Phyllis Chesler - Women and Madness

ALSO BY PHYLLIS CHESLER

Letters to a Young Feminist

Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody

A Politically Incorrect Feminist

With Child: A Diary of Motherhood

Womans Inhumanity to Woman

Copyright 2005 by Phyllis Chesler

Published by arrangement with the author

All rights reserved

This edition published in 2018 by Lawrence Hill Books

An imprint of Chicago Review Press Incorporated

814 North Franklin Street

Chicago, Illinois 60610

ISBN 978-1-64160-036-1

Cover design: Lindsey Cleworth Schauer

Interior design: planettheo.com

Printed in the United States of America

has appeared in different form in:

Women and Psychotherapy, The Radical Therapist, September 1970.

Patient and Patriarch: Women in the Psychotherapeutic Relationship, Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness, edited by Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran, New York: Basic Books, 1971.

Stimulus/Response: Men Drive Women Crazy, Psychology Today, July 1971.

Women as Psychotherapeutic Patients, Womens Studies, Summer 1972.

Grateful acknowledgments are made to the following for permission to include copyrighted selections:

Excerpts from Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female by Frances Beale from The Black Woman: An Anthology edited by Toni Cade. Published by the New American Library, reprinted by permission of the author.

Excerpts from Mothers and Amazons by Helen Diner. Copyright 1965 by Helen Diner. Reprinted by permission of Julian Press.

Excerpts from Margaret Fuller: American Romantic edited by Perry Miller. Copyright 1963 by Perry Miller. Used by permission of Cornell University Press.

Excerpts from Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman published in 1917. Reprinted in 1970 by Dover Publications, Inc.

Excerpts from Black Rage by William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs, New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1968.

Excerpts from On Sexism and Racism by Nancy Henley, resource paper published as part of the Report of the Subcommittee on Women of the Committee on Equal Opportunity in Psychology of the American Psychological Association, February 1971.

Excerpts from Notes from the Third Year by Anne Koedt. Copyright 1971 by Anne Koedt. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Excerpts from The Politics of Experience by R. D. Laing. Copyright 1967 by R. D. Laing. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books, Ltd.

Excerpts from an article by Toni Morrison from the New York Times Magazine, 8/22/70. Copyright 1970 by the New York Times. Reprinted by permission.

Excerpts from Newlywed Swings In from the New York Post, February 19, 1970.

Copyright 1970 by New York Post Corporation. Reprinted by permission of the New York Post.

Medusa copyright 1965 by Ted Hughes and Lady Lazareth copyright 1963 by Ted Hughes from the book Ariel by Sylvia Plath. Excerpts from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath copyright 1971 by Harper & Row, Inc., published by Faber & Faber, copyright 1966 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Inc., and Olwyn Hughes.

Excerpts from Wilheim Reich: A Personal Biography by Use O. Reich. Reprinted by permission of St. Martins Press, Inc., Macmillan & Co., Ltd.

Portion of Snapshots of a Daughter-in-law, from Snapshots of a Daughter-law: Poems 19541962, by Adrienne Rich. By permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1967 by Adrienne Rich Conrad. Excerpts from The Flight from Womanhood from the article as it appears in Feminine Psychology edited by Harold Kelman. Copyright 1967 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., originally published by the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.

Excerpts from Candy by Terry Southern. Copyright 1958, 1959, 1962, 1964 by Terry Southern. Reprinted by permission of Coward-McCann & Geoghegan, Inc.

Excerpts from The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas S. Szasz. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Inc.

Excerpts from The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis De Sade by Peter Weiss. English version by Geoffrey Skelton. Verse adaptation by Adrian Mitchell. Copyright 1965 by John Calder Ltd. Originally published in German. Copyright 1964 by Suhrkamp Verlag. Reprinted by permission of Atheneum Publishers.

Excerpts from Les Guerilleres by Monique Wittig, translated by David Le Vay, English translation Copyright 1971 by Peter Owen. Reprinted by permission of the Viking Press, Inc.

Excerpts from Love Between Women by Dr. Charlotte Wolff, reprinted by permission of St. Martins Press, Inc., Macmillan & Co., Ltd., and Gerald Duckworth & Co., Ltd.

Credits for illustrative material appear on .

They all looked half drugged or half asleep, dull, as if the creatures had been hypnotized or poisoned, for these people walked in their fouled and disgusting streets full of ordure and bits of refuse and paper as if they were not conscious of their existence here, were somewhere else: and they were somewhere else each was occupied in imagining how it, he, she, was triumphing in an altercation with the landlord or the grocer or a colleague, or how it was making love. It was painful in a way she had never known pain, an affliction of shameful grief, to walk here today, among her own kind, looking at them as they were, seeing them, us, the human race, as visitors, from a space ship might see them.

But the most frightening thing about them was this: that they walked and moved and went about their lives in a condition of sleepwalking: they were not aware of themselves, of other people, of what went on around them they were essentially isolated, shut-in, enclosed inside their hideously defective bodies, behind their dreaming drugged eyes, above all, inside a net of wants and needs that made it impossible for them to think of anything else.

Doris Lessing

The Four-Gated City

Without my editor Airi Stuarts ardent desire to have this work out in an updated form, it would not exist as such. I am in her service. I am also grateful to Melissa Nosal, my assistant Robin Eldridge, and researcher-writer Courtney Martin for their exceedingly thoughtful and efficient research and to the entire team at Palgrave Macmillan. My agent Joelle Delbourgo effortlessly made this happen. As always, I am indebted to my family, and to all those health care givers and support staff who keep me in good writing shape.

I also now stand on the shoulders of many Foredaughters and Foresons whose continued work in the areas which I first pioneered in Women and Madness you will find in the updated bibliography. I am indebted to them for that work.

I thank Lillian, my mother, for giving birth to me, and for taking care of me long before I could write such a bookand for whatever dreams, whatever wisdom she and Leon, my father whispered or sang to me while I slept.

I thank my friends for their love and support, and for certain evenings, weekends, and conversations: especially, Vivian Gornick, Ruth Jody, Judy Kuppersmith, and Marjorie Portnow.