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On Gertrude Beasley

Elisabeth Ladenson, 21 October 2021

... the womb only to be tormented in a family whose members I despised or pitied, and brought into association with people whom I should never have chosen. Sometimes I wish that, as I lay in the womb, a pink soft embryo, I had somehow thought, breathed or moved and wrought destruction to the woman who bore me, and her eight miserable children who preceded ...

Rhythm Method

Jenny Diski, 22 September 1994

R.D. Laing: A Biography 
by Adrian Laing.
Peter Owen, 248 pp., £25, August 1994, 0 7206 0934 8
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... the time it came as something of a revelation, not least because there was an audience beyond the psychiatric community primed by the Zeitgeist of the late Fifties and early Sixties to fall on their ideas and make much – too much, perhaps – of them. I was a member of that wider audience. When Volume One of Sanity, Madness and the Family by R.D. Laing and ...
Western Political Thought in the Face of the Future 
by John Dunn.
Cambridge, 120 pp., £8.50
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... real-life experiment. Experimental subjects were, for example, coached to exhibit the symptoms of psychiatric disorders and then presented themselves for admission to mental hospitals: could the psychiatrists tell which were the fake patients and which were the real ones? Some school-teachers were falsely informed that certain of their new pupils had high IQ ...

In the Egosphere

Adam Mars-Jones: The Plot against Roth, 23 January 2014

Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books 
by Claudia Roth Pierpont.
Cape, 353 pp., £25, January 2014, 978 0 224 09903 5
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... Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin in his corner – ‘four tigers’, as he describes them, of American Jewish literature – it might have been possible to ignore the fringe of pious malcontents, but appeasement has never gained ground in Roth’s personal style. In her introduction Pierpont says she has known Roth ‘in sickness and in ...

Life Pushed Aside

Clair Wills: The Last Asylums, 18 November 2021

... a movement that insists on the value of art made by self-taught artists, including patients in psychiatric hospitals. I visited the exhibition by accident, wandering in during a weekend in Paris, and found pictures of tree roots made up of twisted and tortured bodies; of Adam and Eve stripped of their skin, so that they looked like illustrations in a ...

Diary

Elaine Showalter: My Year of Living Dangerously, 2 April 1998

... warning of how great a disappointment I would be to my British friends. UK newspaper reports of American reactions to my book Hystories, published in March last year, had mentioned threats of assassination, and had described me as requiring constant protection. In the book, I argue that several contemporary phenomena – chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War ...

Diary

Sarah Rigby: ME, 20 August 1998

... but if doctors don’t all agree about what ME is, many more now accept that it does exist. The ME Association estimates that between 10 and 20 per cent of GPs are still sceptical; it emphasises that getting an informed doctor very much depends on where you happen to live. Bristol is a good place; Lincoln is not. Older doctors, it is thought, are much more ...

Pissing in the Snow

Steven Rose: Dissidents and Scientists, 18 July 2019

Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science 
by Audra J. Wolfe.
Johns Hopkins, 302 pp., £22, January 2019, 978 1 4214 2673 0
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... two camps thesis for Russian science. Wolfe shows that it was endorsed by the US too. According to American propaganda, just as Nazi Germany’s ‘Aryan science’ had failed to produce an atomic bomb, so the Soviet state’s official endorsement of Lysenko’s fraudulent claims demonstrated that science could flourish only if pursued freely and without ...

Flight of Snakes

Tessa Hadley: Emily Holmes Coleman, 7 September 2023

The Shutter of Snow 
by Emily Holmes Coleman.
Faber, 171 pp., £9.99, February, 978 0 571 37520 2
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... she hit the editor over the head with a lexicon.She took to the giddy Parisian world of expat American and British writers like a duck to water, and made friends with everyone from Emma Goldman (she worked for a while as Goldman’s secretary) to Peggy Guggenheim – as well as Edwin and Willa Muir, Ford Madox Ford and Ernest Hemingway. She crops up in ...

Steaming like a Pie

Theo Tait: ‘Going Postal’, 4 December 2003

Mailman 
by J. Robert Lennon.
Granta, 483 pp., £15.99, October 2003, 1 86207 625 1
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... dead and wounding six others before killing himself. Nearly twenty similar incidents occurred at American post offices during the 1980s and 1990s, though on a smaller scale. As a result ‘going postal’ came to be used as a synonym for a berserk outburst of violence. Charles Bukowski’s butch, squalid autobiographical novel Post Office (1971) gives some ...

Making Up People

Ian Hacking: Clinical classifications, 17 August 2006

... this first instance, there was the multiple movement, a loose alliance of patients, therapists and psychiatric theorists, on the one hand, who believed in this diagnosis and in a certain kind of person, the multiple. There was the larger psychiatric establishment that rejected the diagnosis altogether: a doctor in ...

The Intrusive Apostrophe

Fintan O’Toole, 23 June 1994

Sean O’Faolain: A Life 
by Maurice Harmon.
Constable, 326 pp., £16.95, May 1994, 0 09 470140 7
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Vive Moi! An Autobiography 
by Sean O’Faolain.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 377 pp., £20, November 1993, 1 85619 376 4
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... Irish intelligentsia, led to the foundation by him of WAAMA, the Writers Artists Actors Musicians Association, a short-lived trade union for workers whose services were not exactly regarded as essential. WAAMA inspired the Times columnist Myles naGopaleen (the novelist Flann O’Brien) to an extended fantasy that raised the dilemma of the artist in ...

Naughty Children

Christopher Turner: Freud’s Free Clinics, 6 October 2005

Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice 1918-38 
by Elizabeth Ann Danto.
Columbia, 348 pp., £19.50, May 2005, 0 231 13180 1
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... in Berlin in 1920 by two members of his inner circle: Max Eitingon, who had directed the psychiatric divisions of several Hungarian military hospitals during the war, and Ernst Simmel, who had been director of a Prussian hospital for shell-shocked soldiers. Almost all the 42 analysts who attended the 1918 Budapest conference appeared in military ...

Dennis Nilsen, or the Pot of Basil

John Ryle, 21 February 1985

Killing for Company: The Case of Dennis Nilsen 
by Brian Masters.
Cape, 352 pp., £9.95, February 1985, 0 224 02184 2
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Queens 
by Pickles.
Quartet, 289 pp., £8.95, October 1984, 0 7043 2439 3
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Ritualised Homosexuality in Melanesia 
edited by Gilbert Herdt.
California, 409 pp., £19.95, October 1984, 0 520 05037 1
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... and sensitivity; he also considers and gently dismisses the lamentably vague and contradictory psychiatric evidence given at Nilsen’s trial. Do we really need psychiatrists to tell lawyers whether or not a man like Nilsen suffers from ‘diminished responsibility’? Or whether he has a ‘personality disorder’ (more specifically, in the words of one ...

Popping

D.A.N. Jones, 2 June 1983

... recognised the apparent need for a non-Commercial element in society and she set up the Queen’s Association of Non-Commercial Officers, to deal with clergymen, heads of the broadcasting authorities, judges, magistrates, members of parliament, sports referees and various other oddments which seemed to demand an independence that no Commercial organisation ...

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