Five Weeks at Humanitas. Manfred Jurgensen

Five Weeks at Humanitas - Manfred Jurgensen


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who witnessed the event merely confirmed they had at one point walked out of the seminar, more in sadness than in anger, because they didn’t know what else to do. Had something similar occurred in the science faculty, it would have reached the heights of academic controversy. Different interpretations or new discoveries concerning time and space, energy and light, gravitation and motion would have made headlines comparable to political scandals or sensational sporting achievements. Literary fiction, by definition unrealistic if not unreal, was hardly in that category. Campus gossip confined itself to whether the guest lecturer had to be carried off on a stretcher or voluntarily sought counsel from senior members of the university’s psychiatry department. Nobody seemed to know where he’d been taken. He disappeared between one day and the next, his lectures and seminars cancelled or taken over by local staff. Only members of the doctoral seminar were immediately affected by the disturbance. A delegation approached the Head of Department and the Dean, urgently asking what had happened to their professor, who was acting supervisor of their dissertations. They were advised that due to unforeseen circumstances the Australian professor would not return.

      Apparently he had suffered a major nervous breakdown. It was whispered the man from Down Under had literally lost his identity. No one knew exactly what that meant. Members of the university’s Department of Psychiatry rumoured the visiting colleague had turned into a megalomaniac screaming at no one in particular that he was the world! Adding something about ‘unified sensibility’, ‘no more separation of idea and being’, ‘a world made up of monadic fictional I’s’. For professional reasons they didn’t make fun of his dementia but thought it legitimate to relate his collapse not merely to overwork (did a visiting professor really have to work that hard?), but also, perhaps more importantly, to the subject of his research seminar and the unscientific discourse of his discipline. In the Arts Faculty things like that were bound to happen from time to time. During early diagnostic interviews the Australian visiting professor spoke of a colleague in the Philosophy Department of his own university, who after a few years of teaching and research had decided ‘to change his name by deed poll from Peter Wertheim to Who. At the same time his loyal wife wanted to be known as What.’ The Swiss academics didn’t know what to make of that. It became increasingly difficult to decide how far their colleague’s psychological disorder had progressed. In many ways a psychosis could be likened to cancer. In cases of early diagnosis it might be nipped in the bud. Could they believe what he told them, or was what he was saying a made-up story, the delusions of an incurable schizophrenic? As academic and clinical psychiatrists they were of course fundamentally predisposed towards sympathetic deconstructions of mental breakdowns. What had happened to the Australian they’d met at morning tea was a tragedy. He’d seemed a nice enough fellow.

      I can’t do this. What they’re asking me to do is impossible. I feel like a child again, learning how to write, rehearsing curves and lines that somehow, magically, convey meaning to someone else. As soon as I drew particular lines I recognised in them something outside the classroom and the exercise book. The J became a tree, the P a mushroom or an umbrella (depending on how I felt), the F a crane. That part of writing I liked. But my teacher back at primary school kept shaking his head. He called my efforts wilfully messy. If it was so, my later life followed the same pattern. Who, I wondered, had written its script?

      There was of course no script. Things just happen and form their own wilful pattern. Now the shrinks are trying to force me into their design, ordering me to ‘just write down whatever I can remember’. What kind of direction is that! I know of course what they’re after. Psychiatry is the art of making the thickest fog transparent. I say ‘art’ because psychoanalysis or therapy surely is not a science, as their practitioners insist. From the first interview at Humanitas I not only saw through their questions, I anticipated them. Each time I was right in predicting the next, I triumphantly burst out laughing. Only that made the interrogation bearable. I guess my response didn’t endear me to my inquisitors. Following the subtleties of their discipline they would have taken it as further sign of my mental instability. How laughable my whole situation has become!

      I’m told I’ve had a breakdown. Expert Swiss medical opinion has it I’ve been working too hard. As if I needed to be taken to this obscenely comfortable sanatorium to know that. Humanitas! Was its name an admission that, one way or another, all of us are nuts? Humanity residing in an escape-proof mental home? And people say the Swiss haven’t got a sense of humour! (Or was it the Germans? I’ve forgotten. Perhaps I’m ‘in denial’. One thing I will admit is that because I am, thanks to my mother, half-German, I’ve suppressed that part of my lineage. My mother, who died some years ago, was my nemesis. But isn’t it supposed to be the father who causes sons all kinds of psychological problems later in life? So much for the expertise of those who are in charge of an institute called ‘Humanitas‘!)

      I know from experience that everything derived from universities relating to humanity is at best a profound misunderstanding. It’s as if social man had devised a thought factory to process the functioning of his own body and mind. It’s a university that has referred me to Humanitas on the assumption I am a sufferer from schizophrenia or a psychosis. I wonder whether the resident shrinks realise these mental conditions are not illnesses of an individual but generic to mankind. They are an inseparable part in the evolution of language acquisition. Swiss psychiatrists must be aware recent research into physical changes in the brains of psychotics has revealed they all relate exclusively to the area of language skills and acquisition. So schizophrenia and other related mental illnesses are conditions shared by all mankind. I don’t mind if the shrinks insist on turning the condition into a pathology, so long as they realise it is an ailment they too are suffering from. If I have to deal with psychiatrists I can only do so by treating them as equals. In most cases, I believe, that would amount to a compliment because a language-generated psychosis implies creative imagination at a very high level.

      They want me to write down my life. In addition the plan is to subject me to regular panel interviews. I’m not saying every psychotic is by definition brilliant, at least in the area of language, but to read such a ‘patient’ requires a special intelligence. I’ve already decided I shan’t write about my life in what the shrinks probably call a normal way. Nor shall I reveal everything about myself. Some truths I intend to keep to myself, perhaps to share with a ghostly alter ego, whom psychiatrists no doubt will take as evidence of further mental disturbance. As if ghosts didn’t exist! Some may call them their consciousness or soul. We have all experienced their presence during what clinicians call sleep paralysis. It’s a prevalent condition generating hallucinations everybody experiences now and then. The old Anglo word for it was ‘nightmare’. The ‘mare’ gives its proper meaning away: it communicates a story. (The German word for tales is Mär, as in fairytales, Märchen ). Anyone who dismisses hallucinations will also disregard dreams, visions, apparitions and imagination. Yet that is the language in which mankind has expressed its profoundest values and beliefs. So how can I submit to treatments of the spoken and written at Humanitas ? Why would I diminish the magic and imagination of my otherwise quite ordinary life by succumbing to the bland and mundane? Didn’t Freud himself say quite categorically in one of his introductory lectures on psychoanalysis that analyst and patient are equal? In fact, he went further: he insisted the psychoanalyst was in constant need of analysis himself.

      I won’t allow my life to be told or edited by professional psychotics whose lives are unknown to me.

      But here I am, and there is no escape, the result of a momentary lapse of reason, a fatal error for an academic. In my discipline, the history of writing (another non-scientific branch of knowledge), professors adhere to a theory of spontaneity. It was a spontaneous comment of mine that got me to this place. Humanitas is, like most of Switzerland, a luxurious prison, a democracy built on alpine visions. Small is beautiful. Small creates wealth. It’s the mountains that are big. In this charitable confinement I am expected to find myself. Or, as the staff would put it, I’ll either be cured or remain institutionalised until further notice. Neither option is a prospect I look forward to. I just want to go home.

      Who am I? O yes, of course. I didn’t introduce myself. I’m already being infected with the morale


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