Edwards). He also retained a healthy sense of humor about his supposed tutelary spirit. "On Thursdays and Saturdays, I would think it was God," he told me, "while on Tuesdays and Wednesdays I would think it was extraterrestrial. Sometimes I would think it was the Soviet Union Academy of Sciences trying out their psychotronic microwave telepathic transmitter."
       Fortunately, he retained this humor and self-skepticism when he grappled with his metaphysical ideas in his 1981 novel "Valis." Here he portrayed himself as an eminently sane observer, engaging in dialogues with a delusional alter ego whom he named Horselover Fat. [ ........ ]
       The "Exegesis" takes itself much more seriously, and becomes tiresome as a result. The editors note that Dick's children, who are the heirs to his estate, weren't entirely happy about its being published, in case it "attracted unwelcome attention and threatend to undermine their father's growing academic and literary reputation with its disreputable aura of high weirdness."

[ Charles Platt, Dreaming of Androids, a review of The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, edited by Pamela Jackson, Jonathan Lethem and Erik Davis. Illustrated. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. / The New York Times Book Review, Sunday, December 18, 2011, p. 24. ]

782.

A.

       It was in April of 1938 that Dr. Cerletti began delivering, on alternate days, to some of the more psychotic and suicidally depressed patients, between ten and twenty ECT shocks. And you'll be happy to hear that the results were nothing short of miraculous. For example: 90 percent of the gang with everything from your wilted-garden-variety depression to hopeless catatonia showed everything from moderate to tremendous improvement! (The unhelped 10 percent were probably the agents of the improved 90.) And of course the other handy upside was that, for the most part, these patients wouldn't remember much from right before to a few weeks after their treatment, so it was rare that the patients complained about the experience.
       Not that, in the beginning, there weren't complaint-worthy aspects of the procedure. In the earliest days, the ECT seizures could be so violent that your bones might break, especially those that were commonly referred to as the "long bones." But it wasn't long before doctors discovered a medication that could not only prevent the previously unavoidable convulsions but would also protect the longer bones of the formerly vulnerable arms and legs. Soon after, the administering of a short-term anesthesia ensured that the patients no longer even had to be conscious during those miraculously healing seizures.
       Of course, ECT is rarely considered as treatment until all other valuable medications and talk therapies have failed. Then and only then, do they suggest that you light up the dark and gloomy skies behind your forehead.

[ Carrie Fisher, Shockaholic, Simon & Schuster, New York, NY, 2011, pp. 8-9. See also www.struckbyliving.com ]

B.

       However, contrary to widespread belief, electroconvulsive therapy is extremely effective. A family friend, Dr. Leon Rosenberg, a geneticist and former dean of Yale Medical School, has the same malady. As a patient overwhelmed by suicidal depression, he made remarkable progress after electroconvulsive therapy. As a doctor, he described his own case in a medical journal and discusses his descent and recovery with students.

[ Jamie Stiehm, My So-Called Bipolar Life, The New York Times, January 16, 2012, Op-Ed page, A17. ]

C.

       Psychoanalytic observations of schizophrenics subjected to insulin shock therapy provides another opportunity for an understanding of the role of latent homosexuality in the origin of paranoid schizophrenia. In particular, these observations illustrate the important role played by the homosexual disappointment and the homosexual panic. The cathartic discharge provoked by the insulin coma creates a release of repressed libidinal impulses. The ambivalent homosexual attitude becomes split into its two components, with the positive one invested ideally in the transference reaction and thus accessible to analytic interpretation and working through.
       Psychoanalytic investigations have demonstrated the affinity between homosexuality and the schizophrenic break. In certain complex cases of latent homosexuality, the counter-cathexis, built by the ego in order to maintain the dissociation of the psychotic core from the rest of the ego, is so precarious that the psychotic invasion occurs, as it were, spontaneously and periodically.

[ Gustav Bychowski, M.D., Homosexuality and Psychosis in Perversions, Psychodynamics and Therapy, edited by Sandor Lorand, M.D., Random House, Inc., New York, 1956, p. 98. ]

D.

       His [Daniel Paul Schreber's] excitement, which had its origin in the non-psychotic part of the personality, took a different course from that in the pre-psychotic period prior to the psychosis. In the pre-psychotic period the excitement led to genital emissions; a few weeks later, in the psychosis, before a situation leading to excitement could arise, the energy of the homosexual urge was withdrawn and then used to form the hallucination. Thus the hallucination is formed in anticipation of a danger. The energy of the homosexual urge evaporates in forming the hallucination. The hallucination is therefore a discharge phenomenon which serves to prevent the development of danger. Of course when the homosexual urge acquires energy again, then the danger returns.

[ Maurits Katan, M.D., The Importance of the Non-Psychotic Part of the Personality in Schizophrenia / International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, No. 35, 1954, p. 126. ]

781.

FORT MEADE, Md. -- The military hearing against Pfc. Bradley Manning closed on Thursday, with lawyers and onlookers alternately portraying the young soldier as a traitor who acted with premeditation and as an emotionally troubled whistleblower. [ ....... ]

       Mr. Coombs portrayed Private Manning as a man struggling with emotional issues, stemming primarily from years of having to hide that he felt he was born a woman in a man's body. His lawyers said he had reached out to his commanding officers for help and emotional support, but they had ignored his problems. And, the lawyers said, Private Manning saw himself as a whistleblower, not a traitor.
       "My client was young [24]," Mr. Coombs said. "He thought he could make a difference." [ ....... ]

       Throughout the hearing, Mr. Manning's lawyers have attempted to portray their client as a deeply troubled young man, struggling with gender identity issues during a time when the military was governed by the "don't ask, don't tell" policy that prohibited gay men and lesbians from serving openly. [ ....... ]

       Testimony by one of Private Manning's former supervisors seemed to support the defense argument. Jihrleah Showman, who also worked as an intelligence analyst, said she had warned commanders on several occasions that Private Manning was in severe emotional distress and should not be allowed to handle classified material.
       Ms. Showman said she told commanders that she believed Private Manning suffered "elevated levels of paranoia," and that he reported feeling like he was constantly being watched.
       She said the soldier's outbursts were so "uncontrolled" that she believed he posed a threat to himself and others. And she said she urged her commanders not to deploy him to Iraq.
       She described three occasions that she said exemplified Private Manning's erratic behavior, including one when he "was screaming at the top of his lungs and waving his hands," at an officer. In a second incident with a different officer, Ms. Showman said, Private Manning flipped over a table and lunged at him. And in the third incident, Ms. Showman said, Private Manning punched her in the face.
       She said the attack was "unprovoked."

[ Ginger Thompson, "Competing Portraits of Document Leaker," The New York Times, December 23, 2011, p. A13. ]

780.

A.

MISSION Tex. -- On the last night of his life, Joaquin Luna Jr., 18, filled the pages of a spiral notebook with goodbyes. In brief letters to relatives, friends and teachers, he asked one of his brothers to take care of his nephews and his niece and told a friend he had left a memento for her in his bible.
       One letter was different from the rest. It was addressed to Jesus Christ and in it he asked for forgiveness. "Jesus," he wrote, "I've realized I have no chance in becoming a civil engineer the way I've always dreamed of here ... so I'm planning on going to you and helping you construct the new temple in heaven." [.......]

       Still others have questioned what role, if any, Mr. Luna's immigration status played in his suicide. Although his relatives claimed that he committed suicide because of the pressure he felt, none of the letters mentioned his illegal status. In his letter to Jesus, he suggested that another issue was troubling him, saying he was "fearful to fall in any temptation," though he did not elaborate [.......]

       Mr. Luna was a shy, lanky young man who played guitar in church bands and helped care for his diabetic mother near the border in Hidalgo County, one of the poorest counties in America, where 35.2 percent of the population lived below the poverty line in 2009. [.......]

       Mr. Luna, who was born in Reynosa, Mexico, and came to the United States as an infant, was not like most teenagers in Mission. He drew the blueprints that were used to build his mother's new house and spoke often of becoming either an architect or a civil engineer. He joked that he did not have time for a girlfriend, spending many weekends mowing lawns to pay for his electric guitar and lessons. [.......]

       In recent weeks, administrators at the school and several people close to Mr. Luna said he had given no indication anything was wrong. But on Nov. 25, the day after Thanksgiving, he put on a maroon shirt and a tie, lay down next to his mother and told her he was sorry he was never going to be the person he wanted to be, relatives said, then he went into the bathroom, put a handgun underneath his chin and pulled the trigger. [.......]

Guadalupe Trevino, the Hidalgo County Sheriff, said that Mr. Luna's death had been ruled a suicide, but that investigators had not established a motive.
       "I'm very disappointed that some folks, and even some of our elected leaders, have exploited this young man's ill decision to take his own life, especially when we have found no evidence that points to any particular motive," Sheriff Trevino said. "Nobody knows why he did it. Only he knows for sure why he did what he did."

[ By Manny Fernandez, "Disillusioned Young Immigrant Kills Himself, Starting an Emotional Debate," The New York Times, December 11, 2001. ]

B.

From my material, in which negative instances are conspicuously absent, I am forced to the conclusion that schizophrenic illnesses in the male [or female] are intimately related as a sequel to unfortunate prolongation of the attachment of the son [or daughter] and the mother. That schizophrenic disorders are but one of the possible outcomes of persisting immature attitudes subtending the mother and son [or daughter] relationship must be evident. The failure of growth of heterosexual interests, with persistence of autoerotic or homosexual interests in adolescence, is the general formula. The factors that determine a schizophrenic outcome may be clarified by a discussion on the one hand of the situations to which I shall refer as homosexual cravings and acute masturbation conflict--often immediate precursors of grave psychosis--and of the various homoerotic and autoerotic procedures, on the other.

[ Harry Stack Sullivan, M.D., "Personal Psychopathology / Early Formulations," W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, 1972, p. 211. ]

C.

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. [Likewise for male patients, in order to win their own manhood and independence. / jmm.]

[ Edward J. Kempf, M.D., "Psychopathology," C. V. Mosby Co., St. Louis, Missouri, 1920. ]

779.

A.

Since 1988 when Ian experienced his first auditory communications from "God", his understanding of his role in the universe has changed. He explains that "God" made many promises to him, which He, "God" reneged on for the purpose of providing him with anxiety and emotional suffering to test his commitment and long-term reliability. Recently, Ian has been assured that he met the tests adequately. Specifically, "God" has informed him that he has suffered 100% of the pain that Jesus suffered on the cross, and is therefore, to be honored by "God" with a place in eternity relatively equal to the place assigned to Jesus. In fact, at the judgment scene where all persons, who have ever lived, come before the Almighty for assignment in some stage in Heaven or Hell, "God", Jesus and Ian will do the judging. To make it into paradise all people will have to profess belief in "God", in Jesus and in Ian as part of the godhead. His role has now been defined as the "wife of God" since he has been on such intimate terms with "God". Why "God" needs a wife in eternity is not explained to mortals.

In His conversations with Ian "God" identified a number of different times and places that He, "God" would request Ian's identity as the White Horseman to mankind. To Ian's disappointment, all the promised events failed to materialize leaving him in great emotional pain. The "God" he put his trust in appeared to be lying to Ian. In each of those occasions he pulled himself together and prepared to believe in "God's" next promise. "God's" latest explanation to him is that this was part of the testing process to see if he could stand up under persecution.

The latest word now is that the testing is over and that "God" will reveal him as the White Horseman in the not distant future. Worldwide media will all be involved and the cele-brations will be worldwide. Meanwhile, Jesus talks to him many times each day and reveals to him esoteric information which cannot be refuted.

When Ian first announced his new found mission in life his parents sought psychiatric help for him. Several psychiatrists agreed that Ian was schizophrenic and delusional with audi-tory hallucinations. He was given medication and a little personal counseling.

Believing himself to be perfectly normal, actually super-normal, he fought against taking the medication and became extremely hostile. A several month stay at a research hospital in the capital city followed. There, he was alternatively beaten by attendants and placed into segregation. He remembers those days as very painful.

His pattern changed very little during the ensuing years with periodic "normal" periods when he held jobs for months at a time. In 2002 he returned from California to live with his mother. All went well for a few months until he decided to go off his medication. Police intervened and jail followed where because of his wildness and uncooperativeness he was given a special kind of probation which required his compliance with the medication protocol. When that failed to produce and therapeutic results a move to his father's house ensued. That also failed and a new regime was defined by the court which dispensed his medication dialed on schedule.

Today, Ian is happier than at any time during the preceding 20 years. The promised future of being transformed into a beautiful young woman through all eternity who is also the wife of "God" Almighty makes him smile. And smile he might when one thinks of what he has accomplished in life.

Jim Smith (a fictitious name used for privacy reasons.)

[ For the complete article, please refer on this website to:

"A Case Review of an Individual with Schizophrenia." ]

B.

Without going further into all the details of the course of his illness, attention is drawn to the way in which from the early more acute psychosis which influenced all psychic processes and which could be called hallucinatory insanity, the paranoid form of illness became more and more marked, crystallized out so to speak, into its present picture.

This kind of illness is, as is well known, characterized by the fact that next to a more or less fixed elaborate delusional system there is complete possession of mental faculties and orientation, formal logic is retained, marked affective reactions are missing, neither intelligence nor memory are particularly affected and the conception and judgment of indifferent matters, that is to say matters far removed from the delusional ideas, appear not to be particularly affected, although naturally because of the unity of all psychic events they are not untouched by them.

Thus President Schreber now appears neither confused, nor psychically inhibited, nor markedly affected in his intelligence, apart from the psychomotor symptoms which stand out clearly as pathological even to the casual observer: he is circumspect, his memory excellent, he commands a great deal of knowledge, not only in matters of law but in many other fields, and is able to reproduce it in an orderly manner, he is interested in political, scientific and artistic events, etc., and occupies himself with them continuously (although recently he seems to have been distracted from them a little more again), and little would be noticeable in these directions to an observer not informed of his total state. Nevertheless, the patient is filled with pathological ideas, which are woven into a complete system, more or less fixed, and not amenable to correction by objective evidence and judgment of circumstances as they really are; the latter still less so as hallucinatory and delusory processes continue to be of importance to him and hinder normal evaluation of sensory impressions. As a rule the patient does not mention these pathological ideas or only hints at them, but it is evident how much he is occupied by them, partly from some of his writings (extracts of some are added), partly it is easily seen from his whole bearing.

The patient's delusional system amounts to this: he is called to redeem the world and to bring back to mankind the lost state of Blessedness. He maintains he has been given this task by direct divine inspiration, similar to that taught by the prophets; he maintains that nerves in a state of excitation, as his have been for a long time, have the property of attracting God, but it is a question of things which are either not at all expressible in human language or only with great difficulty, because he maintains they lie outside all human experience and have only been revealed to him. The most essential part of his mission of redemption is that it is necessary for him first of all to be transformed into a woman. Not, however, that he wishes to be transformed into a woman, it is much more a "must" according to the Order of the World, which he simply cannot escape, even though he would personally very much prefer to remain in his honourable manly position in life. But the beyond was not to be gained again for himself and the whole of mankind other than by this future transformation into a woman by way of divine miracle in the course of years or decades. He maintains that he is the exclusive object of divine miracles, and with it the most remarkable human being that ever lived on earth. For years at every hour and every minute he experiences these miracles in his body, has them confirmed also by voices that speak to him. He maintains that in the earlier years of his illness he suffered destruction of individual organs of his body, of a kind which would have brought death to every other human being, that he lived for a long time without stomach, without intestines, bladder, almost without lungs, with smashed ribs, torn gullet, that he had at times eaten part of his own larynx with his food, etc.; but divine miracles ("rays") had always restored the destroyed organs, and therefore, as long as he remained a man, he was absolutely immortal. These threatening phenomena have long ago disappeared, and in their place his "femaleness" had come to the fore; it is a question of an evolutionary process which in all probability will take decades if not centuries for its completion and the end of which is unlikely to be witnessed by any human being now alive. He has the feeling that already masses of "female nerves" have been transferred into his body, from which through immediate fertilization by God new human beings would come forth. Only then would he be able to die a natural death and have gained for himself as for all other human beings the state of Blessedness. In the meantime not only the sun but also the trees and the birds, which he thinks are something like "remains of previous human souls transformed by miracles," speak to him in human tones and everywhere around him miracles are enacted.

[ Dr. G. Weber, Superintendent of the Sonnenstein Asylum, in Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, by Daniel Paul Schreber, Wm. Dawson & Sons Ltd., London, 1955, pp. 267-274 * Translated, Edited, with Introduction, Notes and Discussion by Ida Macalpine, M.D. and Richard A. Hunter, M.D., M.R.C.P., D.P.M. ]

(See Dr. Weber's full report to the court, click here.)

778.

A.

Spalding Gray moved to New York City in 1967, shortly after his mother's suicide, when he was 26. He lived with his girlfriend, Elizabeth LeCompte, in an apartment on Sixth Street and Avenue D, on the Lower East Side. [........]
     The late 60's and 70's were a period of great artistic and personal ferment for Gray, as he struggled through a nervous breakdown and the dissolution of his relationship with LeCompte and toward confessional monologue for which he would later become famous.
     In his personal writings, Gray comes across in a more extreme way than in his theatrical persona, his anguish and need not tempered by his perceptive charm. He writes searchingly about his sexuality. He chronicles his relationships with the three major women in his life -- first LeCompte, then Renée Shafransky and later Kathleen Russo -- each one overlapping with the last, each becoming involved in his work. And it is evident that even as a young man, Gray was battling the demons that would eventually lead him to end his life in 2004 by throwing himself from the Staten Island ferry into the water.

April 20, 1970 ------------------------------------------

I want to see
     why?
     because seeing makes me feel more alive, but at the same time it makes me feel that I could kill myself
     all I have written in the past boils down to these
questions
     how much truth can a person take?
     how honest will I be able to be?

March 7, 1972 ------------------------------------------

I realize that the jig is up. This lazy in-between: I've really got to come to terms with Liz, me, the work -- who I am and what in hell am I doing with my life -- without comparisons. I feel as though I'm reaching a large crisis point in my life...I can't turn away from it.

March 18, 1972 ------------------------------------------

Very confused about my bisexual feelings. This morning Liz and I woke early after a late night.
[ ...... ] ...Liz accused me of not fully loving her, of dislike of women in general.

B.

     In 1976, when Gray was 34, he traveled throughout India with a production of Bertolt Brecht's "Mother Courage and Her Children," put on by the Performance Group. While there he had a nervous breakdown. His downward emotional spiral would continue as he traveled from India to Amsterdam, where he became physically frail and consumed by a fever.
     The following is from an undated [diary] entry narrating a series of events that he would later come to call his "India Breakdown."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I began to drink beer and smoke a lot of cigarettes. I was not treating myself well and felt I was on a self-destruct spiral. I could not will myself to leave Amsterdam and spent days and nights wandering the streets obsessed with Bali and Greece. ... I could not make up my mind. America or Bali or Greece. I started to get overwrought and just plain crazy. I began to look for "signs" that I would try to interpret. An example of a sign: I SAW a man from Indonesia on the street, and I ASKED him when he came to Amsterdam and he said, "1941," and I'd try to read that. I'd try to figure it out and make a map or structure out of it. Like: "Let's see, 1941 was the year that I was born, and that means if I go to Bali, that I'll be reborn." Then I'd think I was crazy. Don't go anywhere.
     Then during this period, I went to a homosexual bath house in Amsterdam and was "picked up" by this German photographer. He was very aggressive, and he made love to me like I was this beautiful woman. I had never experienced such a complete giving over before. ... Then I found out that Liz was coming to Amsterdam. ... I was so happy she called and rushed to meet her at the airport bus station. ... As soon as she got off the bus, I wanted to run, but instead I stayed and beat her down with my "madness." Looking back on it, I'm not clear whether I built this madness up to drop on her like a bomb. I was out of control.
     I acted crazy or was crazy. I didn't know the difference really. I told her about the homosexual experience. Her advice to me was to go back to America with her and try to work things out there. I decided to do this, but by the time I got to the airport, I was a nervous wreck. I began to break down and went to the ticket woman just before I was to board the plane and asked if I could get my luggage off the plane and she said, "Yes." And I said, "Skip it." I know I was crazy, so I wasn't crazy (yet). For much of the flight, Liz did not even know I was on the plane. I sat in the back and did not speak to her. The flight seemed an hour long. It was the first time I'd been on a plane without worrying about it crashing. I really did not care if it crashed. My will was nonexistent. I was letting myself be thrown from situation to situation.
     Liz took care of me. She brought me through. I don't know what I would have done without her. She stuck with me and was always there for me. I got into therapy once a week with a psychiatrist, and he had me on tranquilizers. The hypermanic activity soon changed to deep depression, and I slept 18 hours a day. ... I was diagnosed as hyperkalemic and was put on a special diet and given multivitamin therapy. That, combined with my seeing the psychiatrist, brought me back to a condition where I was able to work. It was then that I began to make "Rumstick Road" [with LeCompte]. I also began to have an affair with a young woman. Looking back on it, I see myself as being totally destructive to Liz. It seems like she brought me through all that so I could run off with another woman. It's beyond me how I could have done this, but I did it. And this is where it gets all confusing for me: this is where I stop being able to write about this experience. I feel guilty about this betrayal. I feel I used Liz. I feel I punished her for caring for me. I punished her for loving me. I resented her for helping me.
     This is the part that's hard to write about. I have no distance on it. I'm in it now.

[ THE DARK PRINCE OF DOWNTOWN, Introduction by Nell Casey, Editor of "The Journals of Spalding Gray," The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, October 9, 2011, pp. 24-7. ]

777.

"It's hard to look that cheap and pull it off," John Waters said admiringly of Amy Winehouse, some days after the English singer was found dead in her London bed. [ ..... ]

There were the vocals, of course, lauded for being simultaneously bluesy, jazz-inflected and somehow punk. There was the phrasing so singular that Ms. Winehouse could stretch a note until it threatened to snap and then cap it with a sly vibrato quaver. There was the songwriting, too, child-simple three-note tunes that lodged in your head, and lyrics handily capable of mauling one's heart while slicing surgically through gender conventions. "Is there another straight woman who could pull off a love song to a girl ("Valerie") or make a hit from a tune in which she refers to her boyfriend as her "lady-boy"? [ ..... ]

At the start, when she released her first album, "Frank," Ms. Winehouse appeared to be a pretty type shyly unconvinced of her appeal ("I'm ugly," she said repeatedly in interviews), a woman whose conservative taste in clothes gave no hint of the transformation she would effect by the time she released her second and final album, "Back to Black."

Her array of 13 tattoos, which she began to collect in her teenage years with a Betty Boop inked on her backside, eventually included markings reminiscent of cheap flash: hearts, anchors, pin-ups, horseshoes, a pocket above her left breast lettered with her lover's name. "In the film about Winehouse, you see her look begin to change, but it's frustrating because you don't know why," Karen Durbin, the film critic of Elle, said in an interview, referring to "The Girl Done Good," a 2008 documentary about Ms. Winehouse. "You see the moment when the pretty girl becomes something fiercer and weirder, a bad girl, and when the ordinary pretty girl makeup turns into war paint." [ ..... ]

"Janis, like Amy, is always projected as a victim," said Ann Powers, a critic for NPR Music. Yet that analysis, largely based on their shared drug addiction, is simplistic, Ms. Powers said. For one thing, it fails to account for the joyous and powerful images Ms. Winehouse and Ms. Joplin projected, for the raucous brio of Ms. Joplin's high-hippie floozie style; for Ms. Winehouse's own wholehearted embodiment of a look that lent her the air of a slatternly rocker from Camden Town, the tough immigrant neighborhood in North London. It is probably worth noting that both wore their biker--or gang-girl-style tattoos, traditional markers of renegade status, as badges of honor and pride. [ ..... ]

What's odd, she added, is how little room the victim narrative attached to Ms. Winehouse the moment she died leaves for the possibility that, though sadly in thrall to drugs, she was probably nobody's patsy. Yes, her music producer Mark Ronson may have helped shape her award winning neo-retro sound. True, her stylish husband Blake Fielder-Civil may have influenced her look. It was Ms. Winehouse alone, though, who could pull of feats of vocal and sartorial brilliance without sounding like a Karaoke singer or looking like she was in drag. [ ..... ]

"The woman on the cover of 'Back to Black' is clearly wearing her clothing and makeup as armor," Mr. Levy said. "She is someone who is outside the conventional world, beautiful but fierce, and who is making music that means to take possession of the world."

[ "A Bad Girl With a Touch of Genius", by Guy Trebay, The New York Times, July 28, 2011, p. E1. ]

A close reading of writer Guy Trebay's brilliant and insightful New York Times article (see above), can leave no doubt that Amy Winehouse was afflicted with schizophrenic, "bearded lady" disease symptomatology, and to the key role this virulent illness played in being the basic instigator of her final and fatal descent into the extreme drug and alcohol abuse she resorted to in an unsuccessful [always] attempt to self-medicate and thereby free herself from her searing emotional pain -- the invariable legacy of the "bearded lady" conflict.

"Sexual identity guarantees our psychic unity."
-- Julia Kristeva, psycho-analyst.

776.

A kind of rosy nostalgia seems to be taking over when suddenly, in the final riveting act, there enters a grotesque, almost demonic figure, tortured, mesmerising, a doctor with the prodigious wreckage of three wives, seven or eight children, alcohol, drugs, and adultery trailing behind him, a transvestite who finally has a sex change operation and ends up dying in jail: the always troubled, gifted youngest son, Gregory Hemingway.
     He is last seen sitting on the curb in Key Biscayne one morning after having been arrested the night before trying to get through a security gate. He's in a hospital gown but otherwise naked with some clothes and black high heels bunched in one hand. He had streaked, almost whitish hair that morning, painted toenails, and as the police approached was trying to put on a flowered thong. Five days later he died of a heart attack while being held in a Women's Detention Center. He was listed as Gloria Hemingway. This was in 2001; he was sixty-nine years old.
     The last, very moving section of Hemingway's Boat is devoted to Gregory, Gigi as he was always called, rhyming with "biggy," the wayward son who as a boy was caught trying on his stepmother's white stockings. "He was a boy born to be quite wicked who was being very good...," Hemingway wrote in his fictional version, Islands in the Stream. "But he was a bad boy and the others knew it and he knew it." Hendrickson says, "I'll whoof this straight out: a lifelong shamed son was only acting out what a father felt...." And these were possibly the transsexual fantasies in The Garden of Eden along with all the women in Hemingway with hair cut short like a boy's.
     When Gigi's oldest child, Lorian, saw him for the first time in years, he took her out in a chartered boat to show her big-game fishing, but then embarrassingly lost the big marlin he'd hooked. He hadn't slacked, and the line had snapped. He'd made a botch of it. He seemed broken. She reached out and touched his forehead in sympathy. "Sorry, Greg," she said. "You're a pretty girl," he said. "A very pretty girl. Call me 'Father,' would you?" She noticed the nail polish on two of his cracked and dirty nails.

[ James Salter, The Finest Life You Ever Saw, a review of "Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life and Lost, 1931-1961," by Paul Hendrickson. Knopf, 531 pp., $30.00), in The New York Review of Books, October 13, 2011, p. 8. ]

Gregory "Gigi" Hemingway's life was one which was savagely rent by schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease. This malignant illness had already destroyed his father's life [ref: Impressions 119, this website] and now it was Gigi's turn to succumb to its lethal ravages.

Thus we can see again and again how schizophrenia, "the bearded lady" disease, works its insidious poison into the lives of its unsuspecting and innocent victims, leaving disaster and heartache in its wake.

775.

A.

Anders Behring Breivik
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
July 29, 2011

He spent the first year of his life [DOB: 13 February 1979] in London until his parents divorced when he was one year old. His father, who later married a diplomat, fought for his custody but failed. Breivik lived with his mother and his half sister in the west-end of Oslo and regularly visited his father and stepmother in France, until they divorced when he was 12. /// When he reached adolescence, Breivik's behavior became more rebellious and wayward. He and his gang of friends would reportedly spend their evenings hanging around in Oslo, spraying graffiti on buildings. He later wrote that after he was caught spraying graffiti on walls, his father stopped contact with him. /// Breivik criticised both of his parents for supporting the policies of the Norwegian Labour Party, and his mother for being a moderate feminist. He wrote about his upbringing: "I do not approve of the super-liberal, matriarchal upbringing as it completely lacked discipline and has contributed to feminising me to a certain degree." /// Breivik was exempt from conscription in the Norwegian Army and has no military training.[20] In his manifesto, Breivik described how he avoided his mandatory military service in the Norwegian Army three times, by claiming he would not put his life on the line for Norway's political parties. /// Breivik claims that he started a nine-year-plan to finance the attack in 2002, founding his own "computer programming" business while working at the customer service company. He claims that his company grew to six employees and "several offshore bank accounts", and that he made his first million at the age of 24.[44] The company was later declared bankrupt and Breivik was reported for several breaches of the law.[45] To save money, he moved back to his mother's home. /// Breivik has also been linked with the bomb blasts which had taken place approximately two hours earlier in Oslo, killing eight people. Six hours before the attacks, Breivik posted a YouTube video urging conservatives to "embrace martyrdom" and showing himself wearing a compression garment and pointing a rifle.[59] He also posted a picture of himself pretending to be a military officer in a costume festooned with gold braid and multiple medals.[60] /// Breivik's lawyer has stated that Breivik may be insane.[64] The chief of the Norwegian Police Security Service disputes the claim Breivik is insane saying "His lawyer is not a psychologist and I am not. But I have previously been a defense attorney and I perceive him as a sane person because he has been so focused over such a long time."[65] Breivik himself has confessed to using testosterone in the days before the attack, saying he had become more aggressive after coming off testosterone supplements. [66][67] /// An EDL leader denounced Breivik and the attack on 26 July 2011.[79] He sympathises with the Serbian paramilitarism.[17] He demands the gradual deportation of all Muslims from Europe from 2011 to 2083.[86] He blames feminism for allowing the erosion of the fabric of European society. [117] In his manifesto he also urges the Hindus to drive Muslims out of India.[118]

B.

[continued]

"Dagens Noeringsliv" writes that Breivik sought to start a Norwegian version of the Tea Party movement in cooperation with the owners of document.no, but that they, after expressing initial interest, ultimately turned down his proposal because he did not have the contacts he promised.[82] /// Putin's [Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin] Dmitri Peskov has denounced Breivik's actions as the "delirium of a madman."[83] /// Breivik compiled a 1,516-page manifesto entitled "2083: A European Declaration of Independence (a reference to the unsuccessful second Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683 [84]), under the pseudonym "Andrew Berwick", which he e-mailed to 1,003 addresses about 90 minutes before the bomb blast in Oslo. In the manifesto, which is part political discussion, part confessional, and part action plan, Breivik sets out his belief that his actions will help to spark a civil war in Europe that will last for decades, progressing through three distinct phases and culminating in 2083 with the extermination of European Marxists and the expulsion of Muslims from Europe.[86] /// The text also copies sections of the Unabomber manifesto, without giving credit, while exchanging the words "leftists" for "cultural Marxists" and "black people" for "muslims".[91] [ Note: For more information on the Unabomber (Theodore Kaczynski), ref. "Schizophrenia - The Bearded Lady Disease, Volume One," by J. Michael Mahoney, pp. 432-34. ] /// In the manifesto, Breivik considers himself "a real European hero", "the saviour of Christianity" and the greatest defender of cultural- conservatism in Europe since 1950".[102] /// Breivik confessed and stated the purpose of the attack was to save Norway and Western Europe from a Muslim takeover and "[t]he price for this they had to pay yesterday." [ i.e., The reported cold-blooded murder of 69 adolescents on Utoya Island, including a young girl who had just turned 14, plus the additional eight fatalities of the bomb blasts in Oslo. ] /// Breivik has confessed to what he calls "atrocious but necessary" actions, but denies criminal responsibility.[22][23]

C.

These considerations therefore lend an added weight to the circumstance that we are in point of fact driven by experience to attribute to homosexual wishful phantasies an intimate (perhaps an invariable) relation to this particular form of disease. Distrusting my own experience on the subject, I have during the last few years joined with my friend Sandor Ferenczi of Budapest in investigating upon this single point a number of cases of paranoid disorder which have come under observation. The patients whose histories provided the material for this enquiry included both men and women and varied in race, occupation, and social standing. Yet we were astonished to find that in all of these cases a defense against a homosexual wish was clearly recognizable at the very centre of the conflict which underlay the disease, and that it was in an attempt to master an unconsciously reinforced current of homosexuality that they had all of them come to grief.[1] [ [1]Further confirmation is afforded by Maeder's analysis of a paranoid patient J.B. (1910). The present paper, I regret to say, was completed before I had an opportunity of reading Maeder's work. ] This was certainly not what we had expected. Paranoia is precisely a disorder in which a sexual aetiology is by no means obvious; far from this, the strikingly prominent features in the causation of paranoia, especially among males, are social humiliations and slights. But if we go into the matter only a little more deeply, we shall be able to see that the really operative factor in these social injuries lies in the part played in them by the homosexual components of emotional life. So long as the individual is functioning normally and it is consequently impossible to see into the depths of his mental life, we may doubt whether his emotional relations to his neighbours in society have anything to do with sexuality, either actually or in their genesis. But delusions never fail to uncover these relations and to trace back the social feelings to their roots in a directly sensual erotic wish. So long as he was healthy, Dr. Schreber, too, whose delusions culminated in a wishful phantasy of an unmistakably homosexual nature, had, by all accounts, shown no signs of homosexuality in the ordinary sense of the word.

[ Sigmund Freud, "Psycho-Analytic Notes on a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides) (1911), in the "The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud," Volume XII, The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London, 1958, pp. 59-60. (Translated from the German by James Strachey.) ]

D.

"Paranoia -- An Historical Digression"

Paranoia, from Greek meaning wrong or faulty knowledge or reasoning, "antedates Hippocrates" (Cameron, 1944) when "it was most frequently used in a very general sense ... as the equivalent of our popular current term insanity."

[ Daniel Paul Schreber, "Memoirs of My Nervous Illness," Translated, Edited with Introduction, Notes and Discussion, by Ida Macalpine, M.D. and Richard A. Hunter, M.D., M.R.C.P., D.P.M., WM. DAWSON & SONS LTD., London, 1955, p. 13. ]

[ .... Mr. Breivik has confessed to killing 77 people last month in Oslo and Utoya Island, and the Oslo District Court said that Mr. Breivik had to be kept in isolation partly out of fear that he would tamper with evidence or contact possible accomplices. Mr. Breivik appeared at a closed hearing under heavy police protection. His request to wear a long black tuxedo to the session was rejected. --- "Norway: Mass Killer Staying in Isolation" (AP), The New York Times, August 20, 2011, p. A9 ]

774.

A.

There is no greater example of the shape-shifting force of a pen name than that of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, who took the notion of reticence to unparalleled, even pathological levels. In maintaining more than 70 literary identities he called "heteronyms," he did not employ them as a mode of deception. Instead, he insisted that he was amanuensis to the multiple beings that dwelled within. They transcended gender, ideology and genre. They bickered with one another, mentored one another, clamored for attention like children. He once described his work, aptly, as a "drama divided into people instead of into acts."

Why Pessoa, whom George Steiner once called one of "the evident giants in modern literature," had to engage in self-breeding will never be known. The most obvious explanation must be mental illness. That he remained an obscure, isolated figure in his lifetime (he died in 1935) only adds to the poignancy of his -- their? -- vast creative output. One scholar speculated that Pessoa's heteronyms were a way to "spare him the trouble of living real life," which makes his bizarre endeavor seem enviable.

B.

The story of the science-fiction writer James Tiptree, Jr., who served as the mask of Alice Sheldon, a former Chicago debutante, had a similarly tragic ending. For Sheldon, the value of an alter ego was beyond measure. At first glance, hers seems a familiar narrative of a woman adopting a pen name so she might succeed in a male-dominated genre. But she wasn't just battling gender bias. Without Tiptree, her prose style, as she once put it, was no more imaginative or compelling than "Enclosed please find payment." She passed as Tiptree for a decade, thus allowing an emotionally troubled, sexually confused middle-aged woman to experience life as a charismatic, flirtatious man at the height of his creative powers.

Their relationship was complicated. Despite having considered, in darker moments, "taking him out and drowning him in the Caribbean," Sheldon felt that without Tiptree, she was crippled creatively. In the late 1970s, after her identity was unmasked, she was bereft. Although her fans and peers in the sci-fi world were largely supportive of her "coming out," Sheldon's efforts to keep writing under her own name (and even other pen names) were half-hearted and futile. ("Some inner gate is shut," she admitted to a friend.) In 1987, she shot her husband in his sleep and then herself.

[ Carmela Ciuraru / Essay / Secret Sharers / The New York Times Book Review, June 26, 2011, p. 39. Ref: Nom de Plume / A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms, By Carmela Ciuraru / Harper; 344 pages. ]

Both Fernando Pessoa (A. above) and Alice Sheldon (B. above), though coming from completely different backgrounds, cultures and sexes, became similarly afflicted with schizophrenia due to their severe "bearded lady" bisexual conflicts and gender confusion. In both cases, their schizophrenia led to tragic outcomes, especially so in the case of Alice Sheldon, where her consequent paranoid ideation caused her to murder her husband in cold blood, followed shortly thereafter by her own self-murder, or suicide.

In Alice Sheldon's case, however, the result of her severe, schizophrenic, "bearded lady" conflict, was glaringly "tragic," since it led ultimately and directly to the violent physical destruction of two lives -- both her own and her husband's.

773.

A.

I was also, and remain, quite incapable of interpreting female signals, or distinguishing between flirting and what primatologists unpleasantly term presenting. I never dared assume a sexual invitation could be real, if directed at me.
      The prime site of my illness, then, was sexual. Common enough. As I unearthed my buried troubles, I saw how bound up they were with features of modern society that I loathed, such as demonstrations, in which I always heard the echo of the schoolyard, or radicalism which seemed to enlarge the schoolyard into a whole ideal world. In the chants of early militant feminism, I heard the accents of Taree High. In a column I used to write for the short-lived "Independent Monthly," I coined the term 'erocide', meaning the deliberate destruction of a person's sexual morale, and speculated that we victims of the process probably outnumber all other victim-groups combined, but we will never rise up and demand redress. We are too deeply shamed, and too darkly aware that those rejected for reproduction or pleasure are scapegoats for the pain which sex entails even among the attractive. [p. 25-6]

B.

If, as shrinks tell us, a fifth of all people in this stressed age will suffer at least one depressive episode in their lives, there is clearly an enormous pool of potential recruits among people who haven't identified the real roots of their trouble and so will reliably hate substitutes or near-enough versions. [p. 26-7]

C.

AFTERWORD

    I know now that you can't kill the DOG, and that thus my earlier account has the wrong title: it should be called "Learning the Black Dog." Even before Lovan [Fluoxetine], I'd gained increments of self-esteem, and learned that treachery doesn't lurk behind every smile. I've become less afraid of Australian women, and less self-absorbed. At seventy, I'm at last more at ease with what Homer Simpson called his womanly needs. [p. 36]

D.

What I still do mourn is the terrible waste of energy the Dog has exacted from me, over my lifetime and especially in my twenty horror years, and how much more I might have achieved if I'd owned a single, healthy mind working on my side. [p. 37]

[ "Killing The Black Dog / A Memoir of Depression," by Les Murray, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2009. ]

772.

[.......]

He gives rambling incoherent speeches at places like the United Nations. His head is stuffed with oddball conspiracy theories and strange obsessions, like calling for the elimination of Switzerland or blaming the J.F.K. assassination on Israeli intelligence. He shows up in foreign countries in odd dress, with odd make-up and hair-gel preferences, once having pinned a photograph to his chest.

He has an all-female bodyguard contingent. In 2008, he announced that as part of a government shake-up, he was going to abolish all government ministries except Defense, Internal Security and a few others. [.......]

It seems that there is something advantageous in the megalomania that is his defining lifelong trait. He was kicked out of school for trying to organize a student strike. He began plotting a coup to take over the country while in college. He has repeatedly compared himself to Jesus and the Prophet Muhammad. He calls the Green Book, his book of teachings, "the new gospel."

That book, which Libyans are compelled to read (he canceled student summer vacation at one point and replaced it with indoctrination sessions), is filled with oddball notions and banal assertions. It consists of three parts, "The Solution to Democratic Problems," "The Solution to Economic Problems," and a section offering solutions to social problems.

Quaddafi apparently wrote the book with the conviction that he had discovered the answers to all human problems, which he calls the Third Universal Theory." In a characteristically absolutist passage, he writes, "True Democracy has but one method and one theory."

Along the way he offers banal observations as if nobody had ever thought of them before. He reveals that women menstruate and men do not. He unveils doctrines that have nothing to do with how he actually behaves: "Mandatory education is a coercive education that suppresses freedom. To impose specific teaching materials is a dictatorial act."

He seems to be one of those people who believes he possesses absolute truth, who wants to impose his thoughts on everybody else and exercise total dominance over others like some World Historical superman. [.......]

Over the decades, he has tried to remake the world in his own grandiose image. He tried to create a larger empire by merging Libya and Sudan. He tried to create a Federation of Arab Republics with Egypt and Syria. He tried to create an Arab Legion. He has named himself King of Kings, Imam of All Muslims and, in 2009, sought to create a United States of Africa. He has created dictatorship academies and has trained some of the world's most brutal autocrats, and, of course, he has supported terrorist movements in Australia, Ireland, Germany and beyond.

Yet this very megalomania seems to be both the secret to his longevity and to his unhinged nature. The paradoxical fact is that if you want to stay in office as a dictator, it is better to be a narcissistic totalitarian than a run-of-the mill autocrat. Megalomaniacs like Quaddafi seek to control every neuron in their peoples' heads and to control every aspect of life. They destroy all outside authority and civil society. They personalize every institution so that things like the army exist to serve their holy selves, rather than the nation at large. [.......]

[ "The Ego Advantage," by David Brooks, The New York Times, March 25, 2011, the Op-Ed page. ]

B.

Cars passed us, carrying passengers who themselves were carried on the waves of a powerful joy. On the back of a pickup truck, a group of young men sang and clapped, one of them wearing a terrible wig, a symbol of Colonel Qaddafi's famously wild haircut, which had given him the disparaging nickname Abu Shafshufa (father of the fuzzy hair). Another young man, in Algeria Square, held up a large portrait of Colonel Qaddafi in traditional women's clothes.

[ Omar Abulqasim Alkikli, Tripoli, Libya, The New York Times Op-Ed page, October 21, 2011. ]

The person described in the above Quotation, Libya's Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, is displaying all the classic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease; namely, delusions of grandeur (megalomania), faulty reasoning, obsessive thinking, and feelings of persecution consisting of imagined conspiracies being hatched against him at all times.

Schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, is a "killer" disease, has always been so in the past (viz. Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong), and will continue to be so in the future, or until the time arrives when mankind can accurately begin to pinpoint, and safely isolate, those persons afflicted with it. And now more death and destruction [ April/May 2011 ] is being unleashed upon both his own family and the Libyan people, again as the direct and tragic consequence of Col. Qadaffi's paranoid schizophrenic thinking and actions.

[ Please also see Impressions 110. ]

771.

A.

    Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed first met when Lincoln was twenty-eight and Speed twenty-two, on April 15, 1837. That date marked the beginning of their four-year bed sharing, in a room above a general store that Speed co-owned. Almost every Lincoln scholar has found the sleeping arrangement unremarkable.

     Same-sex bed sharing was common in 19th-century America, of course. It was perfectly ordinary, a question of mattress scarcity, small homes, crowded hostelries. Historians have repeatedly pointed to that fact in the wake of Tripp's Intimate World, which among other things documents Lincoln's sleeping arrangements and finds in them evidence that Lincoln had sexual relations with men.

     But as Jean Baker, the well-regarded biographer of Mary Todd Lincoln and the author of Intimate World's Introduction, has noted, for two men with financial resources to share a bed for four years bordered on impropriety. It was unusual. The non-conjugal slept together when it was necessary. They did not do it by choice.

[ "Critical Overview: Lincoln, Sex, and the Scholars," by Lewis Gannett and William A. Percy III, in The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, by C. A. Tripp, with an Introduction by Jean Baker, Thunder's Mouth's Press, New York, Copyright 2005 by The Estate of C. A. Tripp, p. XLV. ]

B.

One truly major trauma of Lincoln's life suddenly came upon him on January 1, 1841 -- the "fatal first" as he ever afterward was to call it (See Appendix 2, Letter 8). A few days before Speed had announced he was leaving and moving back to Kentucky. His father had died recently and his mother had asked him to return and help with problems at home, but the possibility that he might grant this request and actually move back home had apparently not been discussed. Lincoln was evidently crushed to learn of it that New Year's Day, and within hours, as if to complete his shake-up, he broke off with Mary Todd, whom he had been seeing for several months. [........]

     In any case, Lincoln's loss of Speed clearly belongs front and center. His anxiety over the Speed portion of this misfortune, and not seeing any way to recoup his loss, were what soon cast him into a major double-phase nervous breakdown (the worst kind). In the first phase he felt listless and shaken, yet he forced himself to attend several sessions of the legislature, during which he was preoccupied and could not keep him mind on the proceedings. Mostly he sat quietly, as if stunned, when he was able to attend at all; generally he contributed nothing. Sometimes he would only answer the roll call, or would disappear after and hour or two; once the only vote he joined in was "to adjourn."[15] His general debility was widely noticed, and was ready to snowball.

     On January 13, 1841, the second phase of his nervous breakdown came on at full tilt. With no sign of fever or other physical sickness, he became totally incapacitated and was bedridden for six days in what sounds like a state of ongoing shock. It looked very serious to outsiders, too. Wrote James Conkling to his fiancee, Mercy Levering, on January 24, 1841:

Poor L! How the mighty have fallen! He was confined about a week, but though he now appears again he is reduced and emaciated in appearance and seems scarcely to possess strength enough to speak above a whisper. His case at present is truly deplorable but what prospect there may be for ultimate relief I cannot pretend to say. [16]

[ The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, by C. A. Tripp, edited by Lewis Gannett, Thunder's Mouth Press, New York, Copyright 2005 by The Estate of C. A. Tripp, pp. 130-2. ]

C.

     That same June 19 [Lincoln] letter reveals a few other notable details. It begins without a single personal item, but drones on in a 1,575-word account of a local murder trial. Hard to find anything less personal than that, yet it is precisely this kind of impersonal recounting of some irrelevant bit of news that is often resorted to by distraught lovers who are contending with some strain, and who thus choose to recount details from a neutral territory as they wait out a storm that swirls about them. Such letters often end, as does this one, on an especially warm note. Speed [Joshua] was, in fact, the one and only person in Lincoln's life on whom he repeatedly lavished his most personal and most endearing "Yours forever," in itself a major smoking gun and a salutation he never bestowed on any woman, including his wife.

[ Ibid, p. 134. ]

D.

     The President was also not an infrequent visitor [to the Soldier's Home] in the late afternoon hours, and endeared himself to his guards by his genial, kind ways. He was not long in placing the officers in his two companies at their ease in his presence, and Captains Derickson and Crozier were shortly on a footing of such marked friendship with him that they were often summoned to dinner or breakfast at the presidential board. Captain Derickson, in particular, advanced so far in the President's confidence and esteem that in Mrs. Lincoln's absence he frequently spent the night in his cottage, sleeping in the same bed with him, and--it is said--making use of his Excellency's night-shirt! Thus began an intimacy which continued until the following spring, when Captain Derickson was appointed provost marshall of the Nineteenth Pennsylvania District, with head-quarters in Meadville.[3]

[ "History of the One Hundred and Fiftieth Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteers, Second Regiment, Bucktail Brigade," by Lt. Colonel Thomas Chamberlin, immediate commanding officer to Capt. David. V. Derickson in Washington, Published in 1895, and quoted in The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln by C. A. Tripp, Thunder's Mouth Press, Edited by Lewis Gannett, Copyright by The Estate of C. A. Tripp, 2005, pp. 3-4. ]

E.

     The answer he received must have been encouraging, though it went against a mountain of his own forebodings. Not until the very day of the wedding could he bring himself to actually go get the marriage license. And to the last moment he exuded an aura of unwilling gloom far worse than the well-known anxious knees of the ordinary bridegroom. Years later James Matheny recalled how Lincoln had come to him early on the day of his wedding lamenting with alarm, "Jim, I shall have to marry that girl." On the very evening of the marriage Matheny noted, "Lincoln looked and acted as if he were going to the Slaughter," adding that "Lincoln [had] often told him directly & indirectly that he was driven into the marriage."[7] Herndon's simpler statement is more to the point: "Lincoln married her for honor--feeling his honor bound to her."[8]

[ The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, by C. A. Tripp, Edited by Lewis Gannett, Thunder's Mouth Press, New York, Copyright 2005 by The Estate of C. A. Tripp, p. 157. ]

F.

     On the basis of inductive reasoning familiar to him as a Kinsey researcher and in the spirit of social science, Tripp intrepidly measures Lincoln's homosexuality and presents his findings in the first chapter. To do so he employs Kinsey's famous classification system that ranks as individual's homosexuality on a seven-point continuum, where o = exclusively heterosexual and 6 = exclusively homosexual. Lincoln, according to Tripp, ranks as a 5, i.e., "predominantly homosexual, but incidentally heterosexual." While this scale has recently been criticized as offering few advantages over the common terms heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual, its application to Lincoln is a clear indication of Tripp's position. There is no hedging in this book.

[ "Introduction," by Jean Baker, Goucher College, in The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, by C. A. Tripp, Edited by Lewis Gannett, Thunder's Mouth Press, New York, Copyright 2005 by The Estate of C. A. Tripp 2005, p. XVI. ]

Now that Mr. C. A. Tripp, in his meticulously researched and documented book, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, has established beyond any reasonable doubt that our most beloved and admired of all presidents was "predominantly homosexual, but incidentally heterosexual," we must ask ourselves, as did author Tripp, the question, "So What?" Indeed, what difference does this striking insight into Lincoln's basic sexual nature make to our overall view of this irrefutably great and iconic figure in America's history?

Final note: If Lincoln had attempted to repress his strongly homosexual nature when he was a younger man, and had succeeded in doing so, he would later in life have succumbed to schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, and become insane. Most fortunately this did not happen. But sadly this was not the case with his wife, Mary Todd, as she become markedly and increasingly paranoid and psychopathic as she grew older, the direct result of her repressed bisexual conflict and gender confusion, and which illness profoundly impacted not only her own life but that of everyone else's around her, including her husband's, in an extremely destructive fashion. (Please refer to previous Quotation/Comment # 770.)

770

A.

     The most recent incarnation of the "happy marriage legend" is David Grubin's six-hour documentary, "A House Divided" (PBS, 2001), which makes some passing reference to trouble in the marriage but which ignores a mountain of evidence showing that Lincoln's marriage was, in Herndon's [William Herndon, Lincoln's law partner] words, "a domestic hell on earth," a "burning, scorching hell," "as terrible as death and as gloomy as the grave."[4] Carl Schurz, the eminent German-American reformer who knew the Lincolns and championed the Republican cause, called the marriage "the greatest tragedy of Mr. Lincoln's existence."[5] Those who dealt with Mary Lincoln in the White House had little good to say about her. The president's chief personal secretary, John G. Nicolay, referred to the First Lady as "her Satanic majesty."[6] Nicolay's assistant, John Hay, called her "the Hellcat,"[7] The White House physician, Dr. Robert K. Stone, used similar imagery, terming her "a perfect devil."[8] Benjamin Brown French, the commissioner of public buildings who worked with her often, likened Mary to a hyena.[9]

     Dr. Tripp dwells on Mrs. Lincoln's unethical conduct as First Lady, but curiously he says little about her deplorable conduct before her husband became president. She physically abused Lincoln, striking him with firewood, chasing him out of the house with a knife, cursing and ridiculing him in public, flinging hot coffee in his face and hurling potatoes, books, and other objects at him. Her ungovernable temper also led her to strike her children as well as her servants. Overwhelming evidence documenting such behavior can be found in The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln." Since that volume appeared in 1994 more such evidence has turned up and is incorporated in my forthcoming multivolume life of Lincoln.

     [ Michael Burlingame, Professor Emeritus, Connecticut College, "A Respectful Dissent," in The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln, by C. A. Tripp (Edited by Lewis Gannett), Thunder's Mouth Press, New York, 2005, p. 226-7. ]

B.

     That night the President and Mrs. Lincoln entertained General and Mrs. Grant and the General's staff at dinner on the steamer, and before us all Mrs. Lincoln berated General Ord to the President, and urged that he should be removed.

     During all this visit similar scenes were occurring. Mrs. Lincoln repeatedly attacked her husband in the presence of officers because of Mrs. Griffin and Mrs. Ord, and I never suffered greater humiliation and pain on account of one not a close personal friend than when I saw the Head of the State, a man who carried all the cares of the nation at such a crisis -- subjected to this inexpressible public mortification. He bore it as Christ might have done; with an expression of pain and sadness that cut one to the heart, but with supreme calmness and dignity. He called her "mother" with his old-time plainness; he pleaded with eyes and tones, and endeavored to explain or palliate the offenses of others, till she turned on him like a tigress; and then he walked away, hiding that noble, ugly face that we might not catch the full expression of his misery.

     General Sherman was a witness of some of these episodes and mentioned them in his memoirs many years ago. Captain Barnes, of the Navy, was a witness and a sufferer too. Barnes had accompanied Mrs. Ord on her unfortunate ride and refused to say that the lady was to blame. Mrs. Lincoln never forgave him. A day or two afterward he went to the White House to speak to the President on some official matter when Mrs. Lincoln and several others were present. The President's wife said something unusually offensive that all the compamy could hear. Lincoln was silent, but after a moment he went up to the young officer, and taking him by the arm led him into his own cabin, to show him a map or a paper, he said. He made no remark, Barnes told me, upon what had occurred. He could not rebuke his wife; but he showed his regret, and his regard for the officer, with a touch of what seemed to me the most exquisite breeding imaginable.

     [ Adam Badeau, aide-de-camp to General Ulysses S. Grant, in a first-person written account, included in The Intimate World of Abraham Lincolm, C. A. Tripp (Edited by Lewis Gannett), Thunder's Mouth Press, New York, 2005, pp. 175-6. ]

C.

     However, that was the documentary's insanity; what about Mary's? It does have a history of its own. In 1875 Mary's one remaining son, her firstborn, Robert T. Lincoln, brought evidence against her sufficient to result in her commitment for several months to an insane asylum in Batavia, Illinois. Some of his father's closest and most levelheaded friends, the lawyer Leonard Swett among them, supported the decision. True, there were a few new and alarming bits of evidence, such as Mary carrying around a sizable portion of the family assets on her person (fifty-six thousand dollars in securities, plus a considerable quantity of cash), sewn into pockets in her petticoats. And then there were her panicky telegrams concerning Robert's own immediate danger of death in Chicago (he was in perfect health). Although her symptoms varied greatly, many of them did sound patently paranoid, if not worse.

     [ The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, C. A. Tripp (Edited by Lewis Gannett), Thunder's Mouth Press, New York, 2005, p. 170. ]

D.

     Not that distinctions between psychosis and psychopathology were known in the nineteenth century -- or, for that matter, that those who ever found themselves caught in the crosshairs of Mary Lincoln's fierce temper would likely be in a mood to hear any sober academic opinion of it. Whether such a victim either chose to "forgive" her in a spirit of turning the other cheek, or to look past the pain for some other hair-shirt reason, it is only a personal choice. Still, it would have been helpful had both victims and onlookers refrained from bearing false witness. It has often been said, for instance, that after exercising her temper Mary was soon sorry for what she said and did to others, including Lincoln. Wrong again. At least in the present study not a single such example has yet been found. On the contrary, Mary Lincoln was prone to keep her temper going for hours, sometimes days, with no sign of letup short of sheer exhaustion.

     [ Ibid, p. 171. ]

Even from the partial information contained in the above Quotations, it becomes starkly evident that Mary Todd Lincoln was a woman afflicted with a very severe case of paranoid schizophrenia. This is an illness whose genesis invariably lies in the factor of sex-role alienation in early childhood, thereafter leading to the severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion at puberty which is initiated by the powerful hormonol sexual changes occurring at that time of life, and which in turn leads directly either to outright homosexuality or, if the homosexuality is repressed and denied, to the classic and highly disturbing symptoms of schizophrenia. These are: malignant depression, delusions of grandeur, megalomania, feelings of persecution, extreme jealousies, and, finally, both suicidal and homicidal tendencies -- all of which sypmtoms were prominenty displayed, at one time or another, by Mary Todd Lincoln during her turbulent lifetime.

To fully appreciate both the extraordinary depth and breadth of Mrs. Lincoln's mental illness/schizophrenia, it is necessary to delve deeply into author and researcher C. A. Tripp's meticulously documented account of her life with her husband, in his book The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln.

769

A.

    "It got worse over time," Mr. Gutierrez [Zane] said. He said he stopped talking to Mr. Loughner [Jared] last March when their interactions grew increasingly unpredictable and troubling.

    "He would call me at 2 a.m. and asked, 'Are you hanging out in front of my house, stalking me?' He started to get really paranoid, and said he did not want to see us anymore and did not trust us," Mr. Gutierrez said, referring to himself and another friend. "He thought we were plotting to kill him or steal his car."

    [ "Police Say They Visited Tucson Suspect's Home Even Before Rampage," by Jo Becker, Kirk Johnson and Serge F. Kovaleski, The New York Times, January 12, 2011, p. A14. ]

B.

    By the time he turned 20, Loughner had begun to elaborate bizarre belief systems. He was a victim of government mind control, he believed. He could fight back by inventing a new currency. He could learn to dream while conscious, which would give him the power to fly. He could invent a new grammar that would reduce government to a mere word. It was this concept that led him to ask Representative Giffords at an open meeting in 2007, "What is government if words have no meaning?" Giffords skipped lightly to the next question. Loughner was outraged that she didn't indulge his delusion. "He said, 'Can you believe it? They wouldn't answer my question,' and I told him, 'Dude, no one's going to answer that,'" Loughner's friend Bryce Tierney told reporter Nick Baumann of Mother Jones magazine. "Ever since that, he thought she was a fake, he had something against her."

[ 1 MADMAN/AND A GUN, by David Von Drehle, Time magazine, January 24, 2011, p. 29. ]

C.

    He had posted on his Myspace page at some point a photograph of a United States history textbook, on top of which he had placed a handgun. He prepared a series of Internet videos filled with rambling statements on topics including the gold standard, mind control and SWAT teams. And he had started to act oddly during his classes at Pima Community College, causing unease among other students. [......]

    "No one in that class would even sit next to him," Mr. Coorough said. Another fellow student said he found Mr. Loughner's behavior so eccentric -- including inappropriate remarks and unusual outbursts -- that he wondered if he might be on hallucinogens. [......]

    But the rambling, disconnected writings and videos he has left on the Web are consistent with the delusions produced by a psychotic illness like schizophrenia, which develops most often in the teens or 20's. Among other complaints, Mr. Loughner's social networking pages suggest that he had grievances against Pima Community College, that he felt cheated in some way. "If I'm not receiving the purchase from a payment then I'm victim of fraud," he wrote, referencing the school, in one of his many confusing phrases posted on his videos.

    His You Tube page also listed a series of favorite books. Some were novels about political dystopias -- including Animal Farm by George Orwell and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Others were about falling into phantasy worlds -- like Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll.

    In one extended Internet posting, Mr. Loughner suggested that the government was trying to trick him, or take advantage of him, although he never explained what caused these concerns. He also prepared a video that he called "My Final Thoughts: Jared Lee Loughner!"

    "All humans are in need of sleep. Jared Loughner is a human. Hence, Jared Loughner is in need of sleep," he wrote. He also briefly discussed terrorism. [......]

    As recently as Saturday [January 8, the day of the shooting rampage], he posted a message on his Myspace account hinting that he was going away.

    "Goodbye," he wrote at about 5 a.m. Saturday. "Dear friends...Please don't be mad at me."

[ "Arizona Suspect's Recent Acts Offer Hints of Alienation," by Eric Lipton, Charlie Savage and Scott Shane, The New York Times, Sunday, January 9, 2011, p. 18. ]

D.

    The night before the rampage, authorities say, Mr. Loughner, 22, dropped off at a drugstore a roll of 35-millimeter film he had shot of himself posing with a Glock semiautomatic pistol while wearing a red G-string. The authorities said he picked up the film early on the day of the shooting at a Walgreen's in the same strip mall where he would later open fire at a citizens' forum held by Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona.

    In some of the photos Mr. Loughner is holding the gun near his crotch, and in others, presumably taken in a mirror, he is holding the gun next to his buttocks, investigators said. It was not clear when the photos were taken.

    [ "Police Describe Busy Hours Before a Gunman's Attack," by Marc Lacey, Jo Becker and Sam Dolnick, The New York Times, January 15, 2011, p. A14. ]

E.

    These considerations therefore lend an added weight to the circumstance that we are in point of fact driven by experience to attribute to homosexual wishful phantasies an intimate (perhaps an invariable) relation to this particular form of disease. Distrusting my own experience on the subject, I have during the last few years joined with my friends C. G. Jung of Zurich and Sandor Ferenczi of Budapest in investigating upon this single point a number of cases of paranoid disorder which have come under observation. The patients whose histories provided the material for this enquiry included both men and women, and varied in race, occupation, and social standing. Yet we were astonished to find that in all these cases a defence against a homosexual wish was clearly recognizable at the very centre of the conflict which underlay the disease and that it was in an attempt to master an unconsciously reinforced current of homosexuality that they had all of them come to grief.[1] This was certainly not what we had expected. Paranoia is precisely a disorder in which sexual aetiology is by no means obvious; far from this, the strikingly prominent features in the causation of paranoia, especially among males, are social humiliations and slights. But if we go a little more deeply, we shall be able to see that the really operative factor in these social injuries lies in the part played in them by the homosexual components of emotional life. So long as the individual is functioning normally and it is consequenty impossible to see into the depths of his mental life, we may doubt whether his emotional relations to his neighbors in society have anything to do with sexuality, either actually or in their genesis. But delusions never fail to uncover these relations and to trace back the social feelings to their roots in a directly sensual erotic wish. So long as he was healthy, Dr. Schreber, too, whose delusions, culminating in a wishful phantasy of an unmistakably homosexual nature, had, by all accounts, shown no signs of homosexuality in the ordinary sense of the word.

[1] Further confirmation is afforded by Maeder's analysis of a paranoid patient J. B. (1910). The present paper, I regret to say, was completed before I had an opportunity of reading Maeder's work.

    [ "On the Mechanism of Paranoia," in Notes on a Case of Paranoia, Volume XII, 1911-1913, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London, 1958, pp. 59-60. (Translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey, in Collaboration with Anna Freud, and Assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson.) ]

768

S.F.-- I am an attractive 47-yr.-old professional and mother and I've spent most of my life running from the knowledge that I'm a lesbian. I've never been in love with a man, including my husband, but I still got married. I fulfilled my desire to have children and to make strides in my "brilliant" career, but now I realize I was sorely misguided by my inability to put love first. Is it too late and too complicated to learn? NYR [ New York Review of Books / date not noted ] Box 16702.

There is a very strong probability that at least one (or more) of this woman's children would have become a homosexual, or else have developed schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease. For psychologically she is the very embodiment of the typical, so-called "schizophrenogenic" mother. Specifically, she is the mother with definite masculine, homosexual tendencies, who loves women rather than men, and who competes openly, or sometimes more subtly, with the latter for dominance both in the family and in the workplace. Consequently, her children are raised in a toxic psychological environment of sexual-identity conflict and confusion and parental hostility, the parental hostility being directed both towards each as well as towards their children, thus dooming the latter either to homosexuality or, if their homosexuality is denied and repressed -- to schizophrenia.

767

The former commander of Canada's largest air force base will plead guilty to the murder of two women, two sexual assaults, two charges of unlawful confinement and 82 counts of breaking and entering, mainly involving thefts of women's lingerie, his lawyer told a civilian court in Belleville, Ont., on Thursday. Col. Russell Williams, above [picture], who occasionally piloted Canadian government flights carrying the prime minister and other dignitaries, is accused of carrying out the killings in a village near Canadian Forces Base Trenton, which provides logistical support for Canada's military mission in Afghanistan. Many of the break-ins occurred in Ottawa, where Colonel Williams also lived. The Ottawa Citizen reported that about 500 pieces of women's undergarments were seized from his townhouse there.

[ Canada: Ex-Commander of Air Base To Plead Guilty to Dozens of Charges, by Ian Austen, The New York Times, October 8, 2010, p. A8. ]

This is the chilling account of a man who has obviously been driven insane by his severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion -- clearly demonstrated in this particular case by his psychotic obsession with women's "undergarments." What use he made of these female undergarments, which he constantly collected by means of breaking into homes, only he could tell us -- whether to cross-dress in the privacy of his own home or perhaps to wear them underneath his regular clothing while engaged in his everyday activities. And, from the brief newspaper account of this case, it appears that Colonel Williams was an unmarried man, living alone in his Ottawa townhouse.

A somewhat similar case was reported earlier in the year in the United States in the Boston, Mass., area, where a young medical student would make dates over the internet with women whom he would then proceed to rob, and in one case, murder. When the police later raided his apartment they found a large assortment of women's panties which he had stolen from his victims, stuffed into stockings which he had hidden under his mattress, along with the gun used in the killing. (He was engaged to be married at the time.)

Both of these men were suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, as the direct result of their severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion, which is invariably the cause of this most toxic and malignant of psychological conditions. Furthermore, the fact that they both killed women demonstrates their intense hatred and all-consuming jealousy of the female sex, which, at a deeply-repressed and therefore unconscious level, they both so desperately wished to be members of.

ADDENDUM: In a later, more detailed article in The New York Times "International" (10/19/2010, p. A-11), reporter Ian Austen noted that Colonel Williams, 47, indeed was married, and that he and his wife owned both a townhouse in Ottawa and a "cottage" in the "village" of Tweed," which is located 40 miles from Col. Williams's military base in Trenton. It appears his wife lived mostly in Ottawa and then spent weekends with her husband in Tweed.
     He had broken into a total as 48 homes in or near Ottawa and Tweed, some repeatedly, where he would steal and photograph female underwear. "He then photographed himself -- often sexually aroused or masturbating -- modeling their underwear." Additionally, "He stole 87 pairs of underwear belonging to an Ottawa high school student in a single break-in. Twice, he took loads of the stolen garments to the outskirts of Ottawa and burned them."
     Tragically, Colonel Williams's paranoid schizophrenia - the "bearded lady" disease -- finally escalated to the point where it drove him to the brutal and sadistic sexual assault and murder of two young women -- both innocent and unsuspecting victims of his raging, "bearded lady" madness.
     "Last October, he broke into the home of Cpl. Marie-France Comeau, an air force flight attendant based at Trenton who had flown with Colonel Williams. The police said she died after being beaten and having her mouth and nose sealed with tape.
     "In late January, the second woman, Jessica Lloyd, 27, was reported missing. Her body was found Feb. 8."

766

     Allow me to share a recent encounter with a nut job. It occurred on the very day I'd been looking forward to for weeks. My generous friend [name deleted] was treating me to dinner and the San Francisco Symphony. Our favorite couple, [names deleted], would join us for the evening. With only small worries nagging me (i.e., not smudging the wet lilac polish on my fingers and toes), I blasted my Tom Petty tunes and enjoyed a beautiful day.
     As I stood in front of my closet, deciding between my fabulous brown-and-cream wrap dress and my sexy little black number, someone banged on the front door. Since it was too early for [name deleted] and the [names deleted], I didn't answer it; however, the loud knocking persisted. I finally opened the door to a woman I'd never seen before. Clad in exercise attire, I thought perhaps she couldn't find the nearby trail head. Unfortunately, she wasn't lost. She was looking for me.
     My visitor was tall, attractive and seemingly normal. I stepped outside, asking if I could help her. She immediately began ranting that I was responsible for her financial woes. (Later, I found out that she is in real estate, but clearly the devastated housing market isn't nearly the economic influence that I am.) I tried responding, but she wasn't listening.
     The wacko then got to the real point. She wanted me to know that she's watching me and looking in my windows. OK. Got it. Right before I shut the door in her face, I asked her name. Surprisingly, the bizarre woman revealed both her name and address. Lucky me--my stalker is also my neighbor. Apparently, she believes I'm personally responsible for structural defects in our complex and doesn't believe she should have to contribute to the repair costs.
     The whole incident was so upsetting that I canceled my plans for the evening, closed all of my blinds and stayed inside the entire weekend. [continued........]

[ Barking mad / >> SINGLE iN THE SUBURBS, by Nikki Silvertstein, The Pacific Sun, October 1 - October 7, 2010, p. 20. ]

Illustrated here is a classic case of paranoid schizophrenia, embodied in the aggressive actions and communications of the writer's stalking and demented next-door neighbor.

The bisexual conflict/gender-confused root of all paranoid schizophrenia is starkly manifested in this case by the stalker's obvious obsession with her alluring single neighbor (the writer) whom she admits watching and also peering at through her windows. By doing this, there is a strong possibility she may already have observed her victim undressing, bathing or performing many other of her personal and intimate daily routines. Small wonder, then, that the writer found this news "so upsetting" that she had canceled her dinner plans "and stayed inside the entire weekend." At some conscious, or else unconscious level, the writer must have recognized the obvious homosexual implications underlying this stalker's obsession with her.

Sigmund Freud's formula for paranoia, first developed in his famous study of the case of the paranoid schizophrenic German judge, Daniel Paul Schreber, perfectly applies to all such cases, including this one.

Stalker/ consciously: "I love her." [I am homosexually attracted to her.]

Stalker/ in denial and repression: "No, I don't LOVE her, I HATE her."

Stalker/ the inevitable "paranoid shift" having occurred: "No, I don't hate HER, she hates ME, and is thus persecuting me."

In this particular case the stalker, totally irrationally, blames the victim for being the cause of her personal financial problems and also for being the cause of the "structural defects" in the complex they both inhabit, giving this as the reason she doesn't think she should pay her fair share of the costs to fix said defects. And herein lies the danger to the stalked victims of the paranoid schizophrenic person; when the original, powerful homosexual love current is turned to hate and feelings of persecution due to its repression and the following "paranoid shift", the deranged paranoiac may erupt in fury and do bodily harm to the targets of their anger. We read about such cases everyday in the newspapers, or hear accounts of them broadcast on television or radio. This is one more reason for the victim of this particular stalker to have found the unexpected encounter with her "so upsetting."

We have all heard the old maxim that "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." Of course this observation applies equally to men, but it is only valid for those unfortunate men and women who suffer from paranoid schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, and not, thankfully, for the great majority of more "normal" persons.

In short, the stalker described so vividly in the above quotation is "madly" in love with, or "crazy" about, her victim, albeit now at a deeply and dangerously repressed, unconscious level.

765

     In 2003, a German computer expert named Armin Meiwes advertised online for someone to kill and eat. Incredibly, 200 people replied, and Meiwes chose a man names Bernd Brandes. One night, in Meiwes's farmhouse, Brandes took some sleeping pills and drank some schnapps and was still awake when Meiwes cut off his penis, fried it in olive oil and offered him some to eat. Brandes then retreated to the bathtub, bleeding profusely. Meiwes stabbed him in the neck, chopped him up and stored him in the freezer. Over the next several weeks, he defrosted and sautéed 44 pounds of Brandes, eating him by candlelight with his best cutlery.

[ Robin Marantz Henig, in a review of the book How Pleasure Works / The New Science of Why We Like What We Like, by Paul Bloom. 280 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. (New York Times Book Review, June 27, 2010, p. 6.) ]

Underlying this horrific account of the paranoid schizophrenic interaction between two madmen, is a powerful and fixed undercurrent of repressed homosexuality which permeates every aspect of it.

The one man allows himself to be castrated and killed by the other man, who then partially devours his victim, treating the latter's penis as a special, fried-in-olive oil, "delicacy" -- but not before having offered his dying victim a portion of his dismembered penis to eat.

The "penis" is the central element in this story. The insane victim offers his up as a "gift" to his insane killer, and his killer accepts it and eats it. Through agreeing to his castration, the victim symbolically changes his gender from male to female -- proof of his basic underlying bisexual conflict and gender confusion. And the man who castrates him is also in a state of severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion. Close examination of the personal lives of both these men would undoubtedly show a complete lack of any intimate female companionship throughout their lives.

Thus schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, has reared is ugly head once again -- in this particular case leaving one monstrously gruesome death with its following bizarre, cannibalistic rituals, in its wake.

764

Q.: Are the patterns so regular that it is legitimate to generalize about these families?

LIDZ : You have to categorize somewhat if you are to speak of general patterns. We knew very early in our studies that a large number of families of schizophrenic patients were severely disturbed. In describing the nature of this disturbance it is common to find that in many families parents do not get along, are in fact in open conflict with one another much of the time. But here, in the schizophrenic family, one parent undercuts the worth of the other to the child. The parent tries to win the child's support in the conflict with the other parent. Each tries to give the child the sense that he needs this support. It happens more commonly with a girl who gets caught in what we call a schism in her family. If she sides with one parent she must necessarily be rejected by the other, a variation of the double-bind. The child can never be right, and thus finds herself in an untenable situation. Commonly the girl sides with the father and becomes psychotic. This should not be at all surprising, for the child needs a positive role model from the parents, especially from the parent of the same sex with whom she can in some way identify. When the child grows up feeling different from her mother, a negative orientation is established. The father encouraged the view that her mother is no good, that she must be different from her mother to be cared for by him. And the girl knows, somehow, that no matter what she does she is not going to be cared for by the father. He will never really be satisfied.
     This is an area in which we have done a good deal of work, but Laing [R.D.] has misrepresented the whole thing in a way that I don't understand. In our work to which Laing refers, we were talking about a family model, not actual family transactions. In certain kinds of schizophrenic families there is apt to be a breakdown of boundaries between the two generations. The child is being used by the parent to complete his life. Often in such situations there is a good chance for the reversal of role-models, and so on. Also, in a schismatic family, although the mother may seem concerned for the girl, there will be something inimical in her manner of relating -- she will not be able to show proper, convincing affection. And as the mother fails in not being affectionate or maternal she provides a great handicap to the girl's development as a mother, should she conceive herself in these terms.
     Of course it is not always obvious what is wrong in the family milieu. In a family in which the mother seeks completion from the son she is frequently unable to set up boundaries between them, for she does not know what is going on in herself or in the son. Often the very fact she is a woman makes the mother feel that she cannot achieve anything like completion, that she must turn to the son. The child is given a laxative, and why not? Because the mother is constipated. She cannot grasp that the child will begin to see the world differently than she does. And in such families the pattern is not countered by the father, who in these families is typically passive. The mother in fact married him because he was passive and would not interfere. We find that the mother is usually near psychotic, as manifested in peculiar ways of talking and of calling the family together. And there is a markedly excessive concern to keep the child from others outside the family, especially other children. In such relative isolation from outside norms, without a proper male role model, a boy will be thrown back on the need to be special, different from his father. In this pattern, as in others, communication problems lead to the schizophrenic reaction in the child.

[ Dr. Theodore Lidz, in R.D. Laing & Anti-Psychiatry, Edited by Robert Boyers, Harper & Row Publishers (copyright 1971 by Skidmore College), Interviewers: Robert Orril, Robert Boyers, pp. 167-69. ]

The same family dynamics to be found at work in the average schizophrenogenic family, which Dr. Theodore Lidz has so brilliantly enumerated in the above quotation, apply equally to the family which produces homosexual sons and daughters, for in reality they are the same family.

The daughter who identifies with her father rather than with her emotionally inadequate mother, becomes masculine, as does the son who identifies with his mother rather than with his emotionally inadequate father, becomes feminine. He, along with his sister, lack an emotionally adequate same-sex figure in their developmental life with whom to identify, one which which will enable the son to escape the bonds of his CBI (close-binding-intimate) relationship with his mother, and the daughter her CBI relationship with her father. The dominant, masculine mother uses her son to augment her masculine strivings, just as the passive, feminine father uses his daughter to bolster his feminine strivings. In psychological terms, they have both castrated their children - the mother steals the penis from her son to complete her masculine self and the father steals the vagina from his daughter to complete his feminine self, thus leaving their children with the terrible unconscious choice of either becoming homosexual or else schizophrenic - the schizophrenia invariably occurring as the direct result of the repression and denial by these castrated children of their inevitable homosexuality.

Parents who are deeply conflicted, albeit often unconsciously, about their own sexual orientation, are the ones to whom the term "schizophrenogenic" should always be applied. A new term (by this writer) - "homosexogenic" - should similarly be affixed to these families, and thus a new psychological configuration has hereby been born: The "homosexogenic/schizophrenogenic" family - homosexuality and schizophrenia being the opposite sides of the same psychic "coin."

A constant, immutable law of nature is that homosexuality denied and repressed inexorably mutates into schizophrenia. And Dr. Theodore Lidz, in the above quotation, has clearly delineated for the reader the emotionally-skewed family psychodynamics which are always to be found at the core of the bisexual/gender confused conflicts which lead inevitably to the tragic manifestations of this terrible illness - schizophrenia.

763

Amok

Amok or running amok is another syndrome first described in Malaya, but also found in many other parts of the world, for example in the Philippines, in Africa, in the Caribbean, in Tierra del Fuego, etc. The "going berserk" of the old Vikings was probably similar to running amok. It used to be common in Malaya until the beginning of this century. According to van Wilfften Palthe,[151] it was observed with regularity among the patients of the old Batavia Hospital until the old building was replaced by a modern structure and until modern medical care was instituted in 1914. Since then, amok has become rare among hospital patients. Van Wilfften Palthe claims that he has never observed or heard about a case of amok among the many Malaysians living in European countries.
     In the early days of American occupation of the Philippines, a number of American soldiers became victims of amok Moros, a Moslem tribe. When the Moros' level of education was raised, amok disappeared. Maguigad[102] claims that amok is still quite frequent in the Philippines. It also appears to be fairly common among the Papuans of New Guinea under the name of "Negi-negi" or "Lulu," and in Melanesia.
     The "Puerto Rican Syndrome," or Mal de Pelea is, in my opinion, similar to amok, although the outcome is usually less gruesome. As in amok, the patient withdraws at first and gets into a brooding mood. All of a sudden and without any recognizable provocation, he becomes violent and strikes out at anyone near him.[43]
     According to Zaguirre[159] and Kline,[74] the premorbid personality is impulsive, emotionally hyper-reactive, according to other authors schizoid. However, the psychodynamic interpretation is probably the same. The patient's attempt at conflict-solution by repressing his hostility is failing. He makes a last desperate attempt by withdrawing within himself. According to Maguigad, amok derives from the Malayan word "amoq," which means engaging in furious battle. It is a life or death battle against a feeling of complete disintegration. I have sometimes sensed this feeling in a patient who from a catatonic stupor suddenly switched to catatonic excitement. It is a last-ditch attempt at survival against the inner forces which are about to disintegrate him.
     The Bantus express this idea in their belief that a person destined to die may escape death by killing someone else in his stead.
     In other words, the amok patient externalizes his desperate need to destroy the death-bringing inner conflict by killing other persons. The most violent cases of amok seem to occur in cultures which demand repression of hostility, as in Malaya, Bandung, and the Philippines. In Puerto Rico, violence is more acceptable, and, in fact, expected of males under certain circumstances. The investment of energy in the repression of hostility is not large and therefore the violence - once repression fails - is of a lesser degree.[43]
     The multiple acts occasionally committed in Western countries by persons with a schizoid personality resemble the clinical picture of running amok and may be due to similar psychodynamic mechanisms. These acts have been the subject of several novels by authors like Camus and D'Annunzio.

[ Johannes M. Meth, Exotic Psychiatric Syndromes / Functional Psychoses and Related Conditions, Chapter 32, pp. 729-30, in American Handbook of Psychiatry, Second Edition, Volume Three, Adult Clinical Psychiatry - Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, New York, 1974. ]

The so-called "running amok" syndrome is invariably triggered by a sudden and severe intensification in the afflicted individual - male or female - of an underlying homosexual conflict which is threatening to break through the unconscious psychic defenses of the conflicted person's ego and gain access to conscious awareness. In psycho-analytic terminology, this condition is always referred to as a person being in a state of "homosexual panic."

As can be seen from the above quotation, the "amok" syndrome is widespread throughout the world and has been wreaking havoc for many centuries, too often leaving a trail of death and destruction in its lethal wake. Currently in the United States alone, almost daily examples of individuals suddenly "running amok" and killing and injuring others, often including themselves, are headlined in the news media. It is certain that frequent, similar examples could be found chronicled in the news media of most, if not all, other countries as well.

According to two of the authors cited above, Zaguirre and Kline, the person who suddenly runs amok has a "premorbid personality" which is "impulsive, emotionally hyper-reactive, according to other authors schizoid." And in the insightful understanding of another clinician, Maguigad, the word amok "derives from the Malayan word 'amoq,' which means engaging in a furious battle. It is a life or death battle against a feeling of complete disintegration." He adds that "I have sometimes sensed this feeling in a patient who from a catatonic [schizophrenic] stupor suddenly switched to catatonic excitement. It is a last-ditch attempt at survival against the inner forces which are about to disintegrate him."

These "inner forces which are about to disintegrate" the patient invariably stem from the patient's "bearded lady disease" - his severe, unconscious bisexual conflict and gender confusion, the basic etiological factor inevitably to be found at the very core of the "running amok" schizoid, or schizophrenic syndrome.

The terrible fear and hatred of their "perverse" opposite-sex feelings and sexual cravings which are finally threatening to break through into conscious perception, often after many years of severe denial and repression, initiates the so-called "schizophrenic break," or "homosexual panic." And unfortunately this panic frequently mutates into a furious hatred which reflects the combination of extreme anger and monumental fear that the schizophrenic person unconsciously experiences with regard to his own overwhelmingly powerful and perverse - in his own mind, that is - emotions and desires. This hatred and fear is then paranoically projected and deflected outwards onto an unsuspecting society, too often triggering another tragic "running amok" episode.

Unfortunately mankind will never see the end of this terrifying phenomenon - or at least not until its core etiology - schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease - becomes universally recognized and dealt with appropriately.

762

Koro*

The origin of the word "koro" is not clear. It may stem from the Malayan word "kuru," shake; the Javanese word "keruk," shrink; or according to Yap,[153] from the Javanese word for tortoise. The Chinese and Southeast Asians call the glans penis tortoise.
     The Chinese name for the syndrome is "shook yong." It has been known in China for centuries. One of their emperors died supposedly of shook yong. The Chinese author Pao described it in 1834. He claimed that it is precipitated by exposure to cold or by the ingestion of cold or raw food. It starts out with abdominal pain, spasms, and cyanosis of the limbs, retraction of the penis and scrotum into the abdomen; then, there is trismus, and finally death. It is a serious emergency. According to Chinese folk medicine, it is related to the female middle meridian which is supposedly governed by the liver - the organ most susceptible to worry, fear and anger. One of the triggering causes is believed to be excessive intercourse or improper sexual relations.
     The symptoms usually start without warning. The patient, usually between thirty and forty years of age, is suddenly worried that his penis will disappear into his abdomen and that he will die. To prevent this from happening, the patient has to grip his penis firmly; when he becomes tired, his wife, relatives, or friends can help him. The Chinese constructed a special wooden clasp for this purpose. At times, fellatio, practiced by the patients's wife, can stop the phobia, otherwise it can last for days, or even weeks. Linton[97] describes a female equivalent of koro in Borneo where the patient is afraid that her breasts are shrinking as well as her labia, which would lead to the disappearance of important female characteristics.
     The Chinese believe that shook yong is caused by an imbalance of yin and yan. The prevalence of the female factor yin must be countered by the administration of a drug which increases yan, for example powdered rhinoceros horn.
     Our male patients, afflicted by castration anxiety, choose different symbols to express their fears. They may be worried about the length of their penises, of being homosexual, etc. What makes Southeast Asian or Chinese patients adopt their particular symbolism is impossible to say without intimate knowledge of their culture.

[ Johannes M. Meth, Exotic Psychiatric Syndromes, Chapter 32, p. 730, in American Handbook of Psychiatry, Second Edition, Volume Three, Adult Clinical Psychiatry, Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, New York, 1974. ]

The information contained in the above quotation proves, beyond a doubt, that schizophrenia - the "bearded lady" disease, has been bedeviling both men and women in many, if not all, different cultures and countries, for many centuries.

The Chinese "shook yong" is basically the product of severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion, as it was intuitively recognized by both physicians and laity of that era: "The Chinese believe that shook yong is caused by an imbalance of yin and yan. The prevalence of the female factor yin [in men] must be countered by the administration of a drug which increases yan, for example powdered rhinoceros horn." Likewise in females, "Linton[97] describes a female equivalent of koro in Borneo where the patient is afraid that her breasts are shrinking as well as her labia, which would lead to the disappearance of important female characteristics." (Unfortunately, no mention was made of any "drug" which might be administered to such afflicted women to increase their "yin.")

"Shook yong," or "koro," in both men and women, is precipitated by "an imbalance of yin [female] and yan [male]" - which "imbalance", when either repressed or denied, invariably serves as the basic etoliological factor in all functional mental illness, including schizophrenia.

761

A.

MIDWEST

Iowa: Murder Conviction in Death of High School Football Coach

An Iowa man was convicted of first-degree murder Tuesday in last year's shooting death of a nationally known high school football coach. The jury found Mark Becker, 24, guilty of shooting the coach of Aplington-Parkersburg High School, Ed Thomas, 58, at least six times in front of students in the school's weight room. Mr. Becker told the police that Mr. Thomas was Satan and had been tormenting him. (AP)

[ The New York Times, 3/2/2010, p. A18 ]

B.

FOOTBALL

Guilty Verdict in Coach's Shooting

A jury in Allison, Iowa, convicted Mark Becker on Tuesday of murder in the shooting last June of Ed Thomas, his former football coach at Applington- Parkersburg High School. Jurors deliberated more than 24 hours before convicting Becker, 24, of first-degree murder, rejecting his plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. The verdict carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison.
     Becker told psychiatrists that after months of torment, he shot Thomas at least six times in the high school weight room, then kicked his body before walking away. Prosecutors acknowledged that Becker had a mental illness but said that he coldly calculated the killing, taking practice shots with the .22 caliber pistol he used to kill Thomas and lying to people in his search for the coach. Thomas had a 292-84 record in 37 seasons as coach and was a leader in rebuilding the town of Parkersburg after nearly a third of it was destroyed by a tornado in May 2008. (AP)

[ The New York Times, 3/3/2010, p. B14. ]

C.

     Without going further into all the details of the course of his illness, attention is drawn to the way in which from the early more acute psychosis which influenced all psychic processes and which could be called hallucinatory insanity, the paranoid form of illness became more and more marked, crystallized out so to speak, into its present picture.
     This kind of illness [paranoia] is, as is well known, characterized by the fact that next to a more or less fixed elaborate delusional system, there is complete possession of mental faculties and orientation, formal logic is retained, marked affective reactions are missing, neither intelligence nor memory are particularly affected and the conception and judgment of indifferent matters, that is to say matters far removed from the delusional ideas, appear not to be particularly affected, although naturally because of the unity of all psychic events they are not untouched by them. [......] Nevertheless, the patient is filled with pathological ideas, which are woven into a complex system, more or less fixed, and not amenable to correction by objective evidence and judgment of circumstance as they really are; the latter still less so as hallucinatory and delusory processes continue to be of importance to him and hinder normal evaluation of sensory impressions.

[ Medical Expert's Report to the Court, By Dr. G. Weber, Superintendent of Sonnenstein Asylum, 9th December 1899, in Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, by Daniel Paul Schreber, WM. Dawson & Sons Ltd., London, 1955, p.271. ]

Mr. Mark Becker, the "shooter" in this case, is obviously afflicted with a very severe case of paranoid schizophrenia, attested to by the fact that he reported to the police after fatally shooting his coach, Ed Thomas, that Mr. Thomas "was Satan", and that he had killed him after enduring "months of torment" by him.

As is invariably the case in every occurrence of paranoid illness, the basic motivating factor in the paranoid persons's actions is always based upon a defense against his (or her) overwhelmingly powerful, repressed, and therefore unacknowledged homosexual passions and drives. In this particular case Mr. Becker had, for whatever unconscious psychological reasons, developed a strong homosexual attraction to his coach, which attraction was then violently repressed and repudiated by him, leading directly to the development of his paranoid, delusory ideation. "I LOVE him" was countered immediately by "No, I don't LOVE him, I HATE him." Soon thereafter the inevitable "paranoid shift", or projective phenomenon, occurred: "No, I don't hate HIM, he hates ME and is consequently tormenting and trying to destroy me. Therefore, to protect myself, I have to kill him before he kills me." However, in psychic reality, by killing his coach, Mr. Becker has "killed" the object of his powerful homosexual temptation and attraction, and thereby, in his delusional mind, temporarily freed himself from the dreadful and terrifying possibilities of homosexual fulfillment.

What the prosecutors and jury in this case did not understand was that just because the defendant, Mr. Becker, had, as was charged, "coldly calculated the killing, taking practice shots with the .22 pistol he used to kill Thomas and lying to people in his search for the coach," that these facts alone did not prove that the defendant, although admittedly suffering from a "mental illness" - was truly insane. How mistaken they all were, for Mr. Becker was indeed insane, afflicted with paranoia, the end stage of schizophrenia and the one which is the most difficult, if not impossible, to treat. This fact is what had once led Dr. Sigmund Freud pessimistically to declare that "In schizophrenia the victory lies with repression." And what is being repressed are always the schizophrenic's powerful homosexual drives and desires - sexual cravings which he (or she) experiences as being too psychologically painful and terrifying ever consciously to confront and deal with. In this case Mr. Becker's paranoid schizophrenia ultimately led to the tragic death of Mr. Thomas, supposedly beloved by all who knew him, formerly also including the defendant himself, but whose own love for his coach included overwhelmingly powerful elements of homosexuality which, being intolerable to his ego, were consequently repressed and thereby converted into the energy source which fueled his lethal, paranoid hatred for the "Satan" who had long "been tormenting him."

As Dr. G. [Guido] Weber explains so clearly in Quotation C. above, in speaking of his Sonnenstein Asylum patient, Daniel Paul Schreber - probably history's most famous and studied, as well as self-studied, psychiatric patient - that in paranoia, "next to a more or less fixed elaborate delusional system, there is complete possession of mental faculties and orientation, formal logic is retained, marked affective reactions are missing, neither intelligence nor memory are particularly affected and the conception and judgment of indifferent matters, that is to say matters far removed from the delusional ideas, appear not to be particularly affected, although naturally because of the unity of all psychic events they are not untouched by them."

Daniel Paul Schreber's "fixed elaborate delusional system" was that he was changing into a woman; Mark Becker's was that his former football coach, Ed Thomas, had become Satan and that he was being unbearably tormented by him. Nevertheless, both Schreber and Becker, despite seemingly normal reactions in other fields of thought and behavior, not touching upon their "fixed elaborate delusional systems," would be considered under present U.S. law as legally responsible for any crimes committed by them. Yet in reality, both men were as insane as it is humanly possible to become due to their fixed, unassailable paranoid ideation. Thus when Mark Becker's jurors mistakenly rejected his plea of "not guilty by reason of insanity," they were unknowingly committing a great injustice themselves - one which is committed on an almost daily basis in the vast majority of American courts. Our prisons have now become our mental hospitals.

760

A.

     The Family of the Schizophrenic

The reader must be aware that all the studies of the family of schizophrenics were made after the patient became obviously sick and in most cases had grown to be an adult. The assumption is made that the study of how the family is at the time of the illness and the eliciting of past history give an adequate picture of the family environment during the time preceding the psychosis. Moreover, often the appraisal of the family was in many studies strongly influenced by the personal account of it given by the patient himself. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that one of the first vivid impressions that we get in dealing with patients and their relatives is that the family of the patient is not a happy one, or at least was not so in the formative years of the patient. The unhappiness, although aggravated at times by realistic situations such as poverty and physical illness, was as a rule determined by psychological factors, predominantly by the unhappy marriage of the parents. The marriage was unhappy not only because of the character incompatibility and personality difficulties of the parents but also because such difficulties, instead of being compensated for or countered by less destructive defenses, were enormously aggravated by the process of living together. This atmosphere of unhappiness and tension, although all-pervading and pronounced, in many cases is not apparent to the casual observer, as an attempt is made by all concerned to conceal it not only from the external world but also from themselves. At times, it is almost totally repressed and replaced by psychological insensitivity.

B.

     Many authors have described special family constellations in schizophrenics. In the first edition of Interpretation of Schizophrenia,[4] I described one which I have encountered frequently. A domineering, nagging, and hostile mother who gives the child no chance to assert himself, is married to a dependent, weak man, too weak to help the child. The father does not dare to protect the child because of fear of losing his wife's sexual favors, or simply because he is not able to oppose her strong personality. By default more than by his direct doing he becomes as crippling to the child as the mother is.
     Occurring less frequently in the United States, but still frequently enough, is the opposite combination; a tyrannical or extremely narcissistic father is married to a weak mother who tries to solve her problems by unconditionally accepting her husband's rules. These rules do not allow her to give enough love to the child and to be considerate enough of his affective requirements. In these families, the weak parent, whether mother or father, becomes antagonistic and hostile towards at least one child, because she or he (the parent) displaces her or his anger from the spouse, who is too strong to be a suitable target, to the child. In 1957, Lidz et al.[59] described the same type of family constellation, to which they gave the name of "marital skew."
     Lidz and his associates[58-64] found that the role of each spouse in the family cannot be well established and that no attempt is made by them to complement or to help each other. There is no possibility of getting together, of reciprocal understanding and co-operation, no mutual trust, no confidence, but rivalry, undercutting of worth, threat of separation, and enrollment of the children's support against the other. Each partner is disillusioned in the other: the husband sees the wife as a defiant and disregarding person who also fails as a mother. The wife is disappointed because she does not find in her husband the father figure she expected. In this background, the family is often split into two factions by the overt marital schism of the parents. Generally, the children belong to one side of the schism or to the other and have to contend with problems of guilt because of their divided loyalty.

C.

     Even before the family of the patient was studied as a unity, the various members, and especially the parents, were studied individually, although, as already mentioned, often by relying greatly on how the patient experienced them. Some authors have followed [Frieda] Fromm-Reichmann in referring to the mother as "schizophrenogenic." They have described her as overprotective, hostile, overtly or subtly rejecting, overanxious, cold, distant. etc. Because of these characteristics, she was unable to give herself to the child and was unfit for motherhood. Rosen[76] referred to her perverse sense of motherhood.
In the writings of a large number of authors, she was described as a malevolent creature, and portrayed in an intensely negative way. (Sullivan, [82,83] Rosen,[75,76], Hill,[41], Limentani,[65] Bateson et al, [19] Lu, [66] Lidz and Fleck[63]).
     The father of the schizophrenic has also been studied by Lidz and his associates.[53,64]. Whereas previous authors had emphasized the weakness, aloofness, and ineffectiveness of the father in the paternal role, Lidz and associates described him as insecure in his masculinity, in need of great admiration for the sake of bolstering his shaky self-esteem, occasionally paranoid or given to paranoid-like irrational behavior.

[ Schizophrenia: The Psychodynamic Mechanisms and the Psychostructural Forms (Chapter 24), by Silvano Arieti, in Volume III, American Handbook of Psychiatry - Second Edition, Revised and Expanded, Basic Books, Inc., New York, 1974, pp. 552-54. ]

The so-called "marital skew," or "marital schism," explored by Dr. Silvano Arieti and colleagues in Quotations A, B, and C above, is the breeding ground for producing not only future schizophrenics, but also for producing future homosexuals - schizophrenia and homosexuality being the opposite sides of the same "coin." When the developing homosexuality is repressed or denied, then schizophrenic symptomatology begins.

The father of a schizophrenic patient once told the patient's therapist that "When I married I was only half a man, and could only marry half a woman." The sex of the schizophrenic patient in this particular case was not noted, but is inconsequential because the above equation, so simply but powerfully elucidated by the father, describes perfectly the emotional "petri dish" from which grow all the schizophrenic, as well as the homosexual, offspring of such severely bisexually conflicted and gender confused parents.

All of these parents' psychic difficulties - as outlined so clearly and emphatically in the above quotations - and which have such deleterious and toxic effects upon the emotional and sexual development of their children, have their root, as we can see, in the parents' own "skewed," or "schismatic," basic sexual orientation. Instead of having just two parents, one masculine and the other feminine, the children have, in psychic reality, four parents - the masculine father and the feminine father; the feminine mother and the masculine mother. Figuring out and properly identifying with four such parents, instead of the one of each sex, proves to be such an insurmountable task for the great majority of such children exposed to such confounding parental emotional and sexual signals, that consequentially they fall prey, during the early pubertal course of their emotional and sexual development, to severe schizophrenic and/or homosexual difficulties.

"When I married I was only half a man, and could only marry half a woman."

Within that simple, heartfelt quotation, is contained the answer to the source of all future functional mental illness in the children of such parents - as well as that of their homosexuality - since schizophrenia is invariably the end result of their homosexuality denied and repressed.

759

He managed to avoid the death penalty though when the Supreme Court changed its ruling on capital punishment. He was re-sentenced to 50-100 years in prison but died on December 5, 1991 from a massive heart attack. His autopsy showed that he had an enlarged heart and occluded arteries, having blown up to 220 pounds at the time of his death. No one claimed his body and he was cremated. His ashes were disposed of in an undisclosed location.

But unfortunately, in 1996, Speck was back.

In May of that year, television journalist Bill Kurtis went behind the wall of Stateville prison and came back with a secret videotape that showed a bizarre Richard Speck with women's breasts - apparently from hormone treatments - wearing blue panties and having sex with another inmate. Segments of the video, which also showed sex and drug orgies, were shown on the program American Justice and plunged the Illinois Department of Corrections into a major scandal. The video had been shot in the middle 1980's and viewers were as repulsed to see what had become of Speck as they were by his bloody crimes. Even after death, he was still raising hell.

[ Born To Raise Hell, The Life and Crimes of Richard Speck, Troy Tayor, 2003 - http://www.prairieghosts.com/speck.html ]

Note: See also - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i725FCBJIxA

This is yet another of countless horrendous examples of a person running amok and slaughtering innocent persons - as the direct result of their being afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease. In this case a young man named Richard Speck, 25, on July 13, 1966, broke into a townhouse in Chicago which housed student nurses who were in training at the South Chicago Community Hospital, and cold-bloodedly proceeded to murder, either by stabbing or strangling - or both - eight of these young women, one after the other, for no apparent reason. All were total strangers to him.

But of course there was a reason behind this lethal rampage, the same reason which is the core element behind all such instances of insane persons suddenly running amok and wreaking deadly havoc on unsuspecting victims. In all such cases, the killer is in the deadly grip of a classic, paranoid schizophrenic "homosexual panic", one which has unhinged his mind and caused him to erupt into a frenzied and delusional psychotic state which too often tragically culminates in horrific and lethal consequences for all those in his immediate vicinity, or for others whom his now floridly paranoid and delusional mind has chosen to target.

Later in prison, Richard Speck's primary "bearded lady" characteristics finally asserted themselves (see above quotation) after a lifetime of rigid repression, and he became, in essence, the woman he had always unconsciously yearned to be - most likely ever since early adolescence due to his severely emotionally-warped childhood experiences. His tremendous envy and hatred of women, developed as a consequence of his frustrated, repressed wish to be one himself, led directly to his murderous lashing-out at the innocent young student nurses he killed. His entire life leading up to this tragic episode had consisted of ceaseless and frantic efforts to over-compensate for his unconscious, feminine, homosexual nature by obsessively behaving in exactly the opposite way - "Born To Raise Hell."

Speck's childhood background of having had a father who died when he was six-years-old, thereby depriving him of a potentially admired or beloved masculine figure with whom to identify himself as a male - which lack was further exacerbated by his later having a step-father who was alleged to have been a drunkard who beat him savagely, and a mother said to have been an extremely strict and pious Baptist - all these factors combined were a toxic mix which left Speck with an emotionally-scarred childhood which seeded his unconscious desire to be a female rather than a male, undoubtedly on the "childish" assumption that he would have been more beloved and cherished had he been a member of the opposite sex. And since he was the seventh of eight children, which included several sisters, he may certainly have perceived, or felt, that his sisters were favored over him. In fact, later in prison, following the brutal slaying of the eight young nurses, he finally did achieve that previously repressed and persistently longed-for goal of becoming the "female" he had always wished to be, thereby experiencing, as one of the "queens" among the men imprisoned with him, the "perverse" love and caring he had always searched for.

The great tragedy in this case, as in all similar "running amok" cases, is that its ghastly consequences could have been avoided if only the perpetrator had been recognized as a severely disturbed individual at an earlier stage of his [or her] illness, and at that critical juncture had received the necessary psychological counseling to encourage him [or her] to address the severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion which invariably lies at the root of the paranoid schizophrenic, "bearded lady" illness.

758

A.

     KILLEEN, Tex. - It was still dark on Thursday when Major Nidal Malik Hasan [39-years-old] left his aging apartment complex to attend 6 a.m. prayers at the brick mosque neat Fort Hood. Afterward, he said goodbye to his friends there and asked forgiveness from one man for any past offenses.
     "I'm going traveling," he told a fellow worshiper, giving him a hug. "I won't be here tomorrow."
     Six hours later, Major Hasan walked into a processing center at Ft. Hood where soldiers get medical attention before being sent overseas. At first, he sat quietly at an empty table, said two congressmen briefed on the investigation.
     Then, witnesses say, he bowed his head for several seconds, as if praying, stood up and drew a high-powered pistol. "Allahu akbar," he said
- "God is great." And he opened fire. Within minutes he had killed 13 people [and wounded 31].
     But relatives and acquaintances say tensions that led to the rampage had been building for a long time. Investigators say Major Hasan bought the gun used in the massacre last July, days after arriving at Fort Hood.
     Major Hasan's behavior in the months and weeks leading up to the shooting bespeaks a troubled man full of contradictions. He lived frugally in a run-down apartment, yet made a good salary and spent more than $1,100 on the pistol the authorities said he used in the shootings.
     He was described as gentle and kindly by many neighbors, quick with a smile or hello, yet he complained bitterly to people at the mosque about the oppression of Muslims in the Army. He had few friends, and even the men he interacted with at the mosque saw him as a strange figure whom they never fully accepted into their circle.
     "He was upset," said Duane Reasoner Jr., an 18-year-old who attended the mosque and ate frequently with Major Hasan at the Golden Corral restaurant. "He didn't want to go to Afghanistan." [......]

     During his years in Washington, Major Hasan turned increasingly toward Islam, relatives and classmates said. In part, he was seeking solace after the death of his parents, in 1998 and 2001.
     Mr. Hamad, the uncle, said Major Hasan took the death of his parents hard, isolating himself and delving into books on Islam rather than socializing. "But this was a few years ago, and I thought he had coped with it," Mr. Hamad said.
     Major Hasan also seemd to believe that his mosque could help him find a wife, preferably one of Arab descent, he told imams. Faizul Khan, the former imam at the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring, Md., said he knew women who had been interested in Major Hasan because he had a good job. But he did not find any of them pious enough, the imam said.
     Though Major Hasan told his cousins that he planned to marry sometime this year, he was not known to ever have had a girlfriend, relatives said. [......]
     The former classmate, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of working for the military and not being authorized to speak, said some students complained to their professors about Major Hasan but that no action had been taken. "It didn't cross my mind that he was dangerous," the former classmate said. "He's a chubby, bald guy. He wasn't threatening."
     One of Major Hasan's supervisors, Dr. Thomas Grieger, said that Major Hasan had difficulties while at Walter Reed that required counseling. But Dr. Grieger said that such counseling was not uncommon, and told CNN that Major Hasan "had responded to the supervision that he received." [......]
     In May, after completing the fellowship, he was promoted to major and two months later, he was transferred to Fort Hood, the Army's largest post. When he arrived there on July 15 - deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan - seemed almost certain. [......]

     The tenants generally saw him leave early and come home late in the afternoon, usually in his fatigues. He never had visitors, they said, but he was friendly with his neighbors. [......]
     In early September, he also began worshiping at the Islamic Community of Greater Killeen mosque, on the southern outskirts of town, which about 75 families attend. He prayed there as often as five times a day, kneeling in a plain room with bright green carpet. [......]
     But he was wrestling with his role as a Muslim. He invited Osman Danquah, the co-founder of the mosque to dinner at Ryan's restaurant and asked him how he should counsel young Muslim soldies who might have objections to the wars.
     Mr. Danquah, a retired sergeant, told him the soldiers had no excuse since it was a volunteer Army and they could always file as conscientious objectors.
     "I got the impression he was trying to validate how he was dealing with it, Mr. Danquah said.
     Major Hasan also applied to become a lay Muslim chaplain on the Army post, according to an Army chaplain, who requested anonymity. [......]

     Then in late October, Major Hasan told the iman, Syed Ahmed Ali, that he was leaving Texas for Virginia to live with his family there. He said, "Pray for me," Mr. Ali said.
     But he never left. The night before the shooting, he had dinner with Mr. Reasoner and said he felt he should not go to Afghanistan.
     "He felt he was supposed to quit," Mr. Reasoner said. "In the Koran, it says you are not supposed to have alliances with Jews or Christians, and if you are killed in the military fighting against Muslims, you will go to hell."

[ After Years of Growing Tensions, 7 Minutes of Bloodshed, by James C. McKinley Jr. and James Dao, The New York Times, Monday, November 9, 2009, pp. A1 and A16. ]

B.

Hasan was a walking contradiction; the counselor who himself needed counseling; the proud soldier who did not want to fight, at least not against fellow Muslims; the man who could not find a sufficiently modest and pious wife through his mosque's matchmaking machinery but who frequented the local strip club. A man supposedly so afraid of deployment that he launched a war of his own from which he clearly did not expect to return alive. "Everyone is asking why this happened," said Hasan's family in a formal statement, "and the answer is we simply do not know." [......]

     "We've known for the last five years that [deployment to Afghanistan] was probably his worst nightmare," cousin Nader Hasan told Fox News. "He would tell us how he hears horrific things...That was probably affecting him psychologically."
     That diagnosis seems like sentimental nonsense to people who noted how well Hasan matched the classic model of the lone, strange, crazy killer: the quiet and gentle man who formed few close human attachments but, reported the New York Times, used to chew up food and let his pet parakeet eat it from his mouth; when he rolled over during a nap and accidentally crushed it to death, he visited the bird's grave for months afterward. [......]

     "It was a systemic problem," the officer says. "The same thing was happening at Walter Reed." The vital question for the military and our own security is whether political correctness - or the desire to promote diversity - prevented the Army from recognizing and dealing with a problem in its midst, a problem in plain sight. According to a co-worker, Hasan would not even allow his photo to be taken with female colleagues. "People are afraid to come forward and challenge somebody's ideology," explains Hasan's classmate, "because they're afraid of getting an equal-opportunity complaint that can end careers." NPR reported that top officials at Walter Reed held meetings in the spring of 2008 in which they debated whether Hasan was "psychotic." "Put it this way," an official told NPR." "Everybody felt that if you were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, you would not want Nidal Hasan in your foxhole." [......]

A top Pentagon official admits there may be some truth to the charge. "We're wondering why some of these strange encounters didn't trigger something more formal," he says. "I think people were overly sensitive about Muslims in the military, and that led to a reluctance to say, 'This guy is nuts.' The Army is going to have to review their procedures to make sure someone can raise issues like this."

[ Terrified... Or Terrorist?, by Nancy Gibbs, Time (magazine), November 23, 2009, pp. 28-31. ]

C.

     More than thirty years of intensive investigation of these problems permits me to make the general statement that in man [and woman] every case of emotional neurosis or psychosis is the result of more or less conflict and confusion involving bisexual differentiation. ...Dementing schizophrenia is essentially a regression to the cloacal level of hermaphrodism. I am quite sure that it would be easy to demonstrate these factors in any case and often within an hour of investigation.

[ Bisexual Factors in Curable Schizophrenia, Edward J. Kempf, M.D., (presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, May 18, 1948), Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology, Vol. 44, 1949, pp. 514-419. Note: See this article in its entirety on a separate link on this website. ]

D.

We must recognize that the sexual affections are still the greatest constructve forces of the personality if properly conditioned and adjusted, but also that they may become the most insidiously, irresistibly destructive if perverted or unconditionally repressed.

[ Edward J. Kempf, M.D., Psychopathology, C.V. Mosby and Company, St. Louis, MO, 1920. ]

E.

In any case, the appearance within awareness of the homoerotic interest stirs such violent self-reproach that a dissociation or a vigorous defensive process results. If the self is able to dissociate the abhorrent system, the personality continues to be in grave danger of panic with succeeding schizophrenia, unless the sexual tensions are being drained of by some collateral procedure such as frequent masturbation or more or less auto-sexual intercourse with women [with men in the case of females/jmm]. Moreover, under cover of the dissociation, experience in any case continues to be integrated into the dissociated system and its partition in the personality to grow.

[ Harry Stack Sullivan, M.D., Personal Psychopathology, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1972, 1965, p. 212. ]

As in all cases of persons who run amok and murder other innocent people, this "shooter", Major Nidal Hasan, was suffering from schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, caused by his "unconditionally repressed" [Dr. Edward J. Kempf] and overwhelmingly powerful bisexual conflict and gender confusion.

Becoming noticeably stranger following the deaths of his parents in 1998 and 2001, especially that of his mother - he "became very religious after their mother died," - "..isolating himself and delving into books on Islam rather than socializing," according to various news reports. This was the beginning of his observable clinical depression, though undoubtedly he had been experiencing depressive symptoms since early childhood due to the emotional "warping" effect engendered by a very powerful and unbreakable mother-son symbiotic relationship. "In the case, however, of another boy, one for example who has been seriously warped by the continued or augmented importance of a more or less primitive attachment to the mother, and who therefore is not susceptible to any marked heterosexual drives because of attachment to the mother - with rationalizations generally contributed by her in the shape, perhaps, of advice to keep away from 'bad girls,' examples of misfortune resulting from dealings with crafty females, and the like - the outcome is quite otherwise." [Harry Stack Sullivan, M.D., Personal Psychopatholgy, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1972, 1965, p. 199.]

Despite professing a strong desire to get married, Major Hasan had found fault with every woman concerned friends had introduced him to - in the hope that one of them might prove to be a suitable partner for him - even though at age 39 he had never been known to have a girlfriend. This fact, alone, points to an extremely blighted heterosexual drive in an otherwise healthy adult man, thereby highlighting the homosexual side of his nature which consequently would have to be exceedingly powerful and dominant.

Following the death of his mother, especially, his emotional life slowly but inexorably deteriorated until he eventually reached the point of becoming a full-fledged paranoid schizophrenic - one who was primed to explode at any time due to the buildup of the intolerable tensions caused by his dammed-up bisexual urges and cravings. As the psychologically-astute Judge Daniel Paul Schreber, the subject of Professor Sigmund's Freud's famous study on paranoia, proclaimed in his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness: "I would like to meet the man who, faced with the choice of either becoming a demented human being in male habitus or a spirited woman, would not prefer the latter. Such and only such is the issue for me." Unfortunately and tragically, Major Nidal Hasan chose, albeit unconsciously, to become a "demented human being in male habitus" rather than the "spirited woman" he truly was psychosexually, and the sudden and devastating massacre of his Army colleagues at Fort Hood was undertaken by him as the direct consequence of the paranoid insanity caused by his severe "bearded lady" conflict - which conflict is invariably the basic instigating factor in every such case of a madman running amok.

It had been known, or debated, by his superiors for some time that Major Hasan showed sympoms of being "psychotic", or "nuts", but tragically nothing was done to protect his colleagues from potential harm by him, either by isolating him or discharging him from the Army. Over the course of a severely psychologically-damaged lifetime, he had finally evolved into that most-feared type of paranoid schizophrenic madman - one who has been driven insane by his "bearded lady" disease and then runs amok and kills - a tragic situation which occurs almost on a weekly basis in communities throughout the United States, and elsewhere around the world. [Please also refer to New Quotation/Comment # 757, and IMPRESSIONS items, 75-72.]

As many psychotics attempt to commit "suicide by cop," so also did Major Hasan attempt to commit "suicide by soldier," but surprisingly failed in the attempt. (Suicide has accurately been described by some investigators as the most serious symptom of schizophrenia, but far too often vicious homicidal actions precede it, as occurred in this case.)

In Islamic religious law, homosexuality has long been considered one of the capital offenses, along with adultery, and thus it would have been psychologically almost impossible for Major Hasan consciously to admit to any homoerotic feelings or opposite-sex strivings, especially considering how fiercely he had embraced Islamic precepts following the death of his mother.

In Quotation E. above, Dr. Harry Stack Sullivan discusses how the "appearance within awareness of the homoerotic interest" causes a such a "violent" defensive reaction in the male [or female/jmm], that the afflicted person, in order to stave off a "homosexual" panic attack, tries to "drain off" these repressed homoerotic cravings and sexual excitations by engaging in what Dr. Sullivan refers to as "auto-sexual" intercourse with a member - or members (satyriasis/nymphomania) - of the opposite sex. This is exactly what Major Hasan was unknowingly attempting to do when he began frequenting the strip clubs near his base at Fort Hood and commenced, astonishingly so for an alleged fervent Muslim, to engage in "lap dances," etc. But this final, desperate self-remedy did not work, his homoerotic urges were too powerful, thus precipitating in him a classic "homosexual" panic which resulted in a total loss of his emotional and physical self-control, and launched him on his insanely murderous, and ultimately suicidally-intended, path of destruction and mayhem.

As Dr. Edward J. Kempf explains, in Quotation D. above, if the individual's "sexual affections" become "perverted or unconditionally repressed," they may then become the "most insidiously, irresistibly destrucive" of forces. This is what happened in the case of Major Nidal Malik Hasan, and in the cases of all other paranoid schizophrenic, "bearded lady" victims who have suddenly "snapped" and run amok - with such lethal and tragic consequences for all concerned.

"Running amok" is a psychopathologically-caused phenomenon which has always been, and tragically always will be, an ever-present danger for mankind.

757

A.

     Howard Unruh, who carried out one of America's most infamous mass shootings, killing 13 people, three of them children, in a 20-minute, seemingly emotionless stroll through his neighborhood in Camden, N.J., in September 1949, died Monday at a nursing home in Trenton after 60 years' confinement. He was 88. [......]
     Mr. Unruh was found to have paranoid schizophrenia and never stood trial. He was confined to the high-security Vroom Building for the criminally insane at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital until 1993, when he was transferred across the grounds to less restrictive wards in a geriatric unit.
     When Mr. Unruh gunned down his neighbors, the shootings were particularly shocking because no one could remember anything like that. And few of his neighbors, in the working-class Cramer Hill section of East Camden, had paid him much notice. An army veteran who had seen extensive combat in Europe with the artillery in World War II, he lived in a three-room apartment in the 3200 block of River Road with his mother, Freda.
     He had often accompanied her to St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran Church and was known to read his bible frequently. A graduate of Woodrow Wilson High School in Camden, he entered Temple University's pharmacy school in the fall of 1948 but soon dropped out. At age 28 he was unemployed and supported by his mother, who was estranged from her husband and worked as a packer for a soap company in Camden.
     On the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 6, 1949, Mrs. Unruh fixed her son a breakfast of fried eggs and cereal. Moments later, she was astonished to see him threatening her with a wrench. She ran from the apartment to a friend's home.
     At 9:20 a.m., Mr. Unruh, a slender 6-footer, wearing a brown tropical suit, white shirt and bow tie, stepped into the sun-splashed street and walked to a shoemaker's shop on his block. He pulled put a 9 millimeter German Luger he had purchased at a Philadelphia gun shop in January 1947 and pointed it at the owner, John Pilarchik, 27.
     "I had leveled the gun at him, neither of us said nothing, and I pulled the trigger," Mr. Unruh told a psychiatrist a month later. "He had a funny look on his face, staggered back and fell to the floor. I realized then he was still alive, so I fired into his head." [......]
     On his final stop, Mr. Unruh broke into a home and wounded Madeline Harris, 36, and her son Armand, 16. [......]
     "Men and women dodged into open shops, the women shrill with panic, men hoarse from fear," Mr. Berger [the journalist who reported the story] wrote.
     "No one could quite understand for a time what had been loosed in the block."
     Mr. Unruh fled to his apartment. Some 50 police officers converged there and blazed away with machines guns, shotguns and pistols.
     During an interlude, the assistant city editor of the Camden Courier-Post, Philip Buxton, phoned the house. Mr. Unruh answered his call.
     Mr. Buxton asked Mr. Unruh how many people he had killed.
     "I don't know, I haven't counted," he said. "Looks like a pretty good score."
     "Why are you killing people?" Mr. Buxton asked.
     "I don't know," Mr. Unruh replied.
     After the police fired tear gas, Mr. Unruh came outside, his hands held high, his bow tie still in place.
     A psychiatric report found that Mr. Unruh had felt his neighbors were persecuting him and belittlimg him, "that they were thinking of him as a homosexual."
     The report described him as a "master of suppressed rage," who harbored a "smoldering anger."
     Mr. Unruh's brother, James, said later that "since he came home from the service, he didn't seem to be the same."
     "He was nervous," James Unruh said.
     His father, Samuel, said Mr. Unruh had "built a shell around himself we could never penetrate."
     Moments after Mr. Unruh surrendered a policeman said to him: "What's the matter with you? You a psycho?"
     "I'm no psycho," Howard Unruh replied. "I have a good mind."

[ Howard Unruh Dies at 88; Gunned Down 13 of His Neighbors in 1949, by Richard Goldstein, The New York Times (Obituaries), Tuesday, October 20, 2009, p. B13. ]

B.

     Syracuse (AP) - The father of the man who killed 13 people inside an immigrant services center in Binghamton, N.Y., said he had never seen his son with a handgun and did not know he owned one. [......]
     On April 3, Mr. Wong, 41, walked into the American Civic Association and opened fire with two handguns, killing 13 people and wounding four others before taking his own life.
     Mr. Voong said his son kept to himself and rarely interacted with his family even though they shared a house in Johnson City, near Binghamton.
     Mr. Wong's parents said that they did not learn of his role in the shootings until they read a newspaper the next day. [......]
     In an interview conducted in Vietnamese at the newspaper's offices, Mr. Voong, 66, and Ms. Thong, 61, said they did not know if their son was mentally ill.
     Mr. Voong said the only time that he had seen erratic behavior or sought treatment for his son was 19 years ago. At that time, Mr. Wong told his father that he believed someone was trying to kill him. Mr. Voong said that he took his son to a hospital, but that doctors sent him home after two hours, saying they could find nothing wrong with him.
     Mr. Wong's delusions did not surface publicly again until April 6, when a letter written by Mr. Wong arrived at a television station in Syracuse. Mr. Wong wrote that undercover police officers taunted him, tortured him and spread rumors about him.
     Mr. Voong said he had never seen any officers calling or visiting his son.
     To his parents, Mr. Wong lived a nearly silent existence for the last 19 years. According to his father, that silence deepened two weeks before the shooting. Mr. Wong stopped eating dinner or watching television and rarely emerged from his bedroom.
     "All parents raise their children to be good human beings," Mr. Voong said. "You never imagine in your wildest dreams that they would end up doing something so horrific."

[ Gunman's Parents Express Sorrow for His Rampage, (AP), The New York Times, April 14, 2009, p. A-17. ]

C.

From my material, in which negative instances are conspicuously absent, I am forced to the conclusion that schizophrenic illnesses in the male are intimately related as a sequel to unfortunate prolongation of the attachment of the son and the mother. That schizophrenic disorders are but one of the possible outcomes of persisting immature attitudes subtending the mother and son relationship must be evident. The failure of growth of heterosexual interests, with persistence of autoerotic or homosexual interests in adolescence, is the general formula. The factors that determine a schizophrenic outcome may be clarified by a discussion on the one hand of the situations to which I shall refer as homosexual cravings and acute masturbation conflict - often immediate precursors of grave psychosis - and of the various homo-erotic and autoerotic procedures, on the other.

[ Harry Stack Sullivan, M.D., Personal Psychopathology - Early Formulations, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, 1972, 1965, p. 211. ]

Howard Unruh and Jiverly Wong were both suffering from paranoid schizophrenia - the "bearded lady" disease - and it was as the direct consequence of this pathological condition that they eventually "ran amok" in a murderous frenzy, cold-bloodedly destroying 26 men, women and children during the course of their insane rampages, and wounding several more. Mr. Wong's suicide, following his own rampage, brought the total number killed to 27.

Unfortunately and tragically, this is an all-too-familiar story, one whose devastating consequences have been reported on frequently throughout recorded history. And due to the widespread nature of the underlying pathogenic conflict which had driven these killers insane, namely, their severe, repressed bisexual conflict and gender confusion, these tragic massacres of unsuspecting persons will continue to occur all-too-frequently, far into the future.

The fact that Mr. Unruh "felt his neighbors were persecuting him and belittling him" and "that they were thinking of him as a homosexual", points to his paranoid projection onto his neighbors of his own unconscious awareness that he indeed was a homosexual. Likewise, when Mr. Wong wrote "that undercover police officers taunted him, tortured him and spread rumors about him," undoubtedly this "taunting" and "rumor-spreading" were, in his delusional, paranoid mind, connected to their supposed belief that he, too, was a homosexual, although Mr. Wong never actually used the word "homosexual", as Mr. Unruh had done.

Dr. Sigmund Freud wrote in his "Notes on a Case of Paranoia" (The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 12, Hogarth Press, London) that
     "We should be inclined to say that what was characteristically paranoic about the illness was the fact that the patient [Judge Daniel Paul Schreber], as a means of warding off a homosexual wishful phantasy, reacted precisely with delusions of persecution of this kind.
     "These considerations therefore lend an added weight to the circumstance that we are in point of fact driven by experience to attribute to homosexual wishful phantasies an intimate (perhaps an invariable) relation to this particular form of disease. [......] "The patients whose histories provided the material for this enquiry included both men and women, and varied in race, occupation, and social standing. Yet we were all astonished to find that in all of these cases a defence against a homosexual wish was clearly recognizable at the very centre of the conflict which underlay the disease and that it was in an attempt to master an unconsciously reinforced current of homosexuality that they had all of them come to grief." [......]

As Dr. Freud has illustrated how repressed bisexual conflict/gender confusion leads inevitably to schizophrenic symptomatology - the "bearded lady" disease - Dr. Lewis B. Hill, in paragraph C. above, explains how the factor of homosexuality initially gains a potentially pathogenic foothold in a person's psyche due to the "unfortunate prolongation of the attachment of the son and the mother." (Although unstated here by Dr. Hill, this same pathogenic formula is equally valid in the case of "prolonged attachment" in the mother/daughter relationship.)

It is very obvious in Howard Unruh's case that he and his mother had a most "unfortunate prolongation" of their "attachment". And the end result of this pathogenic mother/son symbiotic relationship was his psychic emasculation and consequent homosexuality, which in turn was repressed, leading directly to his schizophrenic psychosis and following murderous paranoid rampage. It should be added here that his mother, who in reality was his "emotional emasculator", almost became the first victim of his sudden explosive rage and ensuing killing spree.

Mr. Jiverly Wong, 41, had lived the last 19 years of his life with his parents. Obviously he, too, like Howard Unruh, falls into Dr. Hill's category of a man who has had an "unfortunate prolongation of the attachment of the son and the mother," leading to his own psychic castration and resulant homosexuality, which, when repressed, led inexorably to his paranoid schizophrenic breakdown with its lethal spree of violence aftermath.

For Mr. Wong's parents to state "they did not know if their son was mentally ill" shows a spectacular ignorance, or denial of, the basic facts of what constitutes mental health. Here was a man who had lived a "nearly silent existence" in his parents' house "for the last 19 years", obviously with few or no friends of either sex, and had finally "stopped eating dinner or watching television and rarely emerged from his bedroom." This is a classic description of a man who is on the verge of committing suicide, or its emotional opposite - homicide - or both, as happened so tragically in Mr. Wong's case.

Thus we see in both these cases the workings of a universally valid equation: "Unfortunate prolongation of the attachment of the son and the mother" leads directly to the development of homosexuality in the son [and daughter]. If then unconditionally repressed, this homosexual factor becomes the pathogenic core of all schizophrenic symptomatology, with its numerous attendant patholological conditions and extreme dangers.

As Mr. Wong's father said, "All parents raise their children to become good human beings. You never imagine in your wildest dreams that they would end up doing something so horiffic." It is certain that the parents of Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and countless other schizophrenic-plagued individuals who have committed monstrous crimes against humanity, would wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Voong's tragic statement about his son.

Most unfortunately - schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease - will continue to bedevil mankind on a daily basis, long into the future, or at least until this unshakeable truth about its primary etiology is finally universally acknowledged and accepted.

Afterword:

"We must recognize that the sexual affections are still the greatest constructive forces in the personality if properly conditioned and adjusted, but also that they may become the most insidiously, irresistibly destructive if perverted or unconditionally repressed. This statement is based upon the study of more than two thousand psychopathic and criminal personalities of many nationalities and intellectual levels."

[ Edward J. Kempf, M.D., Psychopathology, C. V. Mosby Company, St. Louis, MO, 1920, p. 749. (See also Quotation 262, p. 179, in Schizophrenia - The Beaded Lady Disease, Vol. I.) ]

756

     "SHAKE THE DEVIL OFF" opens with the suicide of Zackery Bowen, an Iraq war veteran who ended his life in 2006 by leaping from a roof in the French Quarter. In Bowen's pocket, the New Orleans police found his dog tags, keys and a note that read: "I had to take my own life to pay for the one I took. If you send a patrol to 826 N. Rampart you will find the dismembered corpse of my girlfriend Addie in the oven, on the stove and in the fridge along with full documentation on the both of us and a full signed confession from myself."
     The police went to the couple's apartment, where they discovered that Bowen had murdered Addie Hall more than a week earlier, then baked her legs in a tinfoil pan, packed her torso in the refrigerator and boiled her head, hands and feet in pots. Yet as soon as the author, Ethan Brown, finishes recounting these horrific details, his first question is: "Why was Zackery Bowen, a former Army sergeant, a veteran of two wars (Kosovo and Iraq), and a beloved bartender and deliveryman in the French Quarter, in such unimaginably deep emotional pain?" [.....]
     The author finds in Bowen a singular example of such double-barreled post-traumatic stress, and produces interviews to show that Bowen was both fun-loving and responsible before going to Iraq, where he became depressed. The depression grew worse after he got home, and his marriage fell apart. Bowen drank and took drugs, then fell in love with Hall, a volatile poet and bartender who also abused alcohol and drugs. The couple lived through Katrina, refusing to evacuate, and afterward their relationship became turbulent. Brown reports that Bowen, who had begun frequenting gay bars, eventually entered into a secret homosexual relationship. When Hall found out, she broke up with him, and they were fighting over their apartment on the night Bowen killed her.
     Brown concludes that the combined post-traumatic stress from Iraq and Katrina is the reason Bowen killed Hall and himself, and the jacket echoes this cry, claiming that the book is a tribute "to two victims of these disasters, Zackery Bowen and Addie Hall." [.....]
     A more nuanced analysis would consider Bowen's drug and alcohol abuse, his cover-up and confusion about his sexuality, his reaction to his parents' divorce and his unhappy adolescence, during which he exhibited low self-esteem and dropped out of his California high school. Although Brown has reported all the facts that would support a fuller explanation, his sympathy for his subject has led him to a shakier conclusion. There is a difference between explaining and explaining away.
     Interestingly, Bowen himself didn't blame either Iraq or Katrina for the murder. In his last note, he alone assumed responsibility, referring to the life "I took." [.....]

[ A Streetcar Named Despair, by Lisa Scottoline, in a New York Times Book Review, September, 2009. ]

The author of the book, "SHAKE THE DEVIL OFF", asks the question: "Why was Zackery Bowen, a former Army sergeant, a veteran of two wars (Kosovo and Iraq), and a beloved bartender and deliveryman in the French Quarter, in such unimaginably deep emotional pain?"

The true answer to this question is that Zackery Bowen had been driven homicidally/suicidally insane as the direct result of his severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion, a conflict which had plagued him since early adolescence. When this deeply repressed conflict finally burst forth into his conscious awareness, it caused him to run amok and slaughter Addie Hall in a fit of overpoweringly lethal rage, followed shortly by his own self-destruction.

Only a person suffering from an acute paranoid schizophrenic psychosis - the "bearded lady" disease - could have carried out such a brutal physical assault upon another human being, including the surgical-like dismemberment of that person, as Bowen had done to the body of his estranged wife, Addie Hall.

Bowen's severe underlying mental illness first began to surface during his Army tour in Iraq, where he suffered from "depression", and when he returned home this depression "grew worse". Consequently, his first marriage was disrupted, or "fell apart", leading him later to a second marriage to the ill-fated Addie Hall. Both Bowen and Hall are said to have abused drugs and alcohol, indicating that not just Bowen, but Addie Hall also, was afflicted with schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease. Their short-lived lives together were reported to have been volatile and turbulent, as would be the natural consequence of their, or any other couple's, folie a' deux.

When Bowen's lifelong-repressed homosexuality eventually gained access to his conscious awareness, he started visitng gay bars, and consequently soon became involved in a "secret" homosexual relationship. But obviously it was not secret enough to keep Addie Hall from finding out about it, and thus the stage was set for the horrifying resolution of the problems besetting these two tragedy-prone, mentally ill human beings, both of whom were ultimately destroyed by mankind's oldest nemesis - schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease - and which resolution has been so shockingly and painfully detailed by Lisa Scottoline in the above Quotation.

755

A.

Ms. [name deleted]

I hesitate sending an email because I know they somehow can end up going around the world. However, I will risk it to hopefully give you some insight into my son, [name deleted] who now goes by the name [woman's name]. I am his biological mother [name deleted] who he has denied as being his biological mother for some 25 years.
I'd like to believe that this letter will be kept confidential the same as if you were speaking to a patient. Ever since [son] was 22 years old he's been in and out of mental wards at least six times that I'm aware of. Always diagnosed as schizophrenic and/or psychotic. He has taken medicine for these afflictions all these years. He's had ups and downs and we've stood by him as a family only to be taken advantage of over and over again. His [a family member] was recently taken by ambulance to the ER with chest pains because of the problems [son] left behind in [location deleted]. His [a family member] provided him a house of his own the past six years and it turned out to be a pig sty. [Son] left in the middle of the night and took a bus to [location deleted] and just left the mess behind.
In May last year [son] was put in the mental ward at [hospital name deleted] in [location deleted] because of a diabetic episode (so I was told). Then he wrote and told me they gave him a pill in the hospital that would make him become a woman. Ever since then he has written dozens of email letters to me and his brother stating how he will become a woman using specific drugs. We wouldn't have a problem with him being transgender except we don't believe that is the case. We believe he has taken on the personality of a woman and therefore, dresses and says he is a woman.
Do you have all of his past medical records so that you can better assist him? I have pretty much gone along with all the bizarre things that he has written to me but I haven't believed them. Like telling me he's been having a monthly period and finding blood in his panties. He gets very upset if I don't believe him so I pretend. As a family we are extremely confused. I can forward you some of his messages to give you an idea if it would be helpful.
He gave me your card and I looked at your myspace entry. I found you to be a delightful person and I'd even be pleased to have you for a friend (not that it would happen as I live in [location deleted]. Nevertheless, I'm concerned that [son] (woman's name) is not getting the proper medication if he is still schizophrenic. Can a person be schizophrenic for 25 years and suddenly not be and then just as suddenly become transgender? Never in his life have I seen a feminine side to him. He's always acted like a man..
This is long and I have so much more I'd like to say but I know your time is valuable. I also know that legally you can't tell me anything because [son] has rights. Which I find amazing because we as a family have no rights.
Forgive the intrusion. I just wish I understood. I do know that [son] has abused the system and has gotten money from all kinds of sources. He's financially a disaster and always has been. He dare not even return to [location deleted] or [location deleted] because of bad debts.
I recently sent [son] some money and told him exactly what to do with it.. He didn't do what I said and I let him know. He fired back a nasty email typed in huge red letters and I haven't heard from him since. Naturally, I am always concerned about his safety and the safety of others around him. He has quite a temper and screams and yells and talks to himself when he thinks he's alone.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely, [ Name deleted for privacy reasons - Please also refer to Impressions # 70-65 ]

B.

He was seeing a psychiatrist when he was in high school because the school called me and told me if I didn't have him committed they would. He was 15 then.

[ From the boy's mother - See quotation A. above. ]

This is the case history of a middle-aged man who had managed to keep his severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion under total repression since early adolescence, with the consequences thereof leading directly to the appearance of his lifelong schizophrenic symptomatology - as it invariably does in all such instances of this illness. These powerful repressed forces - both physiological and emotional - finally gained such enormous strength and urgency in this man's unconscious mind that they overwhelmed the prohibitive, repressing ego and burst forth into conscious awareness as an compelling and authentic feeling that he was turning into a woman. And here in this paranoid psychological state he currently exists - firmly and stubbornly (psychotically) convinced that, through no fault or desires of his own, his formerly male body is inexorably transforming itself into a female one.

This case is almost exactly analagous to that of the widely-cited one of the schizophrenic German Judge, Daniel Paul Schreber, who at midlife also suddenly experienced a similar bisexual/gender confused sexual identity crisis, with comparable paranoid schizophrenic symptoms and outcome to those experienced by this middle-aged man reported on above. In Judge Schreber's case, it was his psychotic belief that God wanted him to change into a woman so that he, God, could procreate with him by means of "divine rays" for the sole purpose of creating a new species of humans beings. By contrast, in the case reported on in Quotation A. above, this schizophrenic man's psychotic belief is that certain female genes ("XX") in his body necessitate this change into the female form, and that consequently he is powerless to resist this transformation. Sigmund Freud has posited, and correctly so, that all paranoid schizophrenic psychoses have their root in the psychotic person's denial, or repression, of his or her powerful homosexual feelings and sexual cravings, which, if they finally do manage to break through into consciousness, are rationalized as being caused by forces beyond the control of the schizophrenic person. In other words, the psychotic person feels that these ego-dystonic homosexual, or opposite-sex feelings, are not really his or her own but are imposed upon them by ruthless outside forces (thus the paranoia), thereby freeing them from assuming any conscious personal responsibility for these formerly - prior to their repression and the cause of their represion - intolerably painful and distressing to the ego, desires and feelings.

Furthermore, It is to be noted here that this man's schizophrenia was already glaringly evident at age 15, and this is the reason "schizophrenia" was formerly known by the name of "dementia praecox" (precocious dementia), due to the fact that its first overt symptoms often manifested themselves during the afflicted person's early pubertal years, when the first powerful biological sexual urges appear. If at this time there was already established within the future schizophrenic's psyche a strong conflict and sense of confusion about his or her primary sexual identity - due to severe familial emotional warping - then these powerful pubertal sexual forces, suddenly unleashed during this pivotal time in the conflicted individual's formative emotional and sexual life, provide, when unconditionally repressed, the "energy" force which "fuels" the myriad symptoms of their schizophrenia, such as hallucinations, both visual and audio (hearing voices) - and paranoid thoughts and feelings.

It has been stated that "Schreber's name is legion." The above case is but one more example of the truth of that statement.

[ Please see further references to the renowned paranoid schizophrenic, Daniel Paul Schreber, in the books "Schizophrenia - The Bearded Lady Disease, Vol. I ", and in the upcoming "Vol 2", as well as on this website: www.Schizophrenia-TheBeardedLadyDisease.com. ]

754

A.

Bridgeville, Pa. - Tortured by loneliness and his lack of success with women, George Sodini developed a plan to get even. On Tuesday night, he executed it, opening fire in a fitness center here and hitting 12 women, 3 fatally, before turning a gun on himself. [.....]
     In his online journal, which has since been taken off the Internet, Mr. Sodini, a programmer-analyst at a local law firm, said that he had not had a girlfriend since 1984 and that he had not had sex since July 1990, when he was 29.
     "I actually look good," Mr. Sodini wrote in an entry dated Dec. 29, 2008. "I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne - yet 30 million women rejected me - over an 18- or 25-year period. That is how I see it. Thirty million is my rough guesstimate of how many desirable single women there are.
     "A man needs a woman for confidence. He gets a boost on the job, career, with other men, and everywhere else when he knows inside he has someone to spend the night with who is also a friend." [.....]
      Mr. Sodini's writings and rationale are all too familiar, said Dr. Michael Welner, a forensic psychologist and adjunct law professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburg, who has studied mass murderers.
     "Mass shooters aim for the attention and notoriety of other mass shooters," he said. "If you read this blog, it may explain to the reader why he feels hopeless, but it doesn't explain why he decides to take the lives of innocent strangers, which is the point. He's channeling that sense of masculine, sexual failure into a conquest that results in a mass killing. [.....]
     Trish Cowen, who lived across the street from Mr. Sodini for 13 years, said he had been friendly but had largely kept to himself. "I never saw any women over there, and he wasn't bad looking," Mrs. Cowen said. "I don't understand it. I just assumed he was gay.

[ Gunman Drew Dark Portrait of Loneliness Before Shooting Women, by Sean D. Hamill, The New York Times, August 6, 2009, p. A-16. ]

B.

     What was unusual about Sodini was how explicit he was in his blog about his personal shame and his hatred of women. "Why do this?" he asked. "To young girls? Just read below." In his gruesome, monthslong rant, he managed to say, among other things: "It seems many teenage girls have sex frequently. One 16 year old does it usually three times a day with her boyfriend. So, err, after a month of that, this little [expletive] has had more sex than ME in my LIFE, and I am 48. One more reason." [.....]
     Soon after the Virginia Tech slayings, I interviewed Dr. James Gilligan, who spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts and as a professor at Harvard and N.Y.U. "What I've concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal, he said, "is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one's manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act."

[ Women At Risk, Bob Herbert, The New York Times, August 8, 2009, p. A-17 ]

Once again a person suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, has suddenly "run amok", resulting in the wounding and slaughter of more innocent citizens.

The two professors commenting on this particular case, and the countless other cases similar to it, are correct about the shooter(s) being afflicted with a sense of masculine (sexual) insecurity, but they do not delve deeply enough into the problem of why this particular factor should often lead so tragically to outright insanity and bloodshed. The answer, of course, is that this sense of sexual insecurity, which is common to all such shooters, invariably has its root in their severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion, and that this basic conflict is always the triggering factor which leads directly to their schizophrenic breakdowns and resultant murderous rampages.

Trish Cowen, who was George Sodini's neighbor for 13 years and said she had never seen any women with him during all that time, even though "he wasn't bad looking," provided the explanation for this case - and of all others like it - when she intuitively remarked that "I just assumed he was gay." For Mr. Sodini was gay, although at a deeply repressed, unconscious level, and it was these powerful, albeit totally frustrated homosexual longings which had finally driven him insane (paranoid schizophrenic) and were the direct cause of the terrible rage which led him to perpetrate his sudden, lethal assault on the 12 unsuspecting women in the Bridgeville gym, with such tragic consequences.

Mr. Sodini was "insanely" jealous of all women, since at a deeply unconscious level that is the gender he himself wished to be. During his "gruesome, monthslong rant" before his attack on the gym, he noted that "It seems many teenage girls have sex frequently. One 16 year old does it usually 3 times a day with her boyfriend. So, err, after a month of that, this little [expletive] has had more sex than ME in my LIFE, and I am 48.
One more reason." Note here that Mr. Sodini is not insanely jealous of the boy who is having sex three times a day with his girlfriend, but is insanely jealous of his girlfriend! Why? Because again, at a deep unconscious level, he would like to be that 16-year-old girl having sex three times a day with her boyfriend, thereby highlighting both his powerful homosexual feelings towards the boyfriend and his consequent longings to be of the opposite sex - specifically in this instance to be the 16-year-old girl so that he could then satisfy his overwhelmingly urgent homosexual, or opposite-sex sexual cravings - and like her, "usually three times a day." He has completely identified himself here with the girl rather than with the boy, thereby clearly demonstrating his severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion.

I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne - yet 30 million women rejected me - over an 18- or 25-year period. That is how I see it." Except for the "clean-shaven" reference (although females are also "clean-shaven"), this could be a woman describing herself to a friend while wondering why she does not have more boyfriends. And Mr. Sodini's "touch of cologne" comment is especially feminine-tinged.

The original Greek meaning of "paranoia" was explained as being a diseased psychological condition comprised basically of "faulty reasoning", and this faulty reasoning invariably leads to unwarranted feelings of distrust of others and false feelings of being persecuted by others. Both these factors can be observed at work here in every facet of Mr. Sodini's thinking and reasoning. The Greeks combined all forms of madness under the rubric of paranoia, and with good reason, for all madness has at its etiological root the pathogenic factor of severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion. Or, as the brilliant Bulgarian psycho-analyst, Julia Kristeva, has so cogently observed: "Sexual identity guarantees our psychic unity." Unfortunately, Mr. Sodini's "sexual identity" had been fractured into a thousand disparate pieces, with horrific consequences ensuing therefrom.

"Back in the fall of 2006," Bob Herbert further reports in his New York Times column of August 8, 2009 (quotation B. above), "a fiend invaded an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania, separated the girls from the boys, and then shot 10 of the girls, killing five." It is glaringly obvious that this "fiend" loved the boys and not the girls, as did M. Sodini, and as do all beserkers who run amok and kill. In some cases the victims may also include members of the same sex as are the killers (as in the Virginia Tech and Columbine massacres), but only because such shooters also hate and fear their own powerful homosexual attraction to these same-sex members, and consequently in their paranoid madness they attempt to destroy not only the furiously envied females but also any males who may tempt and stir up theit repressed and terrifying homosexual feelings.

In summary, All persons who run amok and kill others for no rationally discernible reason, do so because they are afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia - the "bearded lady" disease - the etiological root of which pathological condition invariably stems from the ever-present factor of severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion. Furthermore, this deadly "beserker" syndrome will never be completely eradicated until this universal truth about its cause is fully acknowledged and acted upon accordingly, and before more such tragedies can reoccur.

"We must recognize," wrote the great psycho-analyst, Dr. Edward J. Kempf, in his monumentally important work, Psychopathology, 1920 , "that the sexual affections are still the greatest constructive forces of the personality if properly conditioned and adjusted, but also that they may become the most insidiously, irresistibly destructive if perverted or unconditionally repressed."

Mr. Sodini's true "sexual affections" were most certainly "perverted" and "unconditionally repressed", and thereby became, as Dr. Kempf teaches us, "irresistibly destructive." The above equation applies equally and truly to every person throughout history who has suddenly run amok and left death and destruction in his or her wake, and furthermore it applies to every one of history's other "beserkers", such as Hitler, Stalin, and most recently Osama bin Laden, who cold-bloodedly ordered the destruction of nearly 3,000 innocent persons by means of a an insane suicidal aerial attack on New York's Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. But of course the consequences of bin Laden's madness pale, at least for now, in comparison to the almost unimagineable death and destruction wreaked upon the world in the near past as the direct result of the same paranoid schizophrenic madness afflicting other men, such as Adoph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, and Pol Pot of Cambodia, to name only the most prominent of an ever-lengthening list of such madmen.

Psychologically-speaking, all mass murderers throughout history are George Sodini's writ large, victims themselves of the "bearded lady" disease - paranoid schizophrenia.

753

I suppose that one thing I'd like to get across to you is that I have tried. Tried what? I guess what I'm saying is that I tried with all my might to stay in the closet..to change whom I am. Most people in a similar situation would say the same. You try so hard that your knowledge of whom you are is on a very subconscious level most of your life. The older I got, the more I became aware of whom I was. And the more I vehemently kicked it under the rug. I know there was a limit to my sanity living this way. I honestly toyed with the fact that leaving this life might cause less pain for everyone involved. I came to the conclusion that my kids would probably rather have me here and flawed, than not here. I'm not saying this to be dramatic.. I'm simply stating a fact. For years I've been tossing around ideas and trying to figure out ways to deal with myself and my situation. I have absolutely hated the way that I have disappointed so many people.

[ To My Dear Family , [para 5], writer's name deleted for privacy reasons. [See also Impressions item #54, this website.] ]

The above quotation clearly shows how the immense psychic and physical effort required for a person to repress his or her powerful bisexual conflict and gender confusion will lead inexorably, if the conflict is not resolved, to insanity and/or self-destruction - twin elements of schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease.

Most fortunately, this wife and devoted mother, plagued by years of fiercely battling against her deepest sexual and emotional feelings, finally summoned forth the enormous courage and intellectual honesty necessary to face the truth about herself - thereby saving her own life, both literally and figuratively, as well as allowing her to remain a loving mother to her children, and a close and caring friend of their father.

This brave woman speaks of being "flawed", as if homosexuality were some sort of flaw. It is no more of a "flaw" than being heterosexual is a "flaw". Both sexual orientations are elemental parts of the ebb and flow of human desires and emotions - in essence, a direct inheritance from our mammalian ancestry.

752

     In unflinching and objective language, they hold up a clinically honest mirror to what they witness as they follow their homeless subjects in and out of jail and hospitals, as they are evicted from their camps and set up new ones, as their relationships blossom and collapse and as they struggle over race and gender.

     These are not just episodically homeless people who spend a short while on the street in between personal crises. These are the most chronically homeless we have, the ones you see sleeping in filth and scratching out survival year after year as they struggle with mental illness, substance abuse, acute disabilities or all three.

     There is no sugarcoating here. For the faint of heart, there will be stiff reading moments about people vomiting and defecating, jamming needles into oozing abscesses and selling sex for dope hits. Equally hard to read are the accounts of broken people crying about abandoning their families, childhood abuse they suffered, shivering at night in the rain, and all the other human miseries that attend most lives lived outside.

[ Meredith Maran, San Francisco Chronicle, 6/21/09, in a review of the book Righteous Dopefiend, by Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg, (University of California Press, 359 pages; $24.95) ]

The key sentence in the above quotation is "...and as they [the mentally ill homeless] struggle with race and gender." For truly all chronically homeless persons are struggling with severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion, otherwise known as schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease. In the time prior to the discovery of the supposedly miracle-working psychotropic drugs in the early 1950's, all these unfortunate people would have been housed in the many mental hospitals then existing through the United States. In a tragic twist of fate, these hospitals were then shut down, one-by-one, in order to save money and because it was now falsely and foolishly believed that all the mentally ill had to do to stay well was to take their daily pills as prescribed, and all would be made stable again in their emotionally troubled lives.

Of course we now belatedly realize that the severely mentally ill are totally incapable of looking after themselves - pills or no pills - and consequently they end up on the streets of our nation, struggling to stay alive throughout the year under the most bitter and life-threatening of circumstances, as chronicled so vividly and shockingly in the above quotation. Basically, our prisons and juvenile detention centers have now taken the place of our former mental hospitals, to the great detriment of all concerned, while leaving a sizeable group, whose members have yet to be apprehended, of potentially extremely dangerous paranoid schizophrenic individuals roaming around the country ready to commit, when adequately provoked - at least in their own deranged minds - the most monstrous of crimes against unsuspecting and innocent citizens. All one has to do is to read the daily newspapers, which chronicle these terrifying cases on a dismayingly frequent basis, to fully comprehend the tremendous problem this state of affairs poses to society.

Admittedly, It is most unfortunate to be forced to keep a schizophrenic person locked up in a mental hospital, sometimes for a lifetime, in order to protect that person from himself/herself, and also to protect society from the possible depredations that might be visited upon it as the direct result of that mentally ill person's madness.

In the hospital the schizophrenic person would be given adequate medical care, food, a warm and safe place to sleep, and a fellow-group of patients to interact with, both male and female, and from which emotionally-enriching friendships hopefully may grow and flourish. And, most important of all, along with their daily regimen of psychotropic drugs, which in reality are nothing more than chemical strait-jackets, they have a further chance to interact with each other in group therapy sessions and, if they are very fortunate, to be given the opportunity to engage in individual psychotherapy with a psychologist or psychiatrist. For no "cure" will ever be possible without the  schizophrenic person first gaining deep insight into the severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion which initially triggered his/her psychotic breakdown, and is now the primary cause of their hospitalization.

None of these psychological tools to aid in the patient's recovery from mental illness is available on the mean, dog-eat-dog streets of big-city America, or on the streets of any other nation, for that matter. Some municipalities, however, do their very best to provide help to their mentally ill, homeless populations, but nothing can compare to that which a truly well-run, enlightened and psychodynamically-oriented mental hospital will be able to provide to its patients.

751

Hi Mike,

     I just watched an episode of The American Experience about Jim Jones. It is a PBS documentary that I recorded on my VCR the other night. Different people were talking about Jim Jones and his sex life. This one lady said that Jim Jones believed that he was the only heterosexual person in the world. He believed that all of the women were lesbians and all of the men were gay. He would sodomize some of the different men in his congregation but he publicly said that they should give themselves enemas first. Jones seems like a classic example of the bearded lady syndrome. I still have the documentary recorded on a VCR tape and could send it to you if you'd like.

Best regards John

[ Please refer to the Impressions section of
www.Schizophrenia-TheBeardedLadyDisease.com ,
# 57, to view the PBS documentary on the life of the
paranoid schizophrenic madman, Jim Jones. ]

On November 18, 1978, in Jonestown, Guyana, The cult leader Jim Jones ordered the death by self-inflicted suicide of 909 innocent men, women and children. Those few who resisted his insane edict were murdered by his henchmen who then, along with Jones, took their own lives. In his raging paranoia, he believed the U.S. government was preparing to raid his compound and shut it down.

The fact that Jones truly believed he was the only heterosexual person in the world, that all women were lesbians and all the men were homosexuals, and that he was currently engaging in homosexual anal intercourse with various members of his congregation, proves beyond any doubt that he was a raging madman afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia - the "bearded lady" disease.

Interestingly, Jones always took the active role in the homosexual anal intercourse he indulged in. At a much deeper level, of course, his most fervent desires were to play the passive, feminine role, but his defenses against this role were too powerful to be overcome and thus contributed directly to the development of his floridly psychotic - and eventually lethal - behavior. By playing the active role in homosexual anal intercourse, he could rationalize to himself that he was really a strong, masculine man and not a passive, feminine one, which of course at the deepest and repressed level of his unconscious he truly was. Furthermore, his public demand that the men he had anal intercourse with must first give themselves enemas demonstrates a striking sense of feminine fastidiousness on his part, and also a personal familiarity with enemas - wherein the male is always in a passive, feminine-like situation. It would be very instructive to know how many enemas were administered to Jim Jones by his mother, or other caregivers, when he was a youth, and if so did he continue these anal erotic practices throughout his life

To further guide us in our understanding of the horrendous tragedy that occurred in Jonestown on that terrible day in November, 1978, we must turn to the profound wisdom and insight contained in the written words of that world-famous psychiatric patient, the German Judge, Daniel Paul Schreber: "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. Such and only such is the issue for me." (Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of my Nervous Illness )

Jim Jones had been desperately struggling with his own severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion since he was a small child, and the sexual and emotional tensions resulting from his frustrated, long-repressed opposite-sex cravings and sexual desires slowly mounted over the years until they finally burst forth and triggered the massive psychotic breakdown which led directly to his ordering the wanton massacre of the 909 people at the ill-fated Jonestown compound.

Sigmund Freud once made the statement that what man represses at his deepest level are his pederastic instincts, specifically - his passive, feminine pederastic instincts. Jim Jones was such a man. And the consequences springing from the repression of his passive, feminine pederastic instincts led to a human tragedy of almost unimaginable proportions.

At Jonestown, schizophrenia - the "bearded lady" disease - added one more chapter to the untold thousands of human tragedies occurring over the millennia which can invariably be attributed to the toxic affect of the undischarged libido arising from the schizophrenic person's severe, unconscious bisexual conflict and gender confusion.

750

A.

     A court rejected three of four witnesses for the Burmese opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, a move critics said was aimed at sabotaging her defense against charges of violating the terms of her house arrest. One of her lawyers, U Nyan Win, called the move unfair, and he said it made it likely that a verdict could come as early as Friday. Myanmar's government arrested Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi after an uninvited American intruder was allowed to stay in her home for two days after he swam across a small lake on May 4. On Wednesday, the American, John Yettaw, testified that he had been prompted by a "vision" that she would be assassinated by terrorists, and he said that "God sent me to warn her," according to Mr. Nyan Win. (Reuters)

[ Myanmar: Nobel Laureate's Witnesses Are Blocked , The New York Times, May 25, 2009. [Reference also: 'The Lady' and the Tramp , Newsweek magazine, June 22, 2009, p. 54.] ]

B.

     According to the government mouthpiece, The New Light of Myanmar, an official testifying at the trial on Wednesday said the police had found a strange collection of items that the swimmer - John Yettaw, 53 - had left behind in her home.
     They included "two black chadors usually worn by Muslim women, two black scarves, two long skirts, one red torch light, six color pencils in a plastic bag, three pairs of sunglasses, two signal lights, a pair of swimming glasses, one two-pin plug, two pieces of circuit wire, one recharger, a black bag with a zip in it that was used to keep the apparatuses, a plastic bag with a zip in it, two pairs of gray stockings, five parts of an English book, and a bag with pieces of torn paper sheets in it."
     The paper quoted a witness, a police captain named Tin Zaw Tun, as testifying that Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi had signed a search form accepting responsibility for the items. "Asked why Mr. John William Yettaw left two chadors, she replied that he left them as gifts for her," the paper said.
     No explanation has been given for why Mr. Yettaw, of Falcon, Mo., swam to her home on May 3. He is also standing trial, along with two women on Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi's household staff.
     "Everyone is very angry with this wretched American," said U Kyi Win, a lawyer for Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi. "He is the cause of all these problems. He's a fool."

[ After Briefly Letting Diplomats In, Myanmar Locks Them Out of Dissident's Trial, Seth Mydans and Mark McDonald, Bangkok, The New York Times, May 25, 2009. ]

C.

     Several news reports said investigators found underwear belonging to two of his victims in the hotel attacks in Mr. Markoff's apartment in Quincy. Citing unnamed sources, the reports said investigators also found a hand-gun hidden in a hollowed-out anatomy textbook.

[ The New York Times, Abby Goodnough and Amy O'Connor, April 23, 2009. ]

Mr. John William Yettaw is not a "fool", as he is angrily described by lawyer U Kyi Win, in paragraph B. above, rather he is the unfortunate victim of a very severe case of mental illness - specifically, that of paranoid schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease.

In his own words before the Burmese court, trying him on charges of illegal entry into the country and trespassing at the home of Burmese opposition leader Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, he testified that all his illegal actions had been induced by a "vision" he had experienced that she would be murdered by terrorists and "God sent me to warn her."

This is a classic example of a paranoid-type schizophrenic delusion, and it is invariably the product of a pathological condition arising from severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion within the psyche of the afflicted individual.

The only clothing that Mr. Yettaw reportedly carried with him as he swam across the lake to Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi's compound consisted solely of female garments, namely - the "two black chadors usually worn by Muslim women, two black scarves, two long skirts," plus an extremely odd collection of other items, as listed in paragraph B. above.

The fact that a man illegally swimming across a lake to save the life of an internationally prominent woman whom he delusionally believes is marked for assassination, would be carrying only females clothes with him, points to an element of severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion within that individual's psyche. The two chadors supposedly were for the woman. What about the "two black scarves" and the "two long skirts" - who were they for? Perhaps for Mr. Yettaw himself to change into from the wet clothes, or bathing suit, he was wearing during his swim. Conjecture, certainly, but this explanation fits perfectly within the "bearded lady" genesis of all functional mental illness, including the psychotic paranoid symptomatology exhibited in this case by the deluded Mr. Yettaw.

A similar case recently reported on ( Paragraph C. above) is that of Mr. Phillip Markoff, of Quincy, Massachusetts, who is charged with the murder of one woman and the robbery of several others. When the police later searched his apartment, along with the gun used to commit the murder was found a collection of intimate female undergarments which Mr.Markoff had stolen from his victims. "Investigators also recovered several of the cellphones, or TracFones, laptop computers and four pairs of women's underwear inside socks hidden in a box spring."

Having graduated from Boston University School of Medicine in 2007, and now planning shortly on getting married - with no prior criminal record - Mr. Markoff's unexpected, angry and murderous actions directed against helpless and defenseless females are clearly the product of a mind suddenly unhinged by paranoid schizophrenia, which is invariably caused by severe, underlying bisexual conflict and gender confusion. In both of these cases, it was emotionally extremely imperative for each of the men - Mr. Yettaw and Mr. Markoff - to have intimate female apparel nearby, for whatever purposes they might need them, such as cross-dressing, etc. Although their paranoid psychoses fortunately played out in different ways - only the one having a directly lethal outcome - yet both psychoses were the inevitable consequence of a similar "bearded lady" pathology - as is always the case in every such instance of this extremely dangerous and devastating mental illness.

749

A.

      The man who killed 10 people during a shooting spree last month in southern Alabama left a letter for relatives, writing that he wanted people to pay for making his mother and him suffer, according to a news report. In the letter, obtained by the Dothan Eagle newspaper, the man, Michael McLendon, left [picture], wrote that he shot his mother to death while she slept, then set fire to the rural home they shared. After leaving the house on March 10, Mr. McLendon, 28, went on a 24-hour shooting spree and killed nine more people before committing suicide. "Moma was very sick," he wrote. "Had lung cancer I think. So I put her out of her misery. I'm sorry! But Moma had suffered enough. And so have I. Some of the people who made us suffer will pay." An autopsy did not support Mr. Mclendon's claims about his mother's being ill, said Chief Deputy R. W. Whitworth of the Coffee County Sheriff's Office. (AP)

[ Alabama: Letter by Gunman Claims He and His Mother 'Suffered Enough' , The New York Times, April 4, 2009. ]

B.

      Among those who prove incapable of achieving the biologically ordained heterosexual goal are a great many to whom the mother has continued to be of excessive significance, overshadowing or coloring strongly all prehensions of other women. This handicap is most vividly illustrated in the case of the woman who has married for spite a man whom she soon comes to loathe, yet with whom the peculiarities of her personality, or economic factors, or other cause, force her to live. When a son is born of such a union, he is generally sacrificed to the mother's unsatisfied erotic tendencies, and he becomes tied to her by the sort of intimacy so remarkably symbolized by Von Stuck in his painting, Die Sphinx. Whether he comes finally to rebel, hates her, and goes through life destroying as much as he can of that which arouses the mother stereotype, or instead goes on being her child-lover, the result is most unfortunate as to his growth in personality. It is almost certain that he will not proceed in erotic development past interest in his own sex.

[ Harry Stack Sullivan, M.D., Personal Psychopathology / Early Formulations , W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, 1972, 1965, p. 196. ]

C.

      From my material, in which negative instances are conspicuously absent, I am forced to the conclusion that schizophrenic illnesses in the male are intimately related as a sequel to unfortunate prolongation of the attachment of the son and the mother. That schizophrenic disorders are but one of the possible outcomes of persisting immature attitudes subtending the mother and son relationship must be evident. The failure of growth of heterosexual interests, with persistence of autoerotic or homosexual interests in adolescence, is the general formula. The factors that determine a schizophrenic outcome may be clarified by a discussion on the one hand of the situations to which I shall refer as homosexual cravings and acute masturbation conflict - often immediate precursors of grave psychosis - and of the various homo-erotic and autoerotic procedures, on the other.

[ Harry Stack Sullivan, M.D., Personal Psychopathology / Early Formulations , W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1972, 1965, p. 211. ]

Dr. Harry Stack Sullivan's two brilliant expositions on the pathology surrounding an unnaturally close, binding and intimate symbiotic relationship between a mother and her son, as outlined in Quotations B. and C. above, unerringly explain why Michael McLendon suffered a severe paranoid- schizophrenic psychotic break at the age of 28, causing him to run amok in a murderous frenzy and tragically destroy ten persons, including himself.

In the psychiatric literature, this symbiotic type of mother/son relationship has sometimes been referred to as a CBI relationship - Close/Binding/Intimate - and it is always of a pathogenic nature. In fact, it can truthfully be posited that all functional mental illness basically stems from this single pathogenic CBI relationship between mother and son, or between mother and daughter, since it invariably results in the severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion in both sexes leading directly to schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease - as we have seen so dramatically illustrated here in the case of Michael McLendon and his "schizophrenogenic" mother.

In every such CBI relationship, comparable to the one between Mr. McLendon and his mother, there is always an immense amount of unconscious rage directed at the CBI mother, since it is programmed into every person's basic genetic make-up to be a sexually free and independent organism, for the sole purpose of being able to fulfill nature's primal goal which is applicable to all species - namely, that of propagating itself. The CBI relationship strangles this urgent, primal instinct by emotionally - and consequently physically - "castrating" the son or daughter caught up in its pathogenic web. In this particular case it led directly to the killing anger directed against the mother unleashed by the now totally insane Michael McLendon. Tragically, however, on a conscious level he was totally unable emotionally to accept his furious rage at his mother, even while killing her as he simultaneously rationalized his reason for doing so - "Moma was very sick. Had lung cancer I think. So I put her out of her misery. I'm sorry!" - thus making it inevitable that his overwhelmingly powerful and suddenly unleashed - yet paranoid and mistakenly focused fury, would spill over onto other innocent victims, with deadly consequences.

In every case of a person's running amok after a catastrophic schizophrenic "break," the ultimate cause is always to be found in the brilliant Harry Stack Sullivan's two quotations presented above - B. and C. For therein lies the explanation for the "CBI" petri dish upon which all functional mental illness, including its most extreme and often lethal manifestation - schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, is invariably incubated.

"The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world" - for both good and evil - as we can see clearly in Mr. McLendon's case, all too terrifyingly.

748

      "We don't want to be normal," Will Hall tells me. The 43-year-old has been diagnosed as schizophrenic, and doctors have prescribed antipsychotic medication for him. But Hall would rather value his mentally extreme states than try to supress them, so he doesn't take his meds. Instead, he practices yoga and avoids coffee and sugar. He is delicate and thin, with dark plum polish on his fingernails and black fashion sneakers on his feet, his half Native American ancestry evident in his hair and dark eyes. Cultivated and charismatic, he is also unusually energetic, so much so that he seems to be vibrating even when sitting still.

[ Listening to Mad Pride, Alissa Quart, Newsweek magazine, May 11/May 18, 2009, p. 54. ]

The brief physical description of the schizophrenic man in the above quotation emphasizes, most likely unwittingly, his marked androgynous, "bearded lady" characteristics. To wit: "He is delicate and thin, with dark plum polish on his fingernails and black fashion sneakers on his feet."

Considering that the factors of unconscious bisexual conflict and gender confusion form the basic etiological role in all functional mental illness, including its most severe manifestation in schizophrenic symptomatology, it comes as no surprise to see this invariable "bearded lady" configuration delineated in the above case.

The fact that this schizophrenic person "is also unusually energetic, so much so that he seems to be vibrating even when sitting still," demonstrates that he is in the relentless grip of a prolonged manic state fueled by enormous quantities of dammed-up sexual energy emanating from powerful, repressed - and thus unacknowledged - ego-dystonic sexual passions, as is always the case in every manic state.

If this unfortunately mentally ill man would consent to take his "meds", they would tranquilize him to the extent that these urgent. yet frustrated "bearded lady" sexual passions would temporarily be "tamped down", thus losing their energy force and consequent ability to drive his mania - or drive him mad - for as long as he continued to take them.

747

      On the Morning of Friday 28 March, a bright, clear, cold day, Virginia went as usual to her studio room in the garden. There she wrote two letters, one for Leonard, one for Vanessa - the two people she loved best. In both letters she explained that she was hearing voices, believed she could never recover; she could not go on and spoil Leonard's life for him. Then she went back into the house and wrote again to leonard:

"Dearest,
      I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight it any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will now I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is that I owe all the happiness of life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that - everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer.
      "I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.
                                                               V."

      She put this on the sitting-room mantle and, at about 11:30, slipped out, taking her walking-stick with her and making her way across the water-meadows to the river. Leonard believed that she might already have made one attempt to drown herself; if so she had learnt by her failure and was determined to make sure of it now. Leaving her stick on the bank she forced a large stone into the pocket of her coat. Then she went to her death, "the one experience," as she had said to Vita, "I shall never describe."

[ Virginia Woolf: A Biography ], Quentin Bell, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. New York, 1972, p. 226.

Virginia Woolf once wrote: "Women alone stir my imagination." Whether or not she realized it at the time she wrote it, she was thereby proclaiming to the world that she was a lesbian, for it would be inconceivable for a truly heterosexually-oriented woman ever to make such a statement. And thus herein lies the etiological root of Woolf's long-standing paranoid schizophrenia - the "bearded lady" disease - as it invariably does in all such instances of severe mental illness. Virginia truly was a "bearded lady", long married to her patient, caring, maternal-figure-of-a-husband, Leonard, while simultaneously engaging in passionate emotional relationships throughout her life with numerous girls and women, and reputedly had at least one actual sexual relationship - that with her long-time lesbian friend, Vita Sackville-West. And it is upon this latter's remarkably androgynous character that it is widely hypothesized that Virginia based the protagonist of her widely-known book, "Orlando". (It is interesting to note that nowhere in her final letter to her husband, Leonard, does Virginia use the word "love".)

Although ostensibly writing here about Orlando, Virginia in actuality is perfectly describing her own bisexul, gender-confused state of mind: "And here it would seem from some ambiguity in her terms that she was censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither; and indeed, for the time being she seemed to vacillate; she was man; she was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each. It was a most bewildering and whirligig state of mind to be in. The comfort of ignorance seemed utterly denied her. She was a feather blown on a gale."
---"Orlando", Virginia Woolf, New American Library of World Literature, Inc., 1960, p. 103. (See also "Schizophrenia, The Bearded Lady Disease", Vol I, Quotations 384, 385, 386, pp. 277-279.)

The above profoundly insightful description of a severely gender-confused, bisexually-conflicted person can be similarly applied to everyone - male or female - who is afflicted with schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, and it was this agonizing, and for Virginia an unresolvable conflict, with the resultant mental anguish and turmoil emanating therefrom, that relentlessly gnawed away at her fragile and beleagured psyche to the extent that finally - being unable to endure the pain of it any longer, drove her to her lonely death by suicide in the River Ouse, near her home.

And thus schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, claimed for itself another hapless, tortured victim.

746

A.

      Though Mbeki's casting of Mandela as Lear was less than apt, there's still a tragic element in the multilayered narrative Mark Gevisser has painstakingly constructed. It attaches both to the country and to Mbeki. Freed from the scourge of apartheid, a liberated South Africa wasted the better part of a decade before starting to marshal its considerable resources to confront the scourge of AIDS (by which time nearly 30 percent of pregnant South African women were estimated to be HIV-positive. Thabo Mbeki was the central reason for that catastrophic misjudgment. In his suspicious mind, the notion that HIV and AIDS were causally related was only a "thesis" propounded by multinational drug companies bent on opening new markets in Africa.
      In private sessions with his party's caucus, Gevisser tells us Mandela's successor speculated about the likely role of the Central Intelligence Agency in supporting these exploiters; his aides sometimes worried aloud that the President's life might be in danger because of his determination to probe beneath the science establishment's analysis of the plague, which, he convinced himself, grew out of a racist obsession with the sexual behavior of black men. Meanwhile, his chosen health minister, who lost her job only after Mbeki was summarily forced to resign as president last September by the African National Congress, prescribed garlic, beetroot, and olive oil as antidotes to the disease.

      Mbeki's biographer struggles mightily - sometimes wordily, drenching his subject in adjectives like "guarded", "paranoid", and "repressed" - to reconcile the brooding recluse who sat up late into the night in presidential mansions in Cape Town and Pretoria, exploring the speculations of AIDS deniers, with the charming, reassuring diplomatic operative who in the 1980s sold the path of negotiation both to a nervous white establishment and to an underground movement that imagined itself bent on armed struggle.

B.

Once he'd replaced Mandela as leader, he must have understood that he'd never been the party's favorite son, that its ranks were still full of those who'd doubted him for years. Gevisser isn't able to pinpoint a time when the leader's prudence shaded into paranoia. But even after being reelected in 2004 by a margin bigger than Mandela's, Mbeki seems never to have felt secure.
     Gevisser's biography doesn't begin to resolve the issues of character it repeatedly raises. The chapters on Mbeki's handling of the AIDS crisis and his failure to intervene effectively before starvation and disease became rampant in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe leave the reader with a conundrum familiar to anyone who has tried from afar to keep up with these issues. Was it that Thabo Mbeki could not resist defying the conventional wisdom of those who were not black Africans - intrusive white busybodies of all description - or was he responding to political pressures the busybodies did not perceive or appreciate?
     In the case of AIDS, Mbeki faced no significant resistance from within the African National Congress until Nelson Mandela finally made an issue of his denialism. In view of the scale and duration of the calamity, the question of why the government's unresponsiveness never became a burning political issue for the movement and its basic constituency can't be seen simply as a function of one man's over rationalized hang-ups. Obviously, there was drastic failure of leadership. But if there were no cultural inhibitions in the way of common-sense public health policy, why wasn't this the issue on which he fell? Helen Epstein's 2007 book, The Invisible Cure, based on articles that first appeared in these pages [3], offers a more sensitive consideration of such questions than this study of the doleful story's central figure.
     For several years, in apparent retreat, Thabo Mbeki managed to lower his voice on the subject of AIDS, having been persuaded by advisers that his regular polemics were getting him nowhere and doing damage to the international standing he craved. Then in 2007, as Gevisser's book was about to go to press, he phoned his biographer for the first time, asking whether he was aware of an anonymous "monograph" that had been circulating on the internet since 2002 - an angry, rambling screed that basically put the case against the promoters of antiretroviral drugs in a racial context, arguing that it was these drugs rather than HIV that poison and kill. Gevisser knew this text well and shared the widespread assumption that Mbeki was its author. The next day a government messenger delivered to Gevisser's door the latest version of this lengthening stream-of-consciousness twice as long and no less furious than the original. "We will no longer allow," it raged, "that our fear of the colonial mother, which has imprisoned our minds and our souls for far too long, make us meek and gentle with the butchers of the truth." Mbeki was signaling Gevisser that his position hadn't changed [4].

C.

     Meanwhile Thabo Mbeki sits in his new Johannesburg home like Nixon in San Clemente. Perhaps he's waiting for his David Frost to show up in order to get his story out. Or maybe he has started to write it himself. If he's capable of suspending his defense mechanisms and reflecting on his remarkable journey with something approaching candor, as few politicians ever are, he could clear up some of the ambiguities that linger in the story Mark Gevisser tells.

[ How Mbeiki Failed, Joseph Leyveld, New York Review of Books, April 9, 2009, pp. 26, 28, 29; in a review of Mark Gevisser's A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeiki and the Future of the South African Dream, Palgrave Macmillan, 376 pp., $29.95. ]

Chronicled in the above quotations is but one more harrowing tale of the enormous damage that can be wreaked upon an unsuspecting society by a man in a position of enormous state power who himself is the unsuspecting victim of a severe paranoid psychosis. Thabo Mbekei's delusional idée fixe that HIV and AIDS are not causally related, despite overwhelming scientific proof to the contrary, tragically condemned many thousands of South Africa's citizens - men, women, and children - to be deprived of the life-saving benefits of retroviral anti-AIDS drugs for many years, until mercifully he was finally forced to relinquish the presidency of the country he had so dreadfully harmed.

This is a classic case history of a person who has suffered a paranoid schizophrenic breakdown, the "bearded lady" disease, replete with the usual countless mad suspicions of covert forces conspiring against the "patient", Mbekei, including C.I.A. plots, fears for his life at the hands of unseen enemies, and an insane refusal to come to terms with, and finally relinquish, his delusional idée fixe that HIV and AIDS are not causally connected in any way. Mbekei's "anonymous", long-running polemic on the internet backing up his crazed beliefs can only be the product of a mind totally unhinged.

Mbekei was not an uneducated man. He had attended Sussex University in Brighton, England in the 1960s, and was also enrolled at the Lenin Institute in Moscow for several years. Therefore his inability to recognize, and his obsessive refusal to admit to, the overwhelming scientific proof of the HIV/AIDS connection could not be justified or explained as the product of a backward, uneducated mind, but solely as the product of the severe mental illness which had destroyed his "normal" powers of intellect and reasoning. A very sad tale indeed, not only for Mr. Mbeiki himself but for all the HIV-positive citizens of South Africa who were denied retroviral therapy and thus lethally harmed as the direct result of his paranoid delusions.

Furthermore, Mbekei's failure to come to the aid of the thousands of Zimbabwe citizens who were being systematically destroyed due to the paranoid madness of that country's own leader, Mugabe, was another tragic consequence of his madness. Only Mbeiki had the power and standing to help alleviate the terrible conditions in Zimbabwe, but he failed to do so. Thus we have seen the dreadful consequences of how not just one, but two paranoid leaders have had the power to cripple not only their own countries and grievously harm so many of their own innocent citizens, but have likewise failed to come to the rescue of citizens in other countries similarly sorely tried.

The book reviewer Joseph Lelyveld writes that "Meanwhile Thabo Mbeiki sits in his new Johannesburg home like Nixon is San Clemente." At the end of his own presidency, Richard Nixon had also become paranoid, according to many accounts, and was described by some as occasionally walking around the White House at night talking to the pictures of former presidents which were hanging on the walls. It was also reported at this time that after a press conference at Walt Disney World, he had approached a man and a boy and asked the man if he was the boy's mother or grandmother. When the man answered he was neither one, Nixon slapped the man in his face and said "Of course you're not", and walked away. (Reference: Schizophrenia - The Bearded Lady Disease, J. Michael Mahoney, AuthorHouse, Bloomington, IN, 2003, p. 448, Quotation 592.)

Mr. Lelyveld also writes that "Mbeiki wasn't simply being defensive when he warned his biographer not to dig too deeply into the psychological side of his makeup in search of a master key to his conduct." We of course now know what that "master" key is, the exact same key that is invariably operative in every case of paranoid schizophrenia - namely, severe unconscious bisexual conflict and gender confusion. This truth has been most strikingly documented by Daniel Paul Schreber in his Memoirs of My Nervous illness, his famous account of his own madness, and further very briefly but powerfully illustrated above by the paranoid Richard Nixon when he approached a perfect stranger and his young son and asked him if he was the boy's mother or grandmother.

It has accurately been stated that "Schreber's name is legion," and Mbeiki and his neighbor, President Mugabe of Zimbabwe, (as well as was Richard Nixon) are all members of that fateful legion, much to the detriment not only of themselves but to the thousands of other of their innocent and unsuspecting fellow-citizens who have been tragically ensnared in the destructive web of their paranoid delusions - particularly in reference to Mbekei and Mugabe - and the horrendous consequences following therefrom.

745

Conclusion

    We eventually decided to translate the book, because the clinical material it contains exemplifies and elucidates the difficulties which beset the theory, classification and psychotherapy of the psychoses at the present time. For all students of psychiatry, Schreber, its most famous patient, offers unique insight into the mind of a schizophrenic, his thinking, language, behavior, delusions and hallucinations, and into the inner development, course and outcome of the illness. His autobiography has the advantage of being complete to an extent no case history taken by a physician can ever be: its material is not selected or subject to elaboration or omission by an intermediary between the patient and his psychosis, and between both and the reader. Every student therefore has access to the totality of the patient's products. Indeed the Memoirs may be called the best text on psychiatry written for psychiatrists by a patient. Schreber's psychosis is minutely and expertly described, but its content is - as Dr. Weber explained to the Court - fundamentally the same and has the same features as that of other mental patients. Schreber's name is legion.
     We ourselves have learnt from it things which neither textbooks we read, nor lectures we attended could teach us. It helped us understand the actions and speech of chronic psychotics, enabling us to make contact with them, and in this way lessen their alienation. In milder patients, particularly hypochondriacs and early schizophrenics, we could help them understand their concern and preoccupation with body and body functions, or vague anxiety in terms of fantasies and budding delusions about their physical and mental identity. We have talked and listened to many Schrebers since we studied the Memoirs.
     Finally, as the Memoirs are the source material on which Freud based his most famous clinical study, fascinating opportunity is provided of observing Freud's mind actually at work on a case history.

* M. Bleuler (1953) in a personal communication stated that E. Bleuler would have agreed that "schizophrenics are almost invariably, if not indeed invariably, in doubt about the sex to which they belong."

[ Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Daniel Paul Schreber, Translated, Edited, with Introduction, Notes and Discussion by Ida Macalpine, M.D. and Richaed A. Hunter, M.D., M.R.C.P., D.P.M., WM. Dawson & Sons, Ltd., London, 1955, pp. 25, 26. ]

The key words in the above quotation lie in the following sentences: "Every student therefore has access to the totality of the patient's products. Indeed the Memoirs may be called the best text on psychiatry written for psychiatrists by a patient. Schreber's psychosis in minutely and expertly described, but its content is - as Dr. Weber explained to the Court - fundamentally the same and has the same features as that of other mental patients. Schreber's name is legion."

Superintendent G. Weber of the Sonnenstein Asylum in Germany, where Daniel Paul Schreber was kept for many years due to his psychotic behavior, told the Court, which was holding a hearing on Dr. Schreber's request for a "Rescission of Tutelage" in his case, that Schreber's psychosis showed the same features and elements as those of all other patients at the asylum - specifically, immense confusion and disorientation about gender identity and sexual orientation. Moreover, no doubt exists that these same gender-dysphoric features would be found in every instance in the female population at the Asylum, which was divided almost equally between males and females.

Drs. Macalpine and Hunter, the translators and editors of Schreber's Memoirs, disagreed with Freud's analysis that the outbreak of Schreber's paranoid psychosis was the direct result of his repression of overwhelmingly powerful homosexual feelings, with their attendant sexual cravings, directed towards Dr. Emil Flechsig, the physician he first consulted at the beginning of his schizophrenic breakdown. (It has been reported recently that Dr. Richard A. Hunter, Dr. Macalpine's son, was prepared to alter his opinion in this matter in favor of Dr. Freud's theory, but unfortunately he died before he was able formally to do so.)

It is best to let the paranoid schizophrenic Doctor of Jurisprudence, Daniel Paul Schreber, have the last word on this subject:

"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. Such and only such is the issue for me." (Schreber, p. 178;  Macalpine and Hunter translation, p. 149.) This insight applies equally well to all schizophrenic, or mentally ill females by simply reversing the gender order in his above monumentally important declaration.

744

A.

Can there be any prospect more terrible for a human being so highly gifted is such various ways, as I may say of myself without conceit, than the prospect of losing one's reason and perishing an imbecile? Hence anything which might befall me seemed more or less trivial, once I had gained the absolute conviction through years of experience that all attempts in this direction were predestined to fail, as within the Order of the World not even God has the power to destroy a person's reason.
      Naturally I have also occupied myself with the question of my future in a positive way. For several years after I had completely changed my ideas (described in Chapter XIII) I lived in the certain expectation that one day my unmanning (transformation into a woman) would be completed, this solution seemed to me absolutely essential as preparation for the renewal of mankind, particularly while I thought the rest of mankind had perished. Indeed, I still regard this as the solution most in accordance with the essence of the Order of the World. Unmanning for the purpose of renewing the race has in all probability actually occurred several times in earlier periods in the history of the universe (compare Chapter V), perhaps on our earth, perhaps on other planets. Many miracles enacted on my person (compare beginning of Chapter XI), as well as the filling of my body with nerves of voluptuousness, also unequivocally signify unmanning. But whether in the conditions contrary to the Order of he World (tying-to-celestial-bodies, etc.) which God established after the appearance of tested souls, unmanning can really be completed I dare not predict; it is even more difficult to predict the future since I have had to correct my earlier view that mankind had perished. It is therefore possible, even probable, that to the end of my days there will be strong indications of femaleness, but that I shall die as a man.

[ Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Daniel Paul Schreber - Translated, Edited, with Introduction, Notes and Discussion by Ida Maclpine, M.D. and Richard A. Hunter, M.D., M.R.C.P., D.P.M. - Wm. Dawson & Sons, Ltd, London, 1955, p. 212. ]

B.

      These statements are of decisive importance in determining the view we are to take of the delusion of emasculation and in thus giving us a general understanding of the case. It may be added that the 'voices' which the patient heard never treated his transformation into a woman as anything but a sexual disgrace, which gave them an excuse for jeering at him. 'Rays of God [1] not infrequently thought themselves entitled to mock at me by calling me "Miss [2] Schreber", in allusion to the emasculation which, it was alleged, I was about to undergo.' (127.) Or they would say: 'So [this] sets up to have been a Senatespräsident, this person who let's himself be f---d!' [3] Or again: 'Don't you feel ashamed in front of your wife?' [177.] 
      That the emasculation phantasy was of a primary nature and originally independent of the Redeemer motif becomes still more probable when we recollect the 'idea' which, as I mentioned on an earlier page [p. 13], occurred to him while he was half asleep, to the effect that it must be nice to be a woman submitting to the act of copulation (36.) This phantasy appeared during the incubation period of his illness, and before he had begun to feel the effects of overwork in Dresden.
      Schreber himself gives the month of November, 1895, as the date at which the connection was established between the emasculation phantasy and the Redeemer idea and the way thus paved for his becoming reconciled to the former. 'Now, however,' he writes, 'I became clearly aware that the Order of Things imperatively demanded my emasculation, whether I personally liked it or no, and that no reasonable course lay open to me but to reconcile myself to the thought of being transformed into a woman. The further consequence of my emasculation could, of course, only be my impregnation by divine rays to the end that a new race of men might be created.' (177.)
      The idea of being transformed into a woman was the salient feature and the earliest germ of his delusional system. It also proved to be the one part of it that persisted after his cure, and the one part that was able to retain a place in his behavior in real life after he had recovered. 'The only thing which could appear unreasonable in the eyes of other people is the fact, already touched upon in the expert's report, that I am sometimes to be found standing before the mirror or elsewhere, with the upper portion of my body bared, and wearing sundry feminine adornments, such as ribbons, false necklaces, and the like. This only occurs, I may add, when I am by myself, and never, at least so far as I am able to avoid it, in the presence of other people.' (429.) The Herr Senatspräsident confesses to this frivolity at a date (July, 1901) [1] at which he was already in a position to express very aptly the completeness of his recovery in the region of practical life: 'I have now long been aware that the persons I see about me are not "cursorily improvised men" but real people, and that I must therefore behave towards them as a reasonable man is used to behave towards his fellows.' (409.) In contrast to the way in which he put his emasculation phantasy into action, the patient never took any steps towards inducing people to recognize his mission as Redeemer, beyond the publication of his Denkwurdigkeiten.

[ Notes on a Case of Paranoia, Sigmund Freud, The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud - Volume XII (1911-1913) - The Case of Schreber - Papers on Technique - and other Works, The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London, 1958, pp. 20, 21. ]

C.

Sonnenstein, 9th December 1899

A. MEDICAL EXPERT'S REPORT TO THE COURT [133]

      The retired Senatspräsident Daniel Paul Schreber, Doctor of Law, of Dresden, was admitted to this Country Asylum on 29 June 1894 for treatment and has been here ever since.
      According to the formal certificate of Professor Flechsig of
Leipzig issued for the transfer of the patient to this asylum, President Schreber had already had a serious attack of hypochondria in 1884-1885; he recovered from it and was admitted for the second time to the University Clinic in Leipzig on 21st November 1893. At the beginning of his stay there he mentioned mostly hypchondriacal ideas, complained that he was suffering from softening of the brain, would soon die, etc.; but ideas of persecution soon appeared in the disease picture, based on hallucinations, which at first occurred sporadically, while simultaneously marked hyperesthesia, great sensitivity to light and noise made their appearance. Later the visual and auditory hallucinations multiplied and, in conjunction with disturbances of common sensation, ruled his whole feeling and thinking; he thought he was dead and rotten, suffering from the plague, mentioned that all sorts of horrible manipulations were being performed on his body, and that he was going through more terrible states than anybody had ever known. All that for a holy purpose, as indeed he still maintains. These morbid ideas gained so great and influence over the patient that he was inaccessible to any other impression, sat for hours completely stiff and immobile (hallucinatory stupor), at other times they tortured him so much that he wished for death, repeatedly made attempts at drowning himself in the bath and demanded the "cyanide destined for him". Gradually the delusions took on a mystical and religious character, he communicated directly with God, devils were playing their games with him, he saw "miracles", heard "holy music", and finally even believed that he was living in another world.
      In this asylum, to which President Schreber was transferred after a short stay in the private establishment of Dr. Pierson, he showed at first mainly the same picture as in Leipzig. This physically strong man, in whom frequent jerkings of the face musculature and marked tremor of the hands were noticeable, was at first completely inaccessible and shut off in himself, lay or stood immobile and stared with frightened eyes straight ahead of himself into space; he did not answer questions at all or only very briefly and protestingly; but clearly this rigid demeanor was far removed from indifference, rather the patient's whole state seemed irritable, caused by inner uneasiness and there could be no doubt that he was continually influenced by vivid and painful hallucinations, which he elaborated in a delusional manner. In the same way the patient abruptly rejected every communication and continually demanded to be left alone, indeed even that the whole house be cleared because God's omnipotence was being obstructed by the presence of attendants and others, while he himself wanted "divine peace". For the same reason he refused nourishment so that he had to be forcibly fed, or only took a few light dishes, refusing meat completely, and it was only with great difficulty that he was gradually made to eat again regularly. At the same time he retained is stool apparently deliberately, as far as he possibly could; he was therefore even incontinent at times. [134] Similarly for a long time it was impossible to persuade him to any activity such as reading, which he rejected because every word he read was being shouted out through the whole world. He frequently complained that there was a "loss of rays", that the doctor had "negligently emitted rays", without explaining more closely what he meant.
[..........]
      Very gradually the patient's excitement mounted further, disturbed his, up till then, moderate sleep and manifested itself externally, particularly by loud persistent laughter occurring to a certain extent in attacks (by day as well as by night), and by heavy hammering on the piano in a most disturbing manner. That this very striking behavior had to be looked upon as a reaction to hallucinations, particularly to delusional ideas springing from them, became evident from some of the patient's statements such as that the world had come to an end, that everything he saw around himself was only a sham, he himself and the persons around him only lifeless shadows. At the same time he still had hypochondriacal ideas, mentioned among others that his body was completely changed, one lung had disappeared altogether, and he could hardly breathe sufficiently to remain alive.
      Subsequently, the nights in particular became increasingly restless, while simultaneously a change occurred in him in so far as the earlier continuously stiff and rejecting and negativistic attitude gave way, so to speak, to a certain dualism. On the one had the reactions against the hallucinations became increasingly noisy and intense, in the garden the patient used to stand for a long time motionless in one place, staring into the sun, at the same time grimacing in an extraordinary way or bellowing very loudly at the sun with threats and imprecations, usually repeating endlessly one and the same phrase, shouting at her, that she was afraid of him, and that she had to hide from him the Senatspräsident Schreber, and also called himself Ormuzd. Or he raved in his room to such an extent, harangued for some time the "soul-murderer" Flechsig, repeated endlessly "little Flechsig", putting heavy emphasis on the first word, or shouted abuse and suchlike out his window with such tremendous force even at night, that the townspeople gathered and complained of the disturbance.
[........]
      For some time the physical behavior of the patient showed only little change, the peculiar very loud forced laughter and the monotonous uttering in endless repetition of incomprehensible abusive language (for instance "the sun is a whore", and suchlike), which served apparently to a certain extent as a counter-action against the hallucinations and disturbances of feeling (pain in the back, etc.), continued as before, sleep remained very deficient but nourishment was taken more adequately and he was gaining weight; even then there were signs of a peculiar delusion which developed later: the patient was frequently found in his room half undressed, declared that he already had feminine breasts, liked to occupy himself by looking at pictures of naked women, even drew them and had his moustache removed.

[ Excerpts from the report to the Court by Dr. G. Weber, Superintendent of Sonnenstein Asylum, Area Psychiatrist, Psychiatric Adviser to the Court, on 9th December 1899. ]

[ Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Daniel Paul Schreber, translated and edited by Ida Macalpine, M.D. and Richard A. Hunter, M.D., M.R.C.P., D.P.M., Wm. Dawson & Sons Ltd., London, 1955, pp. 267-270. ]

D.

And if tormented and in anguish man is mute,
God greated me to tell of what I suffer.
---Goethe, Act 5, Scene 5.

[ (The epigraph which Senatspräsident Daniel Paul Schreber
chose for his book, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.) ]

Daniel Paul Schreber was a distinguished German jurist who, at the point in his life where he had reached the pinnacle of a very successful legal career, unexpectedly succumbed to the ravages of a paranoid schizophrenic psychosis precipitated, as this illness invariably is, by severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion. This core pathogenic conflict and its devastating consequences are starkly chronicled in the above quotations.

In the immortal words of Dante Alighieri from his Inferno canto of The Divine Comedy [c. 1310-1321], "In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost." Thus Dante himself must have experienced a paranoid schizophrenic breakdown similar to the one which had overwhelmed Dr. Schreber in the middle of the journey of his own life, and this is what had enabled Dante to describe so vividly and powerfully the clashing emotions which he portrayed in his great opus. Both Dante's Inferno and Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness are chronicles of psychotic breakdown, written by men who, most fortunately for mankind, somehow survived their terrifying descent into the boiling cauldron of conflicted bisexual drives and feelings comprising their own madness, and lived to write about what they had endured. Both Schreber's and Dante's classic works are filled with striking illustrations of the bisexuality and gender confusion - the "bearded lady" disease - which afflicted both men and which was the direct cause of their madness.

The signal importance of Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness lies in the fact that it provided Sigmund Freud with an compelling first-person account of the way in which paranoid schizophrenia develops, and which he could then use to elucidate precisely his newly formulated theory of the genesis of paranoid symptomatology - specifically, that it is invariably triggered by repressed, unconscious homosexual and gender-confused cravings. These factors are starkly highlighted in Dr. Schreber's case history, and they gave Freud the irrefutable evidence he needed to document his seminal theoretical findings.

In his Notes on a Case of Paranoia Freud shows how Schreber's powerful homosexual attraction to his original physician, Dr. Emil Flechsig, was instrumental in the development of his psychotic breakdown and in his paranoid feelings of being persecuted by Flechsig. In Freud's brilliant analysis of Schreber's illness, he postulates that Schreber initially felt a powerful homosexual attraction to Flechsig - "I love him." These feelings of love were immediately repudiated by his ego and turned into their opposite, "No, I don't love him, I hate him." And then what Freud describes as the "paranoid shift" became operative - the key change which invariably results in the development of paranoid feelings of persecution - "No, I don't hate him, he hates me and is trying to destroy me." This same formula applies equally to mentally ill females as it does to mentally ill males. "I love her," the woman feels. Then the denial, "No, I don't love her, I hate her." Then the paranoid shift, "No, I don't hate her, she hates me and is trying to destroy me."

Even though Dr. Schreber was finally able emotionally to accept his psychic transformation into a woman, he remained seriously ill (paranoid) the remainder of his life due to the fact he was never fully able to acknowledge to himself that these intensely pleasurable, opposite-sex feelings - but simultaneously extremely painful ego-dystonic ones - were in reality his very own feelings and not those which God demanded of him to experience in order to fulfill God's master-plan for redeeming mankind.

The fact that Schreber's overwhelmingly powerful bisexual and gender-confused feelings were extremely difficult for him to accept on a conscious basis, consequently becoming the primary motivating factor in his initial attempts to repress them, thereby leading directly to the development of his psychosis, is demonstrated by his declaration that "Rays of God not infrequently thought themselves entitled to mock at me by calling me 'Miss Schreber', in allusion to the emasculation which, it was alleged, I was about to undergo. Or they would say: 'So this sets up to have been a Senatspräsident, this person who lets himself be f----d!' Or again: 'Don't you feel ashamed in front of your wife?'"

This tortured but brilliant man, whom Freud declared should have been made a professor of psychiatry at some great university due to the immense importance of his magnum opus, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, to that field of knowledge and study, summed up most succinctly the essence of all he had learned as the result of his hellish descent into madness, with these memorable words: "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. Such and only such is the issue for me" Schreber had made his choice and thus was finally enabled to regain his senses sufficiently to allow him to be discharged from the mental asylum where he had been held as a raging maniac for so many hard and tumultuous years.

Furthermore, by reversing the gender in Schreber's incredibly insightful quotation to read, "I would like to meet the woman who, faced with the choice of either being a demented human being in female habitus, or a spirited man, would not prefer the latter," his psychological "formula" becomes equally applicable to every mentally ill female - thereby truly making him the "discoverer" of the source of all mental illness in mankind. No small feat for a former madman!

743

A.

     For the creation of the standard sexual identity, the child must have a parent or parent substitute of the same sex who is neither so punishing or weak as to make it impossible for the child to identify with him [or her]; a parent or parent substitute of the opposite sex who is neither so seductive, punishing, emotionally erratic, or withholding as to make it impossible for the child to trust members of the opposite sex; and parents who do not systematically reject the child's biological sex and attempt to force him [or her] into behavior more in keeping with the opposite sex.

[ American Handbook of Psychiatry, Second Edition, Silvano Arieti • Editor-in-Chief / Volume One - The Foundations of Psychiatry, Silvano Arieti • Editor, Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, New York, Second Edition, 1974, (ch. 27) Sexual Functions in Men & Their Disturbances, Harold I. Lief, p. 548. ]

B.

Sexual identity guarantees our psychic unity.
[ Julia Kristeva, Psycho-Analyst ]

C.

When I married I was only half and man, and could only marry half a woman.
[ the father of a schizophrenic patient, gender not indicated, as told to the patient's psychiatrist ]

D.

To hate is to change a person's sex.
[ a schizophrenic patient, as told to his psychiatrist ]

Although the author of the above treatise in Quotation A, Harold I. Lief, is predominantly discussing sexual identity problems in males, the general formula he outlines here which leads to the development of a healthy sexual identity applies equally as well to females as it does to males.

As has been stated before, the greatest gift a man can give his children is to love their mother, and similarly the greatest gift a mother can give her children is to love their father. From this simple, but unfortunately too often difficult-to-achieve equation, springs the emotional well-being in the children which immunizes them from any future skewed sexual identity conflicts and the ensuing mental illness which inexorably develops whenever such conflicts are denied, or repressed.

Children of both sexes must have a parent of the same sex with whom they can easily and lovingly identify, and likewise a parent of the opposite sex whom they can deeply love and relate to and who consequently will later serve as the role model for the type of person the child will search for to be his or sexual/marriage partner.

Thus the factors enumerated by Harold Lief in quotation A, and whose consequences are highlighted in B, C, and D, serve as the perfect recipe for creating emotional disaster in the children of such parents. Severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion, leading to schizophrenic symptomatology, is invariably the tragic consequence of such immature and toxic parenting. Those investigators still haplessly searching for the root cause of schizophrenia and mental illness in general, need look no further than Harold I. Lief's brief, but insightful and chilling summation of how emotionally disturbed parents can wreak psychological devastation upon their always vulnerable offspring.

742

     The case concerned an old patient in the women's ward. She was about seventy-five, and had been bedridden for forty years. Almost fifty years ago she had entered the institution, but there was no one left who could recall her admittance; everyone who had been there had since died. Only one head nurse, who had been working at the institution for thirty-five years, still remembered something of the patient's story. The old woman could not speak, and could only take fluids or semifluid nourishment. She ate with her fingers, letting the food drip off them into her mouth. Sometimes it would take her almost two hours to consume a cup of milk. When not eating, she made curious rhythmic motions with her hands and arms. I did not understand what they meant. I was profoundly impressed by the degree of destruction that can be wrought by mental disease, but saw no possible explanation. At the clinical lectures she used to be presented as a catatonic form of dementia praecox [schizophrenia], but that meant nothing to me, for these words did not contribute in the slightest to an understanding of the significance and origin of those curious gestures.
     The impression this case made upon me typifies my reaction to the psychiatry of the period. When I became an assistant, I had the feeling that I understood nothing whatsoever about what psychiatry purported to be. I felt extremely uncomfortable beside my chief and my colleagues, who assumed such airs of certainty while I was groping perplexedly in the dark. For I regarded the main task of psychiatry as understanding the things that were taking place within the sick mind, and as yet I knew nothing about these things. Here I was engaged in a profession in which I did not know my way about!
     Late one evening, as I was walking through the ward, I saw the old woman still making her mysterious movements, and again asked myself, "Why must this be?" Thereupon I went to our old head nurse and asked whether the patient had always been that way. "Yes," she replied. "But my predecessor told me she used to make shoes." I then checked through her yellowing case history once more, and sure enough, there was a note to the effect that she was in the habit of making cobbler's motions. In the past shoemakers used to hold shoes between their knees and draw the threads through the leather with precisely such movements. (Village cobblers can still be seen doing this today.) When the patient died shortly afterward, her elder brother came to the funeral. "Why did your sister lose her sanity?" I asked him. He told me that she had been in love with a shoemaker who for some reason had not wanted to marry her, and that when he finally rejected her she had "gone off." The shoemaker movements indicated an identification with her sweetheart which had lasted until her death. That case gave me my first inkling of the psychic origins of dementia praecox [schizophrenia]. Henceforth I devoted all my attention to the meaningful connections in a psychosis.

[ Psychiatric Activities, in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, by C.G. Jung,
Recorded and Edited by Aniela Jaffe', Vintage Books (A Division of Random House), New York and Toronto, 1961, 1962, 1963, pp. 124-125. ]

This unfortunate woman had experienced a severe schizophrenic breakdown at the age of twenty-five and had ever since been confined to a mental hospital where she finally died at age seventy-five, tragically having never recovered her sanity.

One of the more common triggers for the onset of an acute schizophrenic panic, with its consequent all-encompassing delusional symptomatology, is rejection by the so-called "beloved" in a love affair. This definitely appears to have been the case in this instance since it was reported by the patient's brother, when questioned by Dr. Jung, "Why did your sister lose her sanity?", and he had replied that she had "gone off" following her rejection by a certain shoemaker, or cobbler, whom it was alleged she had been in love with.

The reason "romantic" rejection can be so devastating to an already mentally fragile person is because that person's underlying bisexual conflict and gender confusion is greatly exacerbated by any such rejection, whereas prior to it the pre-schizophrenic person could consciously rationalize that he or she was "normally" heterosexual. Any romantic rejection destroys their self-confidence and self-illusion about their heterosexual normality and allows the underlying bisexual conflict and gender confusion to come to the fore - with often tragic consequences, as in this case. (Similar psychotic breakdowns may end disastrously in suicide.)

Probably the shoemaker involved in this case somehow intuited, either consciously or unconsciously, this young girl's mental instability and sexual ambivalence and for this reason broke off the "love" affair, thus precipitating her severe schizophrenic break which grievously lasted a lifetime. Unfortunately psycho-analysis had not yet been "invented" by Dr. Sigmund Freud at the time of this patient's first serious illness, and it is the only treatment which conceivably could have rescued her from her terrible fate had it been instituted soon after her original mental collapse.

The outstanding symptom she displayed during her long years of illness was her incessant "habit of making cobbler's motions. In the past shoemakers used to hold shoes between their knees and draw threads through the leather with precisely such movements." What the patient was displaying here by mimicking these actions was her unconscious identification as a male with the shoemaker she had once professed to "love," thus highlighting her severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion, the immediate cause of her original schizophrenic, or "bearded lady" breakdown. In her delusional mind she herself had now become a male shoemaker, or cobbler, like her former "beloved." Furthermore, the constant back-and-forth motions she engaged in were, in all likelihood, concurrently related at a deeply unconscious level with certain masturbatory movements she had once been accustomed to performing but had later deeply repressed.

It is interesting to note in this case, presented by Dr. C. G. Jung, his own dawning awareness of the psychological underpinnings of mental illness and of the vital importance of trying to understand the patient from an emotional/psychological point-of-view rather than concentrating solely on the physical symptoms, as had been the custom for so many hundreds of years prior to this time and even in some quarters today, sadly, is still practiced by a certain segment of the psychiatric profession, to the great detriment of its grossly underserved patients.

741

A.

    The mourners also heard from Mark Costello, Wallace's college room-mate in the early 1980s, who implored them not to forget "how painful Dave's day-to-day life was." Wallace [David Foster] had suffered from depression since adolescence, and was hospitalized during his sophomore year at Amherst. Later, he briefly shared an apartment with Costello in Somerville, near Boston. Wallace was drinking heavily and experimenting enthusiastically with drugs, and eventually ended up in McLean Hospital, a psychiatric institution that had previously counted the poets Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell among its patients. The "power of death," Costello said, was his constant companion, and "eventually it cornered him and killed him."
    While he was at McLean, Wallace was prescribed Nardil, a powerful antidepressant that he would take for most of the next 20 years. By the summer of 2007, however, the drug had begun to have unpleasant side effects, and it was decided that he would come off it. Doing so had catastrophic results. "Severe depression came back," Wallace's father, James, told the online magazine Salon. "They tried all kinds of things. He was hospitalized twice...and had a series of electroconvulsive therapy treatments, which just really left him very shaky and very fragile and unable to sleep." (p. 26)

B.

    When, in mid-August, his wife, Karen Green, had to go away on family business, Wallace's parents came to stay with him in Claremont. "He was very emotional," his mother, Sally, said. "He was just terrified of so much. We would just try to hold him. He did tell me he was glad I was his mom." James and Sally flew back home to Illinois at the end of the month. A fortnight later, Karen came home from a shopping trip and found her husband dead.
    News of Wallace's suicide [by hanging] first broke on the Twitter page of the Brooklyn-based writer Edward Champion. By the time the mainstream media picked up the story, Champion was already gathering tributes and testimonials from the "literary community" on his blog, the comments box of which was soon filling up with expressions of shock and anguish from Wallace's fans. The confessions of one devotee that "I haven't really cried over the death of someone I haven't met since Kurt Cobain" was typical. (pp. 26, 28)

C.

    Eggers posted a series of anecdotes about Wallace on the McSweeney's website. In one, he recalled the first time they met, in the mid-nineties, at a diner in New York. While Wallace chewed tobacco, using a teacup in his lap as a spitoon (a habit he would never give up) he and Eggers "talked about how he'd grown up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and how I'd gone to college there, about the pleasures and quirks of east-central Illinois. There's something very strange and uniquely powerful about meeting a guy whose writing you find world-changing but who also comes from your part of the world." (p.28)

D.

Wallace described the atmosphere of the family home in an essay he wrote for Harper's: "Suppers often involved a game: If one of us children [Wallace had a sister, Amy] made a usage error, Mom would pretend to have a coughing fit that would go on and on until the relevant child had identified the relevant error and corrected it. It was all very self-ironic and light-hearted, but looking back, it seems a bit excessive to pretend that your small child is actually depriving you of oxygen by speaking incorrectly."
    Being raised as an "extreme usage fanatic" by a teacher of composition certainly left its mark on the mature Wallace's prose style. In another of his McSweeney's posts, Eggers remembered the time Wallace sent him a story, "Mister Squishy", together with a note asking that if it was to run in his magazine, it should do so under the pseudonym "Elizabeth Klemm". Eggers agreed ("We were so proud to publish it"), but the subterfuge didn't last long: Wallace was simply "too recognizable to hide, too singular to fool anyone." Who else could have written a 60-page story about a marketing executive who hatches a plan to inject deadly cultures into the "snack cakes" he is testing with a focus group? And all this in sentences of improbable length and fiendish complexity. (pp. 28, 30)

E.

"...Schmidt had a quick vision of them all in the conference room as like icebergs and/or floes, only the sharp caps showing, unknowing and -knowable to one another, and he imagined that it was only in marriage (and a good marriage, not the decorous dance of loneliness he'd watched his mother and father do for seventeen years but rather true conjugal intimacy) that partners allowed each other to see below the berg's cap's public mask and consented to be truly known, maybe even to the extent of not only letting the partner see the repulsive nest of moles under their left arm or the way after any sort of cold or viral infection the toenails on both feet turned a weird deep yellow for several weeks but even perhaps every once in a while sobbing in each other's arms late at night and pouring out the most ghastly private fears and thoughts of failure and impotence and terrible and thoroughgoing smallness..."

    This is writing of extraordinary syntactic control, and it is characteristic of what Eggers describes as Wallace's "dense, discursive, and insanely detailed style." The sentence continues for almost another page; the paragraph in which it occurs runs over four pages. Eggers says that he asked Wallace to consider breaking up some of the paragraphs before the story was published: "It was as if he were visiting the notion...for the first time. He was that kind of genius, whose understanding of the workings of his own fiction was, I think, largely separate from ideas of audience." (pp.28-32)

[ An American Suicide, Jonathan Derbyshire, New Statesman, London, 1 December 2008, pp. 26-33. ]

David Foster Wallace had suffered severely from schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, since puberty ("adolescence"), even though the author of the above-quoted article mistakenly describes his painful psychiatric condition as being that of "depression." This same labeling mistake is routinely made by the majority of today's psychiatrists who do not realize that "depression" is but one of the many varied symptoms of the same illness - schizophrenia.

The original name for "schizophrenia" - the latter so designated by Professor Eugen Bleuler in the early 1900's - was "dementia praecox", or early madness, due to its initial manifestations appearing close to the age of puberty when powerful new hormonal and emotional changes are rapidly occurring in the individual. Surprisingly, very few investigators have ever connected this first appearance of powerful sexual urges and consequent emotional turmoil with the beginning of schizophrenic symptomatology, although the correlation should be glaringly obvious. Today, the "popular" psychiatric theory is that schizophrenia is caused by some type of mysterious "chemical imbalance" in the brain and therefore toxic psychotropic drugs are administered in order to alleviate this supposed imbalance. In reality, these drug basically serve as chemical "strait jackets", with no "curative" powers whatsoever - only tranquillizing ones - because the core pathogenic factor of unconscious bisexual conflict and gender confusion which has driven the individual insane, or schizophrenic, in the first place, has been completely ignored.

The unfortunate Mr. Wallace was prescribed every psychotropic drug and physical procedure, such as electro-convulsive therapy, available in the psychiatric arsenal, all of which proved to be ineffective and seriously debilitating ("left him very shaky and very fragile and unable to sleep"), due to the fact the basic pathogenic core of his mental illness - his severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion - was never adequately resolved or perhaps never even considered by his many different therapists. (The one institution where this core pathogenic conflict may actually have been broached to Mr. Wallace would have been at McLean Hospital, which historically has had a strong Freudian psycho-analytic/psycho-dynamic approach to mental illness.)

The most telling clue to Wallace's underlying bisexual conflict/gender confusion appears in the following section of paragraph D. above:

"In another of his McSweeney's posts, Eggers remembered the time Wallace sent him a story, 'Mister Squishy,' together with a note asking that if it was to run in his magazine, it should do so under the name 'Elizabeth Klemm'. Eggers agreed ('We were so proud to publish it'), but the subterfuge didn't last long: Wallace was simply 'too recognizable to hide, too singular to fool anyone.' Who else could have written a 60-page story about a marketing executive who hatches a plan to inject deadly cultures into 'snack cakes' he is testing with a focus group? And all this in a sentence of improbable length and fiendish complexity."

This particular excerpt from the New Statesman article highlights two main points: first, Wallace's strong unconscious identification as a woman - the taking of the name "Elizabeth Klemm" as a pseudonym - and secondly, his "schizophrenese" style of writing which many have mistaken for the work of a literary "genius." Paragraph E. above contains an insightful yet unintentionally damning description of Wallace's "dense, discursive, and insanely detailed style." The key words here are "insanely detailed." For truly Wallace was insane, a schizophrenic person demonized and driven to his death by his unresolved "bearded lady" conflict, and his voluminous writings reflect this madness. But can one be mad and produce a work of "genius"? Yes, but such a work will invariably be seen to be fatally flawed in some manner if it is examined carefully and dispassionately enough, as Wallace's literary output has proven to be.

Finally, Wallace was raised in a family with parents, according to him, whose marriage was "the decorous dance of loneliness he'd watched his mother and father do for seventeen years...." As the father of a schizophrenic once told the patient's therapist, "When I married I was only half a man and could only marry half a woman." This parental description is invariably accurate when applied to families where schizophrenia develops in one or more of the children. Future schizophrenics (and homosexuals) have very poor parental role models with whom to identify themselves in order to help them form normal heterosexual sexual identities in their childhood, since these "schizophrenogenic" parents are themselves so conflicted in this all-important area. "Sexual identity guarantees our psychic unity," as the brilliant psycho-analyst Julia Kristeva has so unerringly stated. David Foster Wallace was obviously afflicted with an extremely insecure and confused sexual identity and consequently his "psychic unity" was eventually shattered into a thousand razor-sharp pieces of mental anguish and physical pain.

In wishing that his parents, "but even perhaps every once in a while sobbing in each other's arms late at night and pouring out the most ghastly private fears and thoughts of failure and impotence and thoroughgoing smallness...", he is simultaneously describing his own "failure and impotence and thoroughgoing smallness...", stemming directly from his own severely conflicted and unresolved bisexual conflict and gender confusion. And it was this malignant conflict which was the direct cause of the terrible madness which led him inexorably and tragically to his dreadful death by suicidal hanging.

Mr. Wallace has now joined that long procession, which stretches out interminably, of similar victims of this deadly malady - schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease - which has caused such incalculable suffering to humanity throughout the ages.

740.

    In the first two years of analysis the patient was subject to "spells
of confusion." These would begin with severe tension headaches in the back of his neck, sometimes extending to the front. Occasionally they were one-sided and migrainous in nature. At these moments he felt he might "crack up," fragment into a "million pieces." He lost a sense of direction and felt disoriented. Lights could appear blindingly bright. The room might shift somewhat and he would become frightened. "I feel terribly sick, as if I'm going to crack up. It's a sort of terrible fright and then a compulsion to homosexual activity. Somehow, it's like I'm going to be destroyed or as if I'm going to be attacked. I'm in terrible danger. Shivers and shudders will shake my body and I'll get into bed, pull the covers over my head and curl up like a fetus. It feels like if I don't then go to a homosexual activity - I do it for my self-preservation. At that point I'm at my breaking point. If I don't I may go insane. It's not an indulgence at all. I have to do it. I might explode or I'll go crazy. It's as if all time and space are mixed up, as if things are shifted and I am in the deepest, direst trouble."

[ Homosexuality, Charles W. Socarides, M.D., New York - Jacob Aronson - London, 1978, pp. 260-261. ]

The analysand in the above-quoted case very emphatically declares that if had attempted to deny and repress completely his powerful homosexual urges, he would have become "insane." "It feels like if I don't then go to a homosexual activity - I do it for my self-preservation. At that point I'm at my breaking point. If I don't I may go insane. It's not an indulgence at all. I have to do it. I might explode or I'll go crazy."

Unfortunately, too many other tortured, bisexually-conflicted souls who have not been privileged to have had access, unlike this analysand, to the highly beneficial - sometimes literally life-saving - effects of psycho-analytic psychotherapy, do reach this "breaking point" and do "explode" and "go crazy," often with horrific consequences to all concerned.

In every case of a person "running amok", or one who succumbs to a murderous frenzy and consequent rampage, it is invariably their intense but severely repressed "bearded lady" conflict which is the triggering factor and direct cause of their paranoid schizophrenic breakdown. Examples of the many terrible tragedies resulting from these "running amok" cases are chronicled almost daily in newspaper, radio and television reports - witness particularly the Columbine and Virginia Tech school shootings, only two out of a multitude of horrendous blood-baths which have occurred in the past and all the new incidents which will continue to materialize with sickening regularity in future news reports. [For more background information on this particular analysand, please refer to # 739.]

739.

     He was aware of his "terrible fear" of normal men but felt superior
with homosexuals. He felt "terribly vulnerable" with boys who made fun of him for being effeminate, although, in fact, he did not appear feminine. "I can vividly remember every remark about my being effeminate or unmasculine. All the remarks in prep school tortured me terribly and the awful guilty feeling that I might give myself away."
     Fears of effeminacy seemed to vanish when he was required to enter the navy after his failure in graduate school. But he had a "year of decline" in the navy, where he worked in a mess kitchen, experiencing homosexual wishes and deeply fearing his effeminacy and homosexuality. He then engaged in a "calculated career" of homosexuality. He was away from home, had lost his social status, and wanted revenge on the navy. He could now be quite "coldly effective" and "felt unusually happy, although I still had to work in the scullery."
     In the evenings he drank a great deal and became "completely animal." He said, however, that homosexuality "saved my sanity. Before, at college, I had reached the end of the world, awful fear. Then I suddenly failed my exams. Then the underlayer of fear, uncertainty, came, that I was going to be at the mercy of people once I got into the service and would have no way to protect myself."
    Campbell's adaptive mechanisms were not sufficient to maintain him while in the navy. He regressed and became ill, suffering a severe pneumonia which kept him hospitalized for three months in a critical state. He then had an intense outbreak of homosexual behavior which he no longer fought. In the homosexuality he felt his sanity was preserved. Homosexuality neutralized severe projective anxieties bordering on paranoidal symptomatology, quieted his general distrust, and defended against extreme aggressive outbursts. He had not, on any occasion, become overtly psychotic.

[ Homosexuality, Charles W. Socarides, M.D., New York - Jason Aronson - London, 1978, pp. 254-245. ]

Campbell was a boy/man suffused with such urgent and powerful homosexual feelings that they had made his life a psychic nightmare during the time he was attending preparatory school and college. Later, while in the navy, he finally ceased his desperate and futile attempts to deny and repress these overwhelmingly insistent homoerotic cravings and embarked on a "calculated career" of relieving them by becoming "completely animal."

The great importance of Campbell's experience, as reported here by Dr. Socarides, lies in the fact that it proves once again the stunning truth of Sigmund Freud's famous dictum that the etiological source of all paranoia, now commonly referred to as paranoid schizophrenia, is invariably to be found in a complex of repressed homosexual desires and feelings, in both men and women, regardless of age or social background. And, as Campbell had so starkly reported, homosexuality "saved my sanity." By this he meant he fully realized he would have descended into total madness had he not found the will, and the immense courage, to allow himself irrevocably to experience and satisfy his deepest and most urgent homoerotic sexual and emotional needs.

As Dr. Socarides states, Campbell's ultimately complete acceptance of his powerful homosexual drives "neutralized severe projective anxieties bordering on paranoidal symptomatology, quieted his general distrust, and defended against extreme aggressive outbursts. He had not, on any occasion, become overtly psychotic." Thus it can be truthfully posited here that the cure for all functional mental illness - the "bearded lady" disease - is for the afflicted sufferer to cease all resistance to his or her theretofore deeply repressed and denied homosexual cravings and phantasies and abreact, or discharge, them either by means of intense masturbatory activity or else in actual human partnerships, as did Campbell. [Reference here specifically Quotation/Comment 528 in "Schizophrenia - The Bearded Lady Disease," in its own link on this website.]

Homosexuality "SAVED MY SANITY." These three words should be engraved in stone, for they provide us with the key to the understanding of, and consequently the cure for, that ever-present, ever-deadly scourge of mankind - common madness.

738.

A.

Perversions generally imply the dominance of pregenitality in the sexual function. This regressive feature is common to all perversions and involves the denial of heightened castration anxiety and marked bisexual identification. The ambivalent cathexis of the object with preponderance of destructiveness is a corollary in the pregenital stages. The role of sadism in the formation of perversions has lately been more and more emphasized by several authors (Klein, Glover, Gillespie, Greenacre) and we may add that emphasis in our etiological thinking has shifted from the traumata of the phallic phase to the traumatic influence of the pre-phallic era. This shift has taken place - though by no means in explicit connection - simultaneously with our greater attention to the role of aggression in mental functioning and in pathology as well. (p. 231)  

B.

    Clinical experience indicated that, in cases of multiple perversions, traumatic overstimulation occurred in the undifferentiated phase, thereby affecting both drives in their undifferentiated state simultaneously. Physiological dysfunctions threatening survival, and the disequilibrium of mother-child relationships (Greenacre) in this early phase, seemed to be present in several cases of perversion. Its sensory consequences, forming identification, were also described by Greenacre in rich detail in relation to fetishism. One may surmise, however, that at least some of these findings cannot be restricted as the determinant of fetishism only, especially since we rarely encounter perversions in isolation. Whereas in fetishism, the uncertainty of body image and especially the confused sexual identity may be most striking, the vagueness of body periphery, of the boundaries of the body-self, may well be a substratum of all perversions. It certainly plays a much greater role in sado-masochism than has hitherto been emphasized. (p. 233)

C.

Perversions in which the above-described genetic history is discernible show a clinical closeness to schizophrenia, or else the patients have schizophrenic symptoms at the same time. In such cases, it is almost impossible to make a clear distinction between the schizophrenic identification and defenses and those underlying the perversion. Their frequent coexistence shows the fluidity of these mechanisms in one individual. One may say that, in schizophrenic symptoms, the regression to undifferentiation has taken place and that the partial narcissistic object relationships in the perverse symptoms are reparative attempts. They seem to represent different forms of defenses against the unneutralized aggressions threatening the object. It is not too unlikely to assume that, in schizophrenic manifestations due to the undifferentiation of both bad a good objects and libido aggression, a more extensive withdrawal from the object world takes place than in perversions where by splitting of the self a narcissistic object relation can be maintained. (p. 234)

D.

    It is obvious that the exhibitionist reassures himself against castration. The acting out of this aggression is a denial of the deeper-lying feminine identification. The male exhibitionist is identified with the female child and maintains awe and aggressive ambivalence toward the paternal phallus. Due to the greater ego-syntonicity of aggression in men, the passive-feminine self will be externalized to the object.
    The fetishist escapes castration fear by the denial of his perception that women lack a penis. The denial is also necessitated by his alternating between identification with the phallic and aphallic mother. (pp. 236-7)

E.

    Homosexuals show a failure in all four factors that are necessary for the resolution of the Oedipus complex. In turning away from heterosexual objects by identification, the destructive impulses against the mother are resolved and, at the same time, they pave the way for the libidinization of aggression against the rival. The homosexual thus succeeds in defending himself against retaliation from both sexes. There are manifold variations in the compromise between aggression and libido (Nunberg) and whether, through narcissistic split, aggressive or libidinal attitudes are delegated to the object (also Anna Freud). In addition, elements which we mentioned in connection with other perversions are present to a greater or lesser extent, just as all other perversions show a degree of homosexuality due to their ubiquitous narcissistic elements and bisexual identification. (p. 239)

F.

    2. Perversions are considered as symptoms in which the dominant defense - common to all perversions - is the dramatized denial of castration and in which the gratification of libido consists of a genetically-determined variety of pregentital fixations.
    3. The increased need to deny castration is based, on the one hand, upon the projection of a heightened aggression, on the other, on a marked bisexual identification, which was established as a defense against the destruction of the object, in whole or in part.
    4. [......]
    5. The frequent coexistence of schizophrenic symptoms with perversions indicates a common fixation point in the undifferentiated phase and in defenses against unneutralized aggression; the perverse symptoms represent an attempt at restitution of the narcissistic object relationship.
    6. Common to all perversions is the narcissistic object relationship established by the splitting of the self. The distance from schizophrenia depends on the grade of structural development and the grade of object relationship. (pp. 239-40)

[ Aggression and Perversion by Robert C. Bak, M.D.*, in Perversions - Psychodynamics and Therapy, Edited by Sandor Lorand, M.D. and Michael Balint, M.D., Gramercy books, New York, 1956, pp. 231-239. ]

[ * Robert C. Bak, M.D., Member, New York Psychoanalytic Society; American Psychoanalytic Association; International Psychoanalytical Association - Secretary, New York Psychoanalytic Institute. ]

The consensus reached by Dr. Bak and his fellow investigators, as outlined in the above quotations, clearly points to the fact that all perversions have at their etiological root the same toxic factor of bisexual conflict and gender confusion which forms the basic etiological core of schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease. Perversions, therefore, must be considered as indirect manifestations of this illness, part of the myriad symptomatology of the disease. Perversions and schizophrenia are invariably and inextricably entwined. As Dr. Bak states: "Whereas in fetishism, the uncertainty of body image and especially the confused sexual identity may be most striking, the vagueness of body periphery, of the boundaries of the body-self, may well be a sub-stratum of all perversions. It certainly plays a much greater role in sado-masochism than has hitherto been emphasized." If the word "schizophrenia" had been substituted for the word "perversions" in the above sentence, it would constitute the perfect description of the basic psychological profile of the schizophrenic person, male or female - that is, of one who is burdened with "uncertainty of body image," "confused sexual identity" and "vagueness of body periphery, of the boundaries of the body-self." No more accurate and intuitive portrayal of the underlying schizophrenic psyche could be elucidated.

737

    The exhibitionist's shyness is at a minimum in the presence of young girls though he knows that indecency with children involves extra-heavy penalties from the law. But if certain women, mistaking the sollicitus for the sollicitans aspect of MGE, take the act of the male genital exhibitionist as an invitation to closer contact, he is immediately put off. He wants no partnership but needs female spectators to increase his narcissism at their expense. Thus by a retreat from object libido, the male exhibitionist arrives in his act at a feeling of hermaphroditic self-fulfillment, a sense of "intoxication with his own power," as Mr. Bleuler says. L. Eidelberg5 quotes an exhibitionist text which no doubt has its variations. It says: "It is not true that I want to have breasts. The truth is that I am proud of having a penis. It is not true that I am interested in watching women who undress. The truth is that I want to show them my penis." But, as already mentioned, it is not just the penis but the whole sexual region which is engaged in the exhibitionist's attitude to femininity and women. Its meaning in a nutshell is: "I am you, all of you, and - whether you swallow it or not - still more."

[ Male Genital Exhibitionism, by Hans Christoffel, M.D.*, in Perversions - Psychodynamics and Therapy, Edited by Sandor Lorand, M.D. and Michael Balint, M.D., Gramercy Books, New York, 1956, pp. 262-263. ]

[ * Hans Christoffel, M.D., Member, Swiss Psychoanalytic Society; International Psychoanalytical Association - Member (late Chairman), Swiss Psychological Society - Chairman, Basle Psychological Working Community ]

The man who indulges in male genital exhibitionism is clearly suffering from schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, since this is clearly an "insane" act he is carrying out and one to which he has been driven to perform, regardless of its potential criminal consequences to himself, through the urgent pressure exerted upon his beleaguered psyche by his unconscious bisexual conflict and gender confusion.

As the above investigators have made clear, MGE is never an act executed by a man who is secure in his heterosexuality and masculine identity, but is always one which is transacted by a man who has a critical need to prove, both to himself and to the female(s) he accosts, that he is not a female like they, with breasts and other feminine attributes, but is undeniably a person who possesses a penis. No, his act proclaims, he has not been castrated and turned into a woman - here is the glaring evidence of the fact he is still a physically intact, powerful man. By shocking his female victims in this manner, he is desperately trying to reassure himself of the certainty of this supposition. In reality, however, he is an emotionally very disturbed individual, torn by his severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion, and much more to be pitied rather than feared.

MGE is one of the more startling of the myriad symptoms which can arise as the direct result of the schizophrenic "bearded lady" conflict underlying all functional mental illness.

736

A.

    The homosexual deviation in cocaine addicts was first described by Hartmann in extensive clinical studies.18

    In certain cases, addiction is but the manifestation of a latent or circumscribed psychosis. In an observation of Benedek, the patient wanted to destroy her feminine body which she hated. This wish had emerged in her adolescence. She drank heavily and stuffed herself with large quantities of food. The drive toward bodily self-destruction served as a defense against repressed homosexuality. In her wish to destroy her feminine ego, she was also trying to destroy her mother with whom she identified herself on the oral level. The defensive struggle against this identification led to paranoid hatred of women. 19

    In this context, I would like to mention briefly my own observation of compulsive bulimia in a schizophrenic girl. Here analysis demonstrated clearly that the compulsive eating served the purpose of establishing the original identification with her mother; at the same time it meant the destruction of her feminine loveliness, since it transformed her into a shapeless mass of flesh and fat. In this way, the patient was defending herself desperately not only against any heterosexual potentialities but, on a deeper level, against the narcissistic homosexual love for the mother and her substitutes. The voice of her fantasy love, that is, of her father, threatened to kill her unless she continued to stuff herself with food. Compulsive hair-pulling was another means of destroying her femininity and forcing her continued dependence on her parents. Her psychotic imagery expressed the split in her homosexual attitude. She was being threatened by her "beautiful" mother holding a sword while, at the same time, she was yearning for the lovely female figures of her own fantasy.

    In my observations of neurotic obesity, I became aware of the role played by repressed homosexuality in my predominantly female patients. One of them, in addition to compulsive overeating, developed during analysis addiction to benzedrine which led her to take, in complete secrecy, immense quantities of the drug. She then displayed a transient paranoid psychosis in which the analyst became her chief persecutor with evil sexual intentions. The homosexual element could easily be detected in this heterosexually oriented delusional formation.

B.

    Among my women patients who were addicts, denial of femininity was a prominent feature; it manifested itself by amenorrhea and avoidance of feminine grace and apparel. In homosexual episodes, patients played the aggressive masculine role. In their heterosexual relations they showed complete vaginal anesthesia and, as one of my patients put it: they did not "discover" their vagina until a fairly advanced stage of analysis. It is in keeping with this attitude that, to their unconscious, food had also the symbolic meaning of the paternal phallus which they wanted to incorporate and thus to keep forever.20

    Finally, we have to consider the role of homosexuality in that most popular and best-known form of addiction, alcoholism. Both superficial and clinical observation concur in stressing the predominance of certain homosexual trends in alcoholics. Here belong such trends as the importance of drinking in common in certain male group activities, the particular kind of conviviality and fraternization displayed by the drinker and, on the defensive side, the manifestation of paranoid tendencies with their further psychotic elaboration.

C.

    However, psychoanalytic authors, by and large, have agreed on the importance of latent homosexuality in the dynamics of alcoholism. Theoretically, this could be expected in view of such trends as morality and narcissism - trends which certainly are shared in common by the alcoholic and the homosexual. Clinically, we are impressed by the fact that alcoholism appears as one of the significant patterns of behavior in individuals with a weak ego structure. A similar ego structure is found in most homosexuals, latent and well as manifest. Clinical observations of non-psychotic and psychotic alcoholics point to trends which may be considered as characteristic - though certainly not specific - of latent homosexuality, such trends as impotence, suspiciousness and jealousy.

D.

    Abraham was the first to recognize the significance of latent homosexuality in the etiology of alcohol addiction. He spoke of men turning to alcohol as a means of gaining an increased feeling of manliness and of flattering their complex of masculinity. He drew attention to characteristic mannerisms of alcoholics and to special drinking customs among such groups as university students - all of them bearing latent homosexual characteristics. He also drew an interesting comparison between the structure of alcoholics and perverts.22  Juliusburger discussed the relation of homosexuality to inebriety and pointed out that periodic stages of anxiety may result from strong homosexual impulses. According to his observations, dipsomania is a manifestation of such unconscious homosexual drives, periodically breaking through the barrier of repression. Anxiety which manifests itself at the beginning of a dipsomanic attack arises under the impact of an unconscious homosexual wish; in our modern terminology, we would describe it as a reaction of the ego to the breaking through of the id impulses.28  In some of my own observations, I have found a similar pattern - with the emphasis put on seeking rapprochement with other men as a substitute for a deficiency in the early relationship to the father. 

E.

    Knight observed, in his alcoholic patients, a conscious or almost conscious fear of being regarded as feminine. They showed impotence and ejaculation praecox and a typical dichotomy in their love and sex life.25  I can also confirm his observation that women with a strong homosexual component resort to drinking as a means of identifying and competing with men.

F.

    The rich variety of clinical developments which arise from the common background of insidious schizophrenia, alcoholism and perversions is well known to descriptive psychiatry. From the analytic point of view, the main distinction consists, perhaps, in the attitude of the ego towards the perversion. We observe patients whose ego accepts homosexuality as a drive as well as a gratification. Here perversion may become more or less integrated into the general pattern of living, without causing any other reaction than, possibly, anxiety based on a good appraisal of reality. Obviously, it is only natural that a passive young man who gets intoxicated and then seeks out tough, aggressive men in order to submit to their anal aggression, should fear the consequences of these encounters. A patient of this type admitted that he had been beaten up and robbed - but "only" twice in the course of four years of intense homosexual activity. The patient accepted both his masochism and his homosexuality.

G.

    The most complete, to my knowledge, analysis of a case of delirium tremens was published in 1926 by Kielholz. The analysis confirmed his former findings concerning the importance of the homosexual component in alcoholics. Clear homosexual and sadomasochistic tendencies in the patient were instrumental in shaping frightening hallucinations in individuals who were, for the most part, objects of his emotional and libidinal attitudes. Some of these fancied attacks on the patient had the characteristics of direct homosexual aggression. Kielholz pointed out the connection between the mass character of animal hallucinations and the deep libidinal links binding the drinker to his male drinking friends.27

    The threatening and castrating character of the hallucinations in alcoholic delirium was the object of special study by Bromberg and Schilder. They described the dismembering tendency of these experiences which they found in the foreground of the clinical picture. The persecutors were chiefly other men - soldiers, drinking companions and the like. The choice of these persons was motivated by latent homosexual tendencies.28

    Paranoid elements may already appear in the acute stages of so-called alcoholic hallucinosis. Voices accuse the patient of various misdeeds, among them not infrequently homosexual activities, and threaten him with a punishment which often amounts to symbolic or undisguised rape or castration.

    In further clinical development, both the delirium and the hallucinosis may evolve into a chronic paranoid psychosis. It is generally believed that, in such cases, alcoholism was the manifestation of a latent or otherwise not recognized schizophrenia. It is easy to recognize typical defense mechanisms, used by the ego in its struggle against the breaking through of homosexuality, in the ideas of jealousy. They are a classic feature in many a chronic alcoholic and reach their peak in a paranoid psychosis.

    The struggle against homosexuality may be covered up by the ego in various ways so that, in certain cases, we may see in succession a whole gamut of defense mechanisms. Obsessive-compulsive symptomatology may be followed by paranoid episodes until, finally, aggressive homosexuality may break through under the impact of alcoholic intoxication. In such patients, inebriety assumes the characteristics of so-called pathological intoxication, with outbursts of violent aggression and homosexual acts, or, at least, overt impulses and fantasies.

    In a patient under my observation, these episodes clearly amounted to what may be described as a self-induced psychosis. In his early childhood, he was exposed to an unusual amount of aggression from both parents. His mother, full of hostility and possessed of a violent temper, used to tell the children that their father would kill them if he ever found out about their various transgressions. These included going to church, since the mother was a devout Catholic while the father belonged to a different creed. After absorbing this great dose of aggression, the patient naturally identified masculinity with savage brutality and isolated both from the rest of his ego. Oral identification with the mother and an inverted Oedipal constellation, with emphasis on femininity and passivity, were a natural result of this development. There was a great fear of the father, that is, of his incorporated and isolated aggression. Since the father was described by the mother as likely to become insane with rage and then capable of homicide, the patient had developed an intense fear of his father, of other men and of insanity. His passive and mostly latent homosexuality served the purpose of placating the dangerous father and his substitutes and of neutralizing his own aggressive virility.

[ Homosexuality and Psychosis, by Gustav Bychowski, M.D.*, in Perversions - Psychodynamics and Therapy, edited by Sandor Lorand, M.D. and Michael Balint, M.D., Gramercy Books, New York, 1956, pp. 114-123. ]

[ * Gustav Bychowski, M.D., Member, New York Psychoanalytic Society; American Psychoanalytic Association; International Psychoanalytical Association; Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, New York University College of Medicine; Associate Visiting Neuro-Psychiatrist, Bellevue Hospital ]

The clinical information contained in the above quotations demonstrates unequivocally the core etiological role of bisexual conflict and gender confusion in a multitude of conditions not normally associated with schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, yet which in reality form an integral part of the general symptomatology of this insidious illness.

The unfortunate victims of alcohol and drug addiction are basically self-medicating themselves in order to keep at bay the intense anxiety which is inevitably the product of the hysteric/physiologic conversion into this painful condition of their repressed homosexual excitations. Malignant anxiety is invariably the toxic outcome when the urgent homosexual libido is denied its normal orgasmic genital discharge due to its complete repression by the disapproving super-ego of the individual so afflicted. When these repressed homosexual excitations are blocked from their natural path of orgasmic genital discharge, their powerful affect, or energy charge, converts itself into anxiety and attempts to discharge itself in this abnormal manner in order to rid the organism of the tremendous burden of tension caused by the dammed-up affect of the repressed homosexual cravings. Furthermore, since this anxiety is always experienced by the bodily organism as a painful, toxic condition, the person experiencing it frequently attempts to alleviate it through the narcotizing medium of alcohol and drugs. And since this is always a very short-term solution to a long-term problem, the use of these narcotizing drugs has to be repeated interminably, thereby leading to a fixed state of addiction by the individual. These drugs basically serve as chemical tranquillizers, or sedatives, in the same manner as do the clinical psychotropic drugs, the main difference being that in the case of drug and alcohol addiction, the sufferer becomes his or her own prescribing "physician."

Sigmund Freud once made the profoundly intuitive and significant statement that "Masturbation is the primal addiction." By this he meant that all other addictions stem from this original one and that the cure, then, for the later ones is to return once more to the original one by abreacting (through orgasmic physical release) all the phantasized sexual excitations which the now "addicted" individual had formerly discharged primarily by means of frequent masturbatory activity, but had later repressed as being ego-dystonic due to their "perverse" nature. Since schizophrenia is so closely interwoven within the addictive process, the abreaction by orgasmic release of these long-repressed homosexual phantasies has an enormously beneficial effect upon the individual's overall mental state, and is in fact the only "cure" for functional mental illness. [See especially Quotation 528 in "Schizophrenia - The Bearded Lady Disease", in its own link on this website.]

As for bulimia, anorexia, and obesity, all three conditions are obviously the product of a basic dissatisfaction within the individual regarding his or her natural gender consignment and its consequent bodily representation. Bisexual conflict and gender confusion invariably form the basic etiological core of these conditions, as they likewise do in all other closely-related schizophrenic symptomatology. The schizophrenic girl who hates her female body will destroy its natural feminine curves either through anorexic starvation or bulimic gluttony and obesity, or a varying combination of all three conditions, sometimes ending tragically in total self-destruction, or suicide. The obese, bulimic and/or anorexic male likewise suffers from the same gender-dysphoria as does the similarly afflicted female.

In the final paragraph of Quotation G., stark proof is provided that the genesis of homosexuality per se in any individual case does not have to rely on any reputed "genetic" basis to be operative but can appear solely as the consequence of a warped and unnatural parental upbringing, as has been so vividly illustrated in this particular case by Dr. Bychowski. With parents as mentally unstable (as the direct result of their own bisexual conflicts and gender confusion) as the ones described here, it is a wonder the son did not evolve into a raving, psychopathic maniac rather than just another "harmless" schizophrenic alcoholic bedeviled by his passive homosexual urges. In every case of homosexuality - and, if repressed, its twin, schizophrenia - in both men and women, if one delves deeply enough into the psychological history of the parents, it readily becomes apparent that bisexual conflict and gender confusion, in one or both parents, is the instigating factor in the child's own homosexual development.

In the telling words of Dr. Lewis B. Hill, in his classic book "Psychotherapeutic Intervention in Schizophrenia," (pp. 134-135), he closely examines and explains the structure of this toxic parental configuration:

"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 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 hard-working, self-centered, and detached from the family. We do not know what sort of mothers and fathers these fathers of schizophrenics may have had, but it could be presumed that the fact that they let themselves be married to mothers of schizophrenics implies something concerning their own mothers.

"Loosely, the pattern which emerges is that of two generations of female ancestors who were aggressive, even if in a weak-mannered and tearful way, and two generations of male ancestors who were effeminate, even if the effeminacy was disguised by psychopathic tendencies. It might be expected, or at least we would not be surprised to find, that a child of such ancestry would have difficulties centering around the problems of active aggressiveness and passive submissiveness. If the child is unstable in its balance of activity and passivity, the likelihood is that, under the guidance of the sort of mother who gets herself called 'schizophrenogenic,' the passive behavior will emerge as the overt character of the child, whereas the active behavior will be noted only in the form of negativism, of stubborness, or retentiveness, and so forth."

As a final note, this commentator was once told by two men, long-time homosexual partners, that in their childhood their respective mothers had threatened to cut off their penises if they persisted in "playing with themselves." One mother said she would use sharp scissors, the other a carving knife, and both mothers prominently displayed said weapons as they made their terrifying threats. Here sharp scissors and carving knives definitely trump "genetics" in explaining the development of these mens' homosexuality. And undoubtedly, on closer examination, both sets of these parents would fit perfectly into Dr. Hill's above description of the schizophrenia and/or homosexuality-producing parental configuration.

735

A.

    There is hardly any need to multiply these examples. This and similar observations led me to the conclusion that the latent homosexual constellation is a constant and most significant element of latent schizophrenia. This constellation centers around a primitive maternal identification [in males] which, by virtue of splitting, remains isolated from the rest of the ego field. Various defense mechanisms are put in action in order to build up the counter-cathexis necessary for maintaining the dissociation of the passive, maternal, feminine sector of the ego field. Among these defensive measures of the ego, we may detect narcissistic withdrawal, secondary hostility and bouts of active homosexuality. Owing to the dissociation of the passive segment of the ego field, the rest of the ego is able to develop a deceptively "normal," seemingly realistic and even pseudo-masculine behavior while passivity, masochism and the megalomania of primary narcissism remain confined to the dissociated segment of the ego. This facade may be maintained until the moment when, due to some precipitating event, a breakdown of ego defenses reveals a crack in the total ego structure and results in a manifest psychosis.
    Psychoanalytic observations of schizophrenics subjected to insulin shock therapy provide another opportunity for an understanding of the role of latent homosexuality in the origin of paranoid schizophrenia. In particular, these observations illustrate the important role played by the homosexual disappointment and the homosexual panic. The cathartic discharge provoked by the insulin coma creates a release of repressed libidinal impulses. The ambivalent homosexual attitude becomes split into its two components, with the positive one ideally invested in the transference reaction and thus accessible to analytic interpretations and working through.*
    Psychoanalytic investigations have demonstrated the affinity between homosexuality and the schizophrenic break. In certain complex cases of latent homosexuality, the counter-cathexis built by the ego in order to maintain the dissociation of the psychotic core from the rest of the ego, is so precarious that the psychotic invasion occurs, as it were, spontaneously and periodically. In such cases, the weakness of ego boundaries allows the intermittent release of internalized images which become projected onto various persons. The rapid shifting from passivity to activity and vice versa enables the individual to act out both attitudes, successively as well as simultaneously, and to play varied roles according to multiple identifications. Since his ego remains fixated in the stage of early narcissism, he is compelled to substitute homosexual acts for consistent and successful dealing with reality; in addition to libidinal gratification, the former offers the advantage of being invested heavily with magic omnipotence.

B.

    The kinship between schizophrenia and homosexuality is based on certain characteristics of ego formation. In my study of the ego of homosexuals, I have shown that the ego weakness characteristic of them is related to the ego weakness characteristic of schizophrenics. I came to the following conclusion: "The homosexual does not pursue the union with the woman, since, in its deep core, his ego has never separated from her. For the same reason, his ego has never really abandoned his prenatal narcissism and he has never acquired the feeling of virility. As a final consequence, he has never really been born into the society of men. Like the future paranoid, his ego has acquired a deep split. It has split off its primitive stage, what I have called the primitive superego, which has never come to grasp reality. Neither has it ever been able to accept any frustration. It has dealt with the latter by introjecting the maternal imago and trying to perpetuate possession through identification. It eternally pursues the phantom of its own and the father's masculinity by carrying within it the maternal image. In reality, it is bound to protect its deep narcissism. Its functioning is, in very truth, based on archaic constitution and primitive mental mechanisms,"12 a formulation expressed by Freud as early as his Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex. Exaggerated narcissistic cathexis is a common characteristic of the ego of the homosexual and the ego of schizophrenics. Fluidity of ego boundaries accounts for phenomena which are common to both groups of individuals.

C.

    Elements of homosexuality may be included in the structure of various forms of depression. They are evident in some cases of paranoid depressive reaction in the period of involution. Here the paranoid ideas not infrequently represent a projection of long-repressed homosexual fantasies; the patient either feels directly accused of homosexual acts or threatened by persecutors  who want to assault him, make him into a male (or female, as the case may be) prostitute, etc.
    According to psychoanalytic insight, the characteristic essential mechanism of the melancholic depression lies in introjection. Occasionally, however, projective mechanisms come into action; in that case, paranoid trends may be added to the picture of a so-called pure depression. Prevalence of such symptomatology may be indicative of the importance of schizophrenic elements in the structure of psychosis. To be sure, some germ of paranoid delusion can be observed in almost every depression of long duration. This was recorded by that great expert on melancholia, Robert Burton. "The melancholy are always aggressive. They cannot speak but they must bite. But they are unaware of their own aggression and feel attacked instead. As they that drink wine think all runs around when it is in their own brain."15

[ Homosexuality and Psychosis, by Gustav Bychowski, M.D.*, in Perversions, Psychodynamics and Therapy, Edited by Sandor Lorand, M.D. and Michael Balint, M.D., Gramercy Books, New York, 1956, pp. 105-109. ]

[ * Member, New York Psychoanalytic Society; American Psychoanalytic Association; International Psychoanalytical Association; Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, New York University College of Medicine; Associate Visiting Neuro-Psychiatrist, Bellevue Hospital ]

In the early days of psycho-analytic research, a great deal more attention was paid by investigators into the psychic mechanisms involved in the development of mental illness in men rather than to those involved in the development of mental illness in women. We can see a clear example of this in the above quotation, where Dr. Bychowski is exclusively referring to bisexual conflict and gender confusion as the causative factor in schizophrenia in males. However, all the same psychic mechanisms he describes in this regard as applying to males also apply equally to females. For in both men and women, the key to their mental illness lies in their pathogenic, negative oedipal relationship with the mother.

In men, this "negative Oedipus complex" (Freud), in contrast to the normal, "positive" one, takes the form of the male child identifying closely with the mother in a passive, feminine manner rather than with the father in a forceful, masculine one, thereby making the father (and all men) the object of their libidinal strivings. And the female child, as the result of her own negative oedipal complex, identifies with the father in a masculine, competitive way and takes the mother (and all women) as the desired love object. "Emotional incest with the mother is indeed the very essence of lesbianism." (Charlotte Wolff, M.D., Love Between Women, p. 60) Unless strongly repressed and denied, these negative oedipal attitudes on the part of the both the male and female child would lead directly to an open homosexual orientation and lifestyle. Mental illness is the inevitable outcome, however,  when these skewed, negative oedipal attitudes are repressed and the unfortunate child attempts to live a normal heterosexual life - witness the examples of schizophrenic illness as described by Dr. Bychowski in the above quotation. Basically, homosexuality and schizophrenia are opposite sides of the same coin. Homosexuality repressed is transformed into schizophrenia.

For these reasons, the mother becomes the key to the mental health of all mankind. If the mother is a sexually mature, heterosexual person who can relate lovingly and nurturingly to both her husband and children, all functional mental illness would be eradicated from the earth. And in every case, to the extent she does not possess these "normal" feminine, maternal attributes, mental illness will inevitably rear its ugly head, too often with devastating consequences not only to the individual so afflicted but even to the world at large. The saying that "the hand the rocks the cradle rules the world" is probably the most astute and concise example of psychological insight ever put to words. And with regard to the husband of this "model" mother, she would never allow herself to be married to a man who was not as sexually mature and heterosexual (one and the same thing) as she is, and therefore as good a male role model for his children as the mother is a female role model. With this ideal couple, then, it would be impossible for the malignant factor of bisexual conflict and gender confusion ever to gain a foothold in the psyches of their children, consequently "inoculating" them from the possibility of ever developing schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, or any of its closely-related pathologies.
 
In summary, the more sexually mature and heterosexual - and consequently the more emotionally mature - is the mother, the more mentally healthy will be her children. And the less she is such, the less mentally healthy will they be. This psychological equation qualifies as a fixed law of nature, always operative.

734

A.

Observations on various forms of mental disturbance accompanied by homosexuality, or vice versa, on homosexuals manifesting symptoms of psychosis, have been known to classical, that is, pre-analytic psychiatry.1 Yet it was not until the tool of psychoanalysis could be applied to our investigations that the connection between psychosis and homosexuality could become the subject of more than a purely descriptive study.
     It seems that the first clinical description - suggesting a possible connection between psychosis and sexual inversion - appears is De Prestigiis Daemonum, the magnum opus by Weyer, the hero of what has been called the first psychiatric revolution (1563). "I knew another Sodomite who complained that he always heard passers-by come to cause noise in his ears; even his parents, he said, were doing it; he wrote to me on his own behalf, quite secretly asking me whether I could not give him some advice, since some people had told him that his trouble was in the organ of hearing."2
     With the advent of psychoanalysis and its impact on clinical psychiatry, the concept of psychotic symptoms developing as a defense of the ego against the awareness of homosexuality came into being. However in Bleuler's monograph we find this problem mentioned only briefly on two occasions.
     A brief review of psychoanalytic contributions to the problems of psychosis and homosexuality should start with the classic contributions by Freud. He followed his pioneering study of Schreber's case (1911) by a comparative study of jealousy, paranoia and homosexuality (1912) and the study of a case of paranoia running counter to the psychoanalytic theory of the disease (1915). In the latter he showed that even when the persecutor of a woman patient happened to be a man, he nevertheless was only a substitute for the maternal image.3
     According to them, MacAlpine and Hunter, two British psychoanalysts, think that the change into a woman, which was one of the turning points in the development of Schreber's psychosis, "was not punishment by castration for forbidden homosexual wishes nor was it meant a means of achieving such wishes; rather its purpose was to permit procreation as a woman.
     "Schreber's basic bisexuality had developed into a true manifest ambisexuality, male and female potentials being equally matched. Thus he developed fantasies of self-impregnation while he was acting the part of a woman having intercourse with himself."6
     This penetrating reanalysis of Schreber's material reminds us of elements described in some former detailed clinical observations of schizophrenia, in particular the classic publications of Nunberg.7
     The role of ambisexuality, with its far-reaching consequences in the clinical picture of advanced schizophrenia, has been evident for a long time. From a clinical point of view, one should bear in mind that Schreber not only went through periods of deep paranoid aggression and extensive elaboration but also long periods of catatonia. We know especially, from detailed observations of catatonic attacks and catatonic stupor, that fantasies of self-procreation frequently play an important part.
     It is also generally recognized that confusion about one's own sexual identity is a frequent and important part of schizophrenic symptomatology. It may occur at a relatively early stage of the illness and, at times, may be detected by psychological testing prior to becoming manifest clinically. In my opinion, this symptom reflects a significant change in the patient's ego and may be described as a struggle of the feminine and masculine identification, or, in other words, generally speaking, of the paternal versus the maternal introject.
     Detailed observations of this process can best be gathered during analytic therapy of patients in a stage of incipient or even latent schizophrenia. They are supplemented by whatever data we can gather from the observation of frank psychotics. An additional source of information is provided by the analytic observation of patients subjected to insulin shock therapy.

B.

     Passive homosexual feelings began to dominate the transference situation and were warded off by fleeting ideas of reference and persecution. I shall return to this observation at a later point in the discussion of the structure of latent psychosis. For future reference, I shall call this patient Michael.
     Such changes in the body ego, when further advanced, may result in the sensation of transformation into a female. Incidentally, we observe with much less frequency the delusion of transformation into a male in a woman. It would be incorrect to assume that such changes occur only in advanced clinical stages of frank schizophrenia. We observe them in initial stages in ambulatory or even latent schizophrenics, where we have the opportunity to study their structure and various shadings.

[ Homosexuality and Psychosis, by Gustav Bychowski, M.D.*, in Perversions, Psychodynamics and Therapy, Edited by Sandor Lorand, M.D. and Associate Editor Michael Balint, M.D., Gramercy Books, New York, 1956, pp. 97-8, 100. ]

[ * Member, New York Psychoanalytic Society; American Psychoanalytic Association; International Psychoanalytical Association; Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, New York University College of Medicine; Associate Visiting Neuro-Psychiatrist, Bellevue Hospital ]

The insight that madness is invariably and inextricably interwoven within a framework of bisexual conflict and gender confusion can be traced as far back as 1563, as noted in Quotation A above, with the clinical description by Weyer of the symptoms of a man obviously suffering from paranoid schizophrenia while simultaneously afflicted with a bisexual conflict severe enough to have him labeled by Weyer as a "Sodomite."

But as Bennett Simon, M.D., clearly illustrates in his book, "Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece," Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1978, the role of bisexual conflict and gender confusion, with its inevitable etiological connection to madness, can be traced even further back than Weyer's 1563 example - to ancient Greece, as is documented here in three excerpts from Dr. Simon's book.

1.    Dionysus is the god who induces madness, and in some mythic versions was himself driven mad by Hera in revenge against Zeus. Hera is also said to have caused his effeminacy, which is closely related to the theme of madness.57 - p. 115

2.   ...In the Bacchae[ITALICS] Pentheus starts out at one extreme - he will brook no illusions or convenient fictions. By the end of the play, this insistence on brute reality has turned out to be quite brittle, and he gradually goes mad. The boundary between reality and madness is marked by the scene in which he dresses as a woman, deluding himself that he is not deluded. - p.147

3. There is a hint here, but only a hint, that Orestes has to combat a feminine side of himself. But what is clearly in focus is the sense that Orestes' madness is inevitable.
    In an important sense the conflict is an external one, though he may suffer internally because of it. Orestes is caught up in a conflict he did not create. Aeschylus' portrayal of Orestes is different from Euripides' version, where we find that the external conflict between Apollo and the Furies mirrors the inner conflicts between the male and female parts of his character."
- p. 103-4

Dr. Bychowski gives many theoretical and clinical examples of how this factor of bisexual conflict and gender confusion invariably lies at the very core of all mental illness, up to and including the severest manifestations of catatonic and paranoid schizophrenic symptomatology.

In Quotation B, Dr. Bychowski states that "the delusion of transformation into a male in a woman" is much less frequent than the other way around - a male into a female. One reason for this may be due to the very lenient manner in which society treats "tomboyish" women as opposed to "tomgirlish" men. Male-like attributes in women are often praised and encouraged by society whereas female-like behavior in men has historically always been universally scorned, at least until very recent times. There is definitely a strong double-standard operating here. Girls and women can act and dress like men without much societal disapproval and consequently in most cases they have no great emotional or physical need to "transform" themselves into men. They have already been acting like men to a great extent anyway. This is not so for men, however, as any urge to act out their feminine feelings has been made much more imperative due to their long-time suppression, and therefore men have become incomparably more prone to psychotic acting-out in order to relieve the unremitting pressure of any consciously disavowed opposite-sex emotional, physical and sexual tendencies which they may unconsciously harbor.

Nevertheless, there are still many documented accounts of women experiencing delusions of being transformed into men. One of the most notable cases was reported on by Dr. R. J. Stoller in his book "Splitting (A Case of Female Masculinity)." [reference also quotations 99-105 (inclusive) in the book "Schizophrenia - The Bearded Lady Disease"] 

G: Why worry about this one little thing? It's not hurting anybody. I'm not hurting anybody with it. And it's not hurting me. It's not a delusion. It's inside of me. This is something I've always known, and I've always felt; and it's there, and it's real, and its mine; and you can't take it away from me, and neither can anybody else, so you might as well kiss my ass.
      S: Does this penis ever show up in your daydreams?
      G: How can it show up when it's really there? What are you talking about? You make it sound like it's a dream.
      S: Have you ever had sexual daydreams in which you had a penis like a man?    
      G. No.
      S: What's the matter?
      G: Nothing.
      S: Don't say 'nothing' to me.
      G: You're just bugging me, that's all. I've told you all there is to know.
[Shouting] I have this. I have it and I use it and I love it and I want it and I intend to keep it, and there's nothing you can do about it. Its mine. It makes me what I am."
---"Splitting (A case of female Masculinity)," Robert J. Stoller, M.D., Dell Publishing Co., Inc, New York, 1973, p. 15.

Here we see a woman, Mrs. G., who in her schizophrenic delusion firmly believes she has a male penis, despite Dr. Stoller's best efforts to disabuse her of this insane idea. But she is as firmly convinced of the truth of her delusion as was Freud's Judge Daniel Paul Schreber convinced of his, which was that that he was turning into a woman, with newly formed breasts, for the sole purpose of procreating a new race of humans on the earth, as God had willed him to do. And both Mrs. G's delusion that she had a penis and Dr. Schreber's delusion that he was turning into a woman were clung to so tenaciously and ferociously because they served to defend their respective egos against conscious awareness of their powerful, underlying and repressed homosexual cravings and drives. In their deluded minds, it is almost as if they preferred to be crazy rather than be labeled "queer," or homosexual.

This terrible fear in the individual of facing the reality of powerful homosexual drives is, tragically, the common denominator in all functional mental illness, from - as previously stated - slight neurosis up to and including the most debilitating forms of schizophrenia. The severity of the ensuing mental illness is always determined by the quantitative degree of the bisexual conflict.

The mind-set that "I would rather die than admit it" too often holds sway in mankind's psyche, leading frequently to dreadful consequences both to the individual so afflicted and to his or her surrounding society - witness the schizophrenia-blasted lives of Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Timothy McVeigh, Lee Harvey Oswald and the countless other madmen (and some madwomen) throughout the ages who have inhabited the extremities of the spectrum of mental illness - the "bearded lady" disease.

733

     About this time, my girl, Joan, decided she didn't want to marry me.
We'd had this beautiful affair, and I wanted to marry her, but she decided she wanted to go home to California. So I followed her there. I thought I'd get some construction work, or some movie work, a change of scene. I rented a place in Venice, decided to write my second novel there by the sea, but when I looked out the window, I saw the surf breaking backward - literally, the surf was breaking backward. What really triggered it though, the actual beginning of the psychosis, was when I was talking to my girl on the phone, trying to find out why she'd left me, why she wouldn't marry me. Somehow that had deballed me, and I said, "Well, maybe I'm gay." And then suddenly a voice in my head cut in on the conversation and said, "Your life has ended. You will never write again."
     Now I'm telling you the facts instead of the psychological interpretation. I became impotent. I tried to jerk off and I couldn't come.
I began hearing these voices. I wanted to kill every woman I saw. I had seizures. You know, they were actual seizures. And it's the single most terrifying - It always is sexual, or was sexual. You get a hot feeling in your cock. Your heart almost stops. Your inner voice says, "Uh-oh." And this rage comes, and you want to get a knife. And it's always in the cunt, too, you know. Or slash the breasts off. Or in the eyes. Any orifice. [......]
     But then other things happened. See, everything was happening at once - my girl leaving me, my brother disappearing, my novel coming out. And I can't sleep. I'm having conversations. The inner voices are going like mad. It just gets worse and worse. I begin to see things. Every upright object becomes, not exactly a visual cock, but I imagine sperm coming out of it. I feel like a zombie. I would walk around like this. I stand on street corners, immobilized, for five hours, just standing there.
     Then I ran out of money. So Diane said, "Come and stay with me." And I couldn't say, "Diane, you're taking care of me but I'm also a homicidal maniac right now and I may kill you." So I moved in there, and then I had another seizure, in the bedroom. The voice started again: "You're going to kill." I tore up the whole bed and actually broke the bed slats to stop myself from going down to the kitchen to get a knife.
     In April, my parents called up to say that my brother's body had been found. He'd jumped off a bridge into the Connecticut river - that was Thanksgiving weekend - and the river had finally thawed. [......] So I have to go back. And I'm nuts. But I can't tell anybody because I've got to be the strong son coming home for the funeral. I'm saying to myself, What am I going to do? I'm having these spells. I'm hearing voices. All upright objects are spewing out sperm. But I can't tell anybody. So I go to the funeral....
     I was crying all the time, not just about Peter but about the girl who wouldn't marry me. I cried from April until - every day - reading old letters from her, over and over again, looking at her picture, and, you know, just crying. I'd get up in the morning, cry, go have breakfast, come back and cry. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't even order from a menu. You cannot make a decision. [......]
     Now I'm living at my folk's house on East 85th Street. And I went to visit a girl named Charlotte, and I had another attack. She was lovely. She had written me a lot of letters from New York, saying, "Come back, I love you." And now I'm just about to fuck her, and suddenly it switches around, and I have to say, "Charlotte, I'm about to kill you." And she was very cool. She said, "You're not going to kill me." And I said, "I'm having these terrible attacks." And she said, "Just calm down. Nothing's going to happen." And remember, I was impotent. I couldn't get it up. So nothing happened. I just said, "Hey, thanks." You know. And left. [......] We were there together alone, and I suddenly got the - you know - got the hot flashes, the heavy breathing, and you know, the voice saying, "Kill, kill, kill!" I was in a state of absolute rage, but I didn't know it. I had to excuse myself - "Mom. Mom. Excuse me. I gotta go now. I'll see you." Well, inside - I'm about to kill my mother, you know. And I still couldn't tell anybody about it.
     I was always terrified of shrinks - because, one, shrinks never helped my father, and two, they didn't seem to help my brother, and, three, I said, "If I go to a shrink, maybe he'll claim that I'm a homosexual. [......] Knock on the door. A sixteen-year-old-girl comes to the door. I whisper: "I'm Anthony Tuttle, and I think I'm having a heart attack. Get me to the hospital." We walk shakily over to Doctor's Hospital, and they give me - what is it called? - an electrocardiogram. And I say, "I'm under psychiatric care. This may be a fake. I'm - you know, a very troubled person." I finally see my physical doctor, who's a wonderful guy, and he says, "Tony, you're in big trouble, and I think you should go to a mental hospital." [......]
     But I finally went, to St. Luke's. It was the same day my agent sold my novel to Universal for thirty grand. I'm put on Thorazine immediately. I'm still homicidal in that I have the attacks. I have two guards watching me - aides - but at least I get sedated. Then that night a doctor started talking to me - Mel was his name - and he just said, "What's the problem?" And it was love at first sight, you know. I mean trust. As soon as I began to talk, and began to understand how outraged I was, and hurt, I began to get better. [......] And that fall I met a girl called Monique. My heart was still in California, but I had a wonderful affair with Monique. She nursed me back to sexual health - you know, gave me my cock and balls back, and I am forever thankful to her. She took care of me. But I had a couple of terrible attacks with her. You know - "Knife! Kill!." Once I left that bedroom right back there, and I telephoned Mel, and I said, "Mel, I'm here in bed with Monique, and I'm having an attack." And Mel, who lived right around the corner, said, "Meet me at Carl Schurz Park." So I met him there, and he walked me up and down, you know, saying, "Look, you're going to be okay. Tell Monique to leave the apartment.
     Mel got to me somehow. There was no posing. I just sensed that he really cared. I never lay down on a couch, you know. He gave me five years of what's called supportive therapy. His job was to get me, you know, functioning again. I can still go back to Mel whenever I need to, although I haven't seen him in more than a year now. I still have rages, occasionally feel an echo of an attack, but - I've been going with a very young girl, and she called me up the other day and said, "I can't see you any more." And I said, "Okay." [......] - Five years ago, six years ago, I would have said, "What's wrong with me? Maybe it's because I'm forty and she's eighteen." [......] But there's nothing wrong with me. That sounds arrogant, but I don't feel it, you know. [......] I'm trying to think if I'm dramatizing to you the severity - but the attacks I had, and the despondency, and the sitting here --I tried to hang myself, but I didn't know what to hang myself with. But all I can say is that this was the profoundest experience of my life, and I feel absolutely blessed. Whenever I feel depressed, like when I was driving the taxi, I say, "Man, you've been to hell and back." I feel you have to have the shit kicked out of you to appreciate the blessedness of the clean breath or the lovely kiss.

[ GOING CRAZY, An Inquiry Into Madness In Our Time, by Otto Friedrich, Simon and Schuster / New York, 1975, 1976, pp. 150-155. ]

Anthony Tuttle has been driven insane by the repressed state of his severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion - the "bearded lady" disease. Several times he mentions his deep fear of being labeled "gay" or "homosexual," which fear arises, of course, from the fact that in a deeply repressed and compartmentalized part of his unconscious mind he is a homosexual. And this homosexuality has made him impotent with women, thus inciting in him an enormous rage - also consisting of an equally large component of intense envy for the female role - that he feels for all women, thereby causing him to come perilously close to carrying out his homicidal feelings towards them.

Mr. Tuttle, fortunately, was able to keep just enough of a grip on his fragmented sanity to stop himself from taking that final, irrevocable step leading to murder. He succeeded where hundreds, if not thousands, of other men, and occasionally women, afflicted with the same illness - paranoid schizophrenia - in times past have failed, and often with horrific consequences to many more than just the one intended victim.

In this case it can be observed that every element of mental illness is included in Mr. Tuttle's case of paranoid schizophrenia, triggered as it invariably is by the patient's severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion. Visual hallucinations were first represented by his observing that " - literally, the surf was breaking backward." His first audio hallucinations began with the sudden voice in his head which told him, "Your life has ended. You will never write again." Notably, this voice came to him just after he had told himself, as the result of his failed romance with his girlfriend, that "Well, maybe I'm gay."

Following these early schizophrenic hallucinations, others began to come fast and furiously as his psychological breakdown became more intense. "And I can't sleep. I'm having conversations. The inner voices are going like mad. It just gets worse and worse." Then a return to his visual hallucinations: "I begin to see things. Every upright object becomes, not exactly a visual cock, but I imagine sperm coming out of it." This particular visual hallucination has a very strong element of homosexuality in it. That is, every object he sees reminds him of an erect penis in a state of orgasm.

Next he experiences catatonic symptomatology: "I feel like a zombie. I stand on street corners, immobilized, for five hours, just standing there." Then comes a very vivid description of what debilitating clinical depression feels like: "I was crying all the time, not just about Peter [his suicided brother] but about the girl who wouldn't marry me. I cried from April until - every day - reading old letters from her, over and over again, looking at her picture, and, you now, just crying. I'd get up in the morning, cry, go have breakfast, come back and cry. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't even order from a menu. You cannot make a decision." And then his confession that: "I'm trying to think if I'm dramatizing to you the severity - but the attacks I had, and the despondency, and the sitting here --I tried to hang myself, but didn't know what to hang myself with."

What we see scattered throughout Mr. Tuttle's description of his schizophrenic breakdown are subtle hints of its cause - the repressed homosexuality which even he, unknowingly, in several places noted previously, alludes to as perhaps being the instigating factor in his insanity. And he is very definite about the fact his mental breakdown is based somehow on sexuality. "And it's the single most terrifying - It always is sexual, or was sexual."

He also makes two "Freudian slips" in his account of his madness which point directly to his repressed bisexual conflict and gender confusion. First, he refers to the "hot flashes" he experiences in describing the feeling that overcomes him preceeding his terrifying, impotence-fueled rages. "Hot flashes", of course, describe a quintessential female phenomenon. Secondly, when reporting his reaction to his initial meeting with his future therapist, Mel, in the hospital, he says: "And it was love at first sight, you know." Then he quickly changes this to: "I mean trust." Perhaps he had a moment of insight here about his true feelings for Mel and needed to cover them up, even to himself, changing "love" to "trust."

His following five years of "supportive therapy" with Mel were obviously of great benefit to Mr. Tuttle. Hopefully a full review of his repressed bisexual conflict and gender confusion formed a large part of the work that took place during this "supportive therapy". The only note of alarm in this respect is the fact that even after these five years of psychotherapy, "I still have rages, occasionally feel and echo of an attack..." If true, this means that Mr. Tuttle was never able to face the full import of his repressed homosexuality and that consequently he would always remain in peril of another schizophrenic relapse.

732

A.

    Cultural expectations for men and women with schizophrenia may differ, and it has been reported that men with schizophrenia may be less able to carry out normal gender role activities than their female counterparts (4). A limited body of literature on gender identity and schizophrenia suggests that men and women with schizophrenia may experience disturbed sex role identification (5). Perhaps in relation to deep and pervasive stigmatization of mental illness, men and women with schizophrenia often appear "genderless" insofar as mental illness itself is perceived to eclipse other factors in identity.  
    In the study reported here we evaluated gender identity among men and women with schizophrenia by characterizing level of self-identification with traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine role concepts. We hypothesized that gender identity among persons with schizophrenia is likely to differ from normative gendered orientations among men and women. Specifically, we hypothesized that men with schizophrenia would have less identification with characteristics associated with male gender than would men who did not have schizophrenia.

[ Gender Identity and Implications For Recovery Among Men and Women With Schizophrenia - Martha Sajatovic, M.D., Janis H. Jenkins, Ph.D., Milton E. Strauss, Ph.D., Zeeshan A. Butt, M.A., Elizabeth Carpenter, M.A., PSYCHIATRIC SERVICES, January 2005, Vol. 56, No. 1, p. 96. ]

B.

    Thus we meet the problem of bisexuality. Of course, this problem is also present in the common neurosis. Yet in the neurosis the problem of bisexuality is dealt with on an oedipal level and does not endanger the ties with reality.
    In schizophrenia, on the other hand, attempts to solve the bisexual problem and still remain in contact with reality fail. Therefore, in its deepest nature, schizophrenia arises from a bisexual conflict, and this bisexual conflict eventually leads to a state where the heterosexual factor is relinquished. 

[ The Importance of the Non-Psychotic Part of the Personality in Schizophrenia, Maurits Katan, M.D., International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, No. 35, 1954, p. 121. ]

C.

    Indeed, these sex-linked differences in schizophrenics would seem to be an unstated but not unfamiliar psychiatric observation. In discussing this finding with psychiatrists who have handled male and female wards we find an immediate recognition in typical comments that female wards are always nosier and more disturbed, require more attendants, etc. This would appear to be one of those glaring facts which must have a clear, cold eye, such as interaction categories, cast upon them before they can be truly seen. [......]
    It is of considerable interest to speculate as to the significance of these findings for our understanding of the nature and etiology of schizophrenia. Does schizophrenia make females more active and males more passive? This would fit the notion of Letailleur and his associates (1958) of the reversal of sex roles as a function of the disease process. However, probably this is not the case as our developmental data suggest that the females have been more active and the males more passive from early childhood.

[ A Serendipitous Finding: Sex Roles and Schizophrenia, Frances E. Cheek, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 69, No. 4, pp. 398-99. ]

D.

    Sex-typed reactions are contrasted in male and female normals and chronic schizophrenics. In general, the schizophrenic shows sex-role alienation on tests which contain a self-image reference (a Role Playing Test, a Body Parts Acceptance Test, and a Figure Preference Test.) Female schizophrenics tend to react in a more assertive manner like normal males, and male schizophrenics like normal females. In a direct test of assertive vs. yielding story sequences on the TAT, the sex-difference reversal is significant only if housewives are used as normal female controls. The inclination of female schizophrenics toward assertive story sequences is matched by a similar inclination in career women, suggesting this role reversal is not as critical to the schizophrenic condition as the self-image disturbance. In conscious sex-typed interests and attitudes, schizophrenics do not differ from normals. A theory is proposed relating schizophrenia to sex-identity alienation in the early years of life.

[ Sex-Role Alienation in Schizophrenia, David C. McClelland and Norman F. Watt, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol. 73, No. 3, 1968, p. 226. ]
  
    Kagan and Moss (1962) report findings that suggest the etiology of this shift. They found that male children (age 0 - 3) to whom mothers were hostile tended to grow up to be withdrawn, non-achievement-oriented, and socially anxious (showing the schizoid, non-assertive type of adjustment in males.) In contrast, female children to whom mothers were hostile tended to grow up into active, competitive, assertive women (showing an atypical pattern with some components of a schizoid type of adjustment in females.) It is conceivable that maternal hostility created sex-identity problems in the children which were solved by opting in part for the opposite sex approach to life. (Ibid, p. 227)
  
    Table 4 reports some very different results. Both male and female schizophrenics say more often than normals that they would choose to play opposite-sex roles. Nearly half of the schizophrenics made three of more opposite-sex choices whereas only 10% of the normals made as many. (Ibid, p. 232)
  
    Among the males, cross-sex choices arise particularly with respect to the alternatives: "secretary vs. policeman" and "cow vs. bull." In both cases the male schizophrenics chose the female roles ("secretary" 7/20 times and "cow" 8/20 times) significantly more often than the normals (0/20 and 1/19 times, respectively). This fits the general hypothesis that male schizophrenics are avoiding assertive male identities. (Ibid, p. 233)  

In Quotation A. above, the statement is made that "....men and women with schizophrenia often appear "genderless" insofar as mental illness itself is perceived to eclipse other factors in identity." This is a very keen observation, the accuracy of which is best reinforced by examining the  seminal theoretical construct briefly outlined by Dr. Maurits Katan in Quotation B. "Therefore, in its deepest nature, schizophrenia arises from a bisexual conflict, and this bisexual conflict eventually leads to a state where the heterosexual factor is relinquished." Thus if the heterosexual factor has been "relinquished", and the homosexual factor has been repressed, that leaves the schizophrenic person with no discernible "factor" at all - and therefore basically "genderless."

The sum of all the information contained in Quotations A, B, C, and D point inexorably to the unshakable truth of the assertion that bisexual conflict and gender confusion lie at the very core of all functional mental illness, from slight neurosis up to and including the most severe forms of schizophrenia, and that the severity of the mental illness ensuing from this conflict is always determined by the degree of the conflict itself.

Furthermore, the vital role of the mother in ensuring the mental well-being of her child is highlighted once again by the researchers Kagan and Moss in Quotation D, where they show that maternal hostility in the very early years of life can have a profoundly deleterious effect upon that unfortunate child by engendering in it a state of incipient bisexual conflict and gender confusion, leading inevitably to a future for the child which will be marked by a continuous struggle with mental illness. Accordingly, Once more the label which has frequently been assigned by various researchers to this type of toxic, maternally-hostile mother bears repeating here - the "schizophrenogenic" mother.

[Note: For those readers wishing further information on the subjects covered in Quotations A, B, C and D above, please refer to Quotation 250, Quotations 267 through 280, and Quotations 498 through 504, in the book "Schizophrenia - The Bearded Lady Disease," to be found in its link on this website, or else ordered from a bookseller.]

731

A.

In this section I shall sketch something of the knot one young man of twenty-three was in when I first saw him. I present this as a paradigm of the internalization of a multi-generational family situation, such as I have seen in a number of people, and still leads to a diagnosis of schizophrenia. I shall simplify enormously.

        He experiences himself as follows:

     Right side: masculine
     Left side: feminine
     Left side younger than right side.
     The two sides do not meet.
     Both sides are rotten, and he is rotting away with them to an early
     death.
     His mother's father (MF) died shortly after Paul was born.

From psychoanalysis and other information:

     His mother and father separated when he was five.
     His mother told him he 'took after' his father.
     His father told him he 'took after' his mother.
     His mother said his father was not a real man.
     His father said his mother was not a real woman.
     To Paul, they were both right.
     Consequently, on the one hand (or, as he would say, on the right
     side), he was a female male homosexual, and on the other hand (his
     left side), he was a male lesbian.
     His mother's father (MF) died shortly after Paul was born.
     Paul's mother said he took after her father.
     But the issue of real or not-real had been reverberating in this
     family for several generations.
     His mother's mother (MM) did not regard her husband (MF) as a real      man.
     Nor did his mother's father (MF) regard his wife (MM) as a real
     woman.

[ The Politics of the Family, and Other Essays, by R.D. Laing, M.D., Pantheon Books, 1969, 1971, pp. 563-564. ]

B.

     To return to Paul. His mother thought she could be a better husband and father than his father. And his father thought he could be a better wife and mother than his mother.
     In his view of his mother's view of her father, and his mother's view of her mother's view of her husband; and his father's view of his mother, and his father's view of his father's view of his wife, THERE HAD NEVER BEEN A REAL MAN OR WOMAN IN THE FAMILY FOR FOUR GENERATIONS. [Caps added for emphasis]

[ (Ibid. p. 56) ]

C.

     His body was a sort of mausoleum, a haunted graveyard in which the ghosts of several generations still walked, while their physical remains rotted away. This family had buried their dead in each other. The foregoing is a very simplified sketch of a complex process of the increasingly tortured and tortuous sexual confusion that had developed within the family structure, which we cannot go into here.
     This young man was tied in a knot; it had taken at least four, perhaps five or more, generations to tie it.

[ (Ibid. p. 57) ]

It is glaringly obvious from Dr. Laing's above account that Paul's schizophrenia, as is invariably the case in every instance of this illness, springs directly from a pathological condition of massive bisexual conflict and gender confusion, present not only in Paul himself, but in all the immediate members of his family, stretching back, in R.D. Laing's words, "four, perhaps five or more, generations..."

This situation is best summed up by the starkly honest proclamation by the father of another schizophrenic patient, gender not specified, who simply stated: "When I married I was only half a man and could only marry half a woman." (Schizophrenia and the Family, Lidz, Fleck & Cornelison) The fact that the gender of this particular schizophrenic patient was not specified in this account is immaterial, since the parents of all schizophrenics, both male and female, are invariably afflicted with the same marked bisexual conflict and gender confusion as that which has been so insightfully delineated by the above-quoted father, and further by Dr. Laing. Thus in one incisive and memorable sentence this father has described the basic reason children grow up to develop not only schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, but any other closely-related functional mental illness as well.

Because this core pathogenic element of familial bisexual conflict and gender confusion can stretch back as far as four or five generations, as noted by Dr. Laing in quotation C. above, many investigators are falsely led to believe that schizophrenia is genetically-based. This is also the average layperson's understanding of the disease. Of course in the above "gender-confusion" sense, schizophrenia is of "genetic" origin in that it can always be traced back to previous "tainted" generations of sexually confused families.

Finally, this nature-dystonic state of familial bisexual conflict and gender confusion eventually reaches a generational dead-end, due to the fact that many people suffering from schizophrenia never marry, or if they do marry, do not have children. Thus nature provides its own finish to an unproductive and pathological offshoot of mankind.