My Madness Saved Me: The Madness & Marriage of Virginia Woolf

by Thomas Szasz

In this book Szasz argues that Virginia Woolf was a victim neither of mental illness, nor psychiatry, nor her husband -- three ways she is regularly portrayed. He finds her to be an intelligent and self-assertive person, a moral agent who used mental illness, psychiatry, and her husband to fashion for herself a life of her own choosing. This is not to impute to Virginia Woolf some sort of limitless freedom of the will, nor is it to deny that the cultural and social milieu in which she grew up and lived had a profound impact on her psyche and her sense of the life choices open to her. It is only to remind us of the primacy of Virginia Woolf as an active, goal-directed, moral agent, responsible equally for her madness-badness and her genius-creativity.

Genres: Psychology, Psychological, Philosophy, Mental Health, Mental Illness

170 pages, Hardcover

First published January 25, 2006

About the author

Thomas Stephen Szasz (pronounced /sas/; born April 15, 1920 in Budapest, Hungary) was a psychiatrist and academic. He was Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, New York. He was a prominent figure in the antipsychiatry movement, a well-known social critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry, and of the social control aims of medicine in modern society, as well as of scientism. He is well known for his books, The Myth of Mental Illness (1960) and The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement which set out some of the arguments with which he is most associated.

Reviews

[Cathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This really made me think and think again about what "mental illness" is or whether it is at all. It's been more than 30 years since I read "The Manufacture of Madness" and I'd forgotten what a compelling argument Szasz makes against the entire construct. However, my own experience has led me to accept the medicalisation of psychological troubles. I was disturbed to learn about Woolf's virulent anti-Semitism. Am I the last to know? Szasz's tone was often angrier than warranted--occasionally I felt he "doth protest too much", which made me question his premise and the passion with which he holds it. But maybe he's just really fed up being a lone voice in the wilderness.

[Servabo · Rating 3 out of 5]

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts. Last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history. Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

I view mental patienthood as a role into which a person is cast by his family and society, which he then assumes and plays, or against which he rebels and from which be tries to escape. Occasionally, individuals teach themselves how to be mental patients and assume the role without parental or societal pressure to do so, in order to escape certain unbearably painful situations or the burdens of ordinary life.

In their hearts, Virginia and Leonard were full of love for mankind in the abstract; in their day-to-day behavior, they were domineering, nasty and snobbish toward individuals, especially their social inferiors.

Leonard viewed Virginia's madness as a life-long affliction that could, at any time, cause a fresh breakdown. He was quite sure that Virginia's genuis was closely connected with what manifested itself as mental instability and insanity. Virginia is permanently insane, although her insanity manifests itself only sporadically, in great fits of breakdowns; she is also permanently a genius, although her genius manifests itself only sporadically, in great works of fiction.

Virginia Woolf spent her life on two projects: 1) thinking, talking, and writing about herself, and 2) hiding her true self from others

She wanted the advantages of both sanity and insanity, and the disadvantages of neither.

The psychoanalytic relationship is intimate, in some ways more intimate than a sexual relationship. Its aim is to assist the patient to take a searching look at himself and stop deceiving himself.

"I feel that I have gone too far this time to come back again."

Sigmund Freud wanted to penetrate the soul to uncover its secrets. Virginia Woolf wanted to protect the soul and its secrets from prying eyes. She comprehended and conveyed the perils of being understood, of having what we now call "good human relationships." Writers of popular songs have long rhapsodized over lovers who never separate, Virginia wrote "Find me a house where no one can ever come."

[Neal Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Szasz believes that the term "mental illness" is a misnomer; that it refers to distressed feelings and delusions which result from problems of living, and which are outside medicine's purview. So we know this book won't be entering the debate on whether or when Virginia Woolf suffered from mental illness.

Szasz describes how, in 1913, Leonard Woolf went "mad-doctor shopping", seeking to have his wife declared "unfit for motherhood", because he didn't share her desire to have children. The second doctor on the list acquiesced. Virginia, feeling trapped, overdosed on barbiturates. This episode resonates with two of the recurring themes of Szasz' oeuvre: that declarations of insanity are an exercise of power, and that anyone has the right to kill themself.

The title of Szasz' book comes from a letter written by Virginia Woolf in 1924. He argues that, weighing up her options, she decided to make the most of her role as an invalid "mad genius" rather than asserting independence and breaking with her husband.

The suicide theme returns towards the end of the book. Szasz quotes Leonard Woolf on how, fearing a Nazi invasion, Virginia's brother Adrian provided himself, Leonard and Virginia, and others with morphine, so that "five ordinary intelligent people in England" were "coolly and prudently supplying themselves with means for committing suicide." Although Virginia Woolf killed herself another way, this is is evidence that she also looked on suicide as a rational choice.

Overall, Szasz' interpretation of events is a reasonable one, although, in crediting people with responsibility for their own actions, he can seem uncaring.

The book production isn't the best. The graphic design for the cover is lazy, and the typesetting is a bit off. It looks like it was done on a word processor rather than a professional system.

[Michael Kulyk · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very engaging meditation on the life and eventual suicide of Virginia Wolf by Thomas Szasz. The central claim that the author makes is that Wolf colluded with her psychiatrist and husband to use her diagnosis of manic depression to escape conflictual areas of her life. That as an author she knew very well that the concept of mental illness and the determination of human behaviour was false and that a persons character was largely based on how they dealt with issues of responsibility, choice and the reality of their existential freedom.
Szasz uses the ideas of Jean Paul Sartre and Alfred Adler to bolster his argument that there is no such thing as mental illness and that institutional psychiatry is about power and domination dressed up in the guise of medicine.
My own view as someone who worked in the field of adult mental health for many years is to say yes but the slings and arrows of everyday life pierce deeper for some than for others. That people like Virginia Wolf lack the sense of self justification or intrinsic sense of self worth that allows for participation as a responsible adult who chooses their actions, Instead they have to constantly rely on external sources of validation and support through achievement and relations based on interpersonal control, that this leaves them vulnerable in their everyday lives in a way that more fortunate people find difficult to understand.
I imagine that Thomas Szasz's answer to this would perhaps be to say that this still isn't an illness and that despite Wolf's lacking an intrinsic sense of self worth and resulting vulnerabilities she still had other personal resources that compensated for this and that she was still free. He may well have argued that her acceptance of her diagnosis was what Sartre would term bad faith and Adler a life lie. Szasz on this basis comes out hard against feminists who insist that Virginia Wolf was a victim of male dominated society as well as those who argue that she was a victim of psychiatry and more so against those who argue that she was indeed mad though her manic depressive illness was the basis for her her creativity, madness and genius supposedly being closely related. Szasz rejects the idea of any association of madness and creativity citing examples of creative people who led emotionally stable lives such as Thomas Edison who maintained that his creativity was based on one percent inspiration and ninety nine percent perspiration.
As usual Szasz writes beautifully and provides the reader with crystal clear clarity in his arguments.
However despite this clarity it's pretty easy to misunderstand what Szasz is saying about Virginia Wolf. There will be those who will accuse Szasz of claiming that she was a malingerer and that she really wasn't mad but instead feigning madness. This isn't the case, more than anyone Szasz is saying the person she lied to was herself. She deceived herself and her 'illness' like Sartre's definition of a hysteric was a lie without a liar. If this is book about anything it's a book about a form of self deceit that's validated by psychiatry and society in general. However this may be the case one has to admit that the burden of life lies heavier on the shoulders of some people more than others.