Ann Belford Ulanov on “Personal Madness”
Madness belongs to all of us. It comes in many forms and many degrees, from the craziness at the bottom of our neurotic symptom to a derangement that engulfs our whole life.
Madness is simpler than it looks: it is our effort to express unbearable pain.
Pain of shame, of humiliation for “not having the goods”; pain at being annihilated as a person with agency over her own life, treated as of “no account, so no accounting is necessary”; pain of catastrophic anxiety, so one goes dead to communicate being made dead; pain of being treated as another’s object, at their disposal, like a prop for sexual release or burst
of violence, filling their need to get ahead, steal one’s land, annex one’s
country.
Breakdown
Madness springs from the shattering of our self.
We communicate this loss by living in a void, a no-man’s land.
We use super vigilant control to prevent our flying into myriad fragments.
But that control stretches to a vibrating extreme and then snaps.
We become confetti.
Or madness shows in an engulfing fog of abysmal confusion, obscuring any
orienting direction of north and south or time sense of then and now.
We cannot represent in word or image what is happening to us.
We spin into outer space, out of body, out of mind. In dread of disintegrating panic, we do not go outside, lest its terrific force fell us in the
supermarket, as one man said, leaving him lying in the aisle as women
push their grocery carts over him.
Madness on the way to recovery digs up parts of us left in shadow that are unadapted, still archaic, so that we feel as bizarre to ourselves as we appear to others.
Yet we need just this primitive energy to find our way through madness.
I am aware that this subject introduces strain.
Speaking of madness brings it near, felt, breathed in again, with all the dissolving of meaning that madness inflicts.
Through the generosity of my analysands, who give permission to cite some of their words, we can feel the theme of madness and associate our own specific variations.
To bring in as well Jung’s experience described in The Red Book bolsters our courage to look into our madness, to see what is there and not there
for us. Something happened to Jung that took him down, gripped by
necessity to find what he missed.
For us to read this volume is to fall into a world that astonishes, for we are gripped as well.
We can take courage from Jung’s saying he also felt “violent resistance . . . and distinct fear” to engage these erupting fantasies.
To approach madness in the more customary way, through clinical terms for disorders of mental distress, puts it at a distance and removes us from the scene, as if madness happens only to the other guy.
I do not want to do that for two reasons.
Labels such as borderline, narcissistic, and the like make us feel judged; we recognize bits of ourselves in these disorders and feel fear when put into categories of craziness.
Also, madness is not ours alone, but part of the human condition; we cannot segregate it over there apart from our own lives.
Jung asks, “What is there, when there is no meaning? Only nonsense, or madniss.”
But, his soul declares, “Nothing will deliver you from disorder and meaninglessness, since this is the other half of the world.”
Any meaning we find or construct must, then, include this other half, too.
Recognizing that bears huge implications for our shared existence in society and for our religious attitude, whatever that is, including our rejection of religion and things spiritual.
Trying to speak and write about madnpss induces its felt impact: words slip, slide, and break, fall into nowhere.
Disorder defeats any clear line of exposition.
Like a spell or a fog or pollen in the air, to speak of madness is to be infiltrated by experiences of its derangement that we both know and deny.
I do speak and write about madness precisely because it is a country we share. ~Ann Belford Ulanov, Madness and Creativity, Page 7-9
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