Vol. 2 No. 23 · 4 December 1980
pages 6-9 | 2640 words
Seeing things
Rosemary Dinnage
- The Story of Ruth by Morton Schatzman
Duckworth, 306 pp, £6.95, September 1980, ISBN 0 7156 1504 1
The jacket of The Story of Ruth is adorned with praise from the famous: Edna O’Brien, among others, found it ‘disturbing and quite fascinating’, and Doris Lessing ‘a valuable book, an original’. It is a pity it comes in the kind of packaging that will repel the averagely fastidious reader. Duckworth have printed it in type about one size smaller than that of a Janet and John reader, and sub-titled it ‘one woman’s haunting psychiatric odyssey’. Morton Schatzman, who is the author of an interesting book on the 19th-century lunatic Daniel Schreber, has written it in fruitiest Reader’s Digestese, replete with remarks I doubt were ever remarked and dreams I doubt were ever dreamed. Nevertheless, if the style can be stomached, there is plenty of interest in this case-history.
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Letters
Vol. 2 No. 24 · 18 December 1980
From Morton Schatzman
SIR: I am writing in reply to your review by Rosemary Dinnage of my book The Story of Ruth (LRB, Vol. 2, No 23). I have read other reviews by Ms Dinnage and regard highly her opinions and learning. Therefore I am particularly stung by some remarks in this review of hers. She dislikes the style in which the book is written, but this is not what bothers me. I wrote it in the awareness that its style was unusual for a psychiatric case-history, but I had a reason for choosing that style, which I still think is valid. I wanted the book to be accessible to a wide audience, hoping that people who had had experiences similar to Ruth’s would read the book and find it reassuring, and might then present themselves to doctors for therapy or to scientists for research. A reader’s response to an author’s style depends upon the reader’s taste, and other people whom I respect like the style of the book: Dr Anthony Clare in New Society said it was ‘skilfully written and immensely readable’, and Dr Charles Rycroft in the Times Literary Supplement called it ‘compulsive reading’.
What does bother me is that Ms Dinnage questions whether some of the dialogue and dreams that I relate actually happened in just that way. The answer is that indeed they did. Before publication, I gave the professional people who had participated in the story those parts of the manuscript that dealt with their participation. Everyone felt satisfied that what I reported conveyed accurately what they remembered had happened. Ruth read the whole manuscript and expressed satisfaction with its accuracy too. Ms Dinnage doubts that some of Ruth’s dreams were ever dreamed. Most of the dreams I report were written down by Ruth upon her waking up from sleep, and in the book I present them in those very words of hers. Here and there I inserted additional remarks she made in conversation with me about the dreams. I still have Ruth’s written dream accounts, and anyone, including Ms Dinnage, who wishes to see those accounts and compare them with what is in the book is welcome to do so. Possibly Ms Dinnage is simply unaccustomed to someone expressing herself in Ruth’s raw unsophisticated manner.
Support of a different sort for the authenticity of the story comes from Dr Theodore X. Barber, an American psychologist and one of the world’s leading researchers into hypnosis. Barber is engaged in a long-term study of excellent hypnotic subjects whom he has discovered through large-scale screening procedures. After reading The Story of Ruth, he wrote to me: ‘Our data corroborate your data with Ruth and seem to show that about 4 percent of the (female) population may have many of the characteristics that Ruth has.’ A recent paper of his, published with Sheryl C. Wilson, documents that allegation in detail: ‘Vivid Fantasy and Hallucinatory Abilities in the Life Histories of Excellent Hypnotic Subjects (“Somnambules”): Preliminary Report with Female Subjects’.
Morton Schatzman
London NW5
