Women Driven Mad

Foreword

Gönül Bakay

Why did I want to write a book on “women and madness”? The first thing that comes to mind is that I am a woman who has always been interested in and tried to understand the lives, contributions, desires and ideals of women, their relationships with their partners, children and friends. All of my research and the books I have written to date, except one, were about women. I have always admired the silent and unlimited power of my fellow women and wanted to get to know them better… I have also always been very much moved by their remarkable productivity, their ability to create life, their unshakable resilience in the face of all odds, and their bold and protective stance when their loved ones are in danger.

Women have been crushed, insulted and pushed around for centuries. How can mankind boast of being the most advanced being on earth and still ignore the other half that produces, gives birth and nurtures? We cannot understand the dynamics behind this unfairness without adequate research. Is it because women were not sufficiently understood, or because of the fear evoked by their power that they have been associated with supernatural forces throughout history, and occasionally been dismissed as “mad”? Have we human beings been quick to judge those who act against the norms to be “mad”? In order to get to the bottom of this problem, we have to carefully consider the social, psychological, physiological and economic dynamics that play an important role in this context.

Fortunately, we are witnessing a change in this situation that has been going on for centuries. Today, most people do not feel obliged to hide their mental illness and they can easily consult a psychologist when they have psychological problems. Mental disorders, including the more severe psychiatric disorders, are seen as other illnesses such as the flu or abdominal pain, for which one could easily consult a doctor. This is a big step, because healing is possible only when the person admits that he or she is ill. However, it is still possible to observe that some people respond with a resounding “Am I mad?” when they are advised to seek help. Although the number of people who have this perspective has been dwindling, estimates published by the World Health Organization indicate that the rate of mental illness in especially women has been on the rise.

The first part of the book takes the reader on a short journey through the history of humanity’s adventure with madness. It traces different perceptions of ←9 | 10→madness in the Western world as well as in Arab, Turkish and Ottoman cultures. After considering the changing approaches to madness with the transformation of psychiatry into a discipline in the 18th and 19th centuries, this chapter concludes with a discussion of the present state of affairs. Under the second heading of this chapter, there is a tour of the horizon that provides insights into the painful lives of women who have struggled with various forms of madness throughout history. Written by my friend Handan Dedehayır, who has managed the publishing and translation activities of various institutions for many years following her degree in psychology, this chapter offers a background to examples of madwomen in English and American literature that constitute the backbone of the present study. We would also like to offer our thanks to Özlem Bayoğlu, a lecturer at the Department of Philosophy at Galatasaray University, for reviewing this chapter’s section on ancient Greek philosophy.

Introduction: The Image of the “Madwoman” as a Discourse of Power

Fatmagül Berktay

The image of the madwoman has been considered a mysterious and a fascinating phenomenon in literature and art from the time of ancient Mesopotamia and Antiquity to our present day. Madness has been widely seen as a generic women’s disease, metaphorically and symbolically, and this prejudice unfortunately persists in some cases even in the 21st century. This tendency, which is reflected in works of art and literature, justifies and disseminates the assumption that (due to their bodies) women are closer to nature, destructive, emotionally weak, unstable and dangerous, and therefore need to be controlled and if necessary, socially isolated. It is not possible to think of concepts such as mental health, mental illness, madness and normality independent of cultural norms and values. The most influential of these norms is gender roles that determine how masculine and feminine roles are to be enacted.

The connection of women with nature, chaos and destructive forces of the universe goes far back in history. This association, which appears to have remained unchanged throughout the centuries, is used to justify the social control of women and the female body. Thucydides writes that the self-image of the Athenian man was built around the need to control allotrion, which means ‘strange’, ‘wild’, and that allotrion often represents the ‘other’ against ‘me’ (Padel, 1983, p. 5). This “strange other” had to be controlled with the use of practical and ideological tools such as rape. It is no coincidence that Greek mythology is full of male gods that force women into sexual intercourse; this “divine rape” can be interpreted as the projection of the phenomenon of male control in society, and eventually of “divine society” through the act and practice of rape. The association of women with nature, especially with the dark side of nature, is not unique to Ancient Greece but has existed since the beginning of civilization. In ancient Mesopotamia, known as the cradle of civilization, female witches were constructed as the antithesis of the Mesopotamian’s ideal of civilization. They ←11 | 12→were therefore associated with the steppes, mountains and the underworld, all of which were outside the social control of the “civilized” Mesopotamians (Rollin, 1983, p. 37).

The connection of woman with nature goes back to the “Mother Goddess” who ruled over humanity for a very long time. She was fertile, nurturing and protective on the one hand, fear-giving on the other. She was Kybele, the goddess of fertility and the ruler of the wild, who was also in charge of life and death. She represented the totality of life as well the bonds people had with each other and with nature. There was a reversal of fortunes with the development of the idea and the imposition of masculine sovereignty over nature. Civilization was gradually associated with the concepts of masculine order and the masculine mind while women came to be identified with nature and its destructive forces.2

For example, “Most Greek demons, especially those which hunt human victims in groups (like Erinyes, ‘Furies’) and those which persecute the mind (again the Erinyes, or single demons such as Lyssa, ‘Madness’) are female. They are also chthonic (born from chthon, ‘earth’) and sometimes described as ‘daughters of the Night’. Their femaleness is linked with their earth-born status, their attack on the mind and their habitation in darkness” (Padel, 1983, pp. 3–4). The privileged elite of the ancient Greek and Roman societies considered women, slaves and barbarians as “Others”. For the Roman nobleman who looked upon the world from an unquestioned position of sovereignty, these “others” were invariably different from and inferior to him. “The most obtrusive polarity of all, the one between himself and women, was explained to him in terms of a hierarchy based upon nature itself. According to physicians and healers, biologically, males were fetuses which have realized their full potential” (Brown, 1988, pp. 9–10).³ As Aristoteles put it, women were left incomplete.

The biological model of madness was replaced with a psychological framework in the 20th century, largely under the influence of Sigmund Freud. The shift in gender roles and social power relations had also changed the traditional psychiatric discourse by the mid-20th century. However, the double standards in ←13 | 14→psychiatry - still largely dominated by men - were changing very slowly, as did the double standards of morality and gender roles. The observations made by Phyllis Chesler on this subject in her ground-breaking book Women and Madness (1997) remain relevant. 4 Men define the norms of female behavior which differ from the norms of male behavior. Whether a woman is “healthy”, “neurotic” or “psychotic” is determined by the masculine ethics of mental health, which in turn is grounded in the implicit or explicit assumptions of patriarchal society. In a patriarchal society that devalues women and conditions them to see themselves as worthless, male dominated professions of psychology, psychiatry, and their definitions of mental illness and treatment methods are inevitably patriarchal and norms of female behavior are different from those of men. Accordingly, a ‘normal’ woman is a housewife who does not work outside the home. A woman who rejects gender norms or shows ambivalent behavior regarding this issue is considered a menace to herself as well as to society. Self-destructive and suicidal tendencies caused by the fear of ostracism are tied to patriarchal pressure. When a woman lacks self-worth and is unable to express her resentment, her anger is directed inwards.

Women cannot evade patriarchal norms even when they receive psychiatric help since most psychiatrists are men and hospitals are patriarchal structures. Michel Foucault (1988) refers to the doctor’s authority as the “father-judge” in his famous study, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (p. 272). However, Foucault overlooks the symbolic authority of the patriarch (“phallus”) which infantilizes women who seek psychiatric help. Psychiatrists perpetuate the image of the so-called “healthy woman”, i.e. a woman who conforms to social norms, by designating women who seek help as ‘mentally ill’, while considering those who tend to comply with the expectations of the society as ‘healing mental patients’. A woman who feels an (often deeply buried) rage towards her own dependent and repressed role and who is unable to make sense of her situation, starts to doubt herself, unaware of the fact that it is this same ‘help’ which actually has brought her to the point of asking for help. Patriarchal oppression leads women to face conflict with society as well as within themselves. The limitations and norm-reinforcing nature of psychiatry become apparent in the way it addresses this very problem.