Strictly Bipolar by Darian Leader

Author:Darian Leader [Leader, Darian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241966105
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

Jamison’s work, for example, is in many respects a sustained apology for lithium, with an idealization of ‘Science’ and good doctors. The rollercoaster ride through her experiences always settles into an encomium for some doctor, drug or therapist. Without denying the worth of these agents, it is tempting to guess that it is not simply the doctor or the drug that has helped her but the actual function of idealization itself. It is otherwise quite extraordinary that someone who has met so many professionals, read so many books and had so many encounters with the mental health system can still shelter behind an idea that ‘Science’ will solve things.

Where schizophrenic subjects will often question power structures, the manic-depressive may invest some person or agency with unimpeachable authority. Fromm-Reichmann and her colleagues pointed out that any therapist working with schizophrenia must respect the patient’s need for a degree of ‘isolation from, skepticism and independence of conventional values’. With manic-depression, on the contrary, ‘the therapist must help them to break through their dependency on their family or its substitutes and to re-evaluate family conventions’. The manic-depressive has not given up their belief in the Other. The emphasis, they argued, should thus be on questioning convention, undermining idealizations of authority that are already operative.

Such idealizations may also function as an artificial form of debt. When Jamison tells us that ‘The debt I owe my psychiatrist is beyond description’, we could read this quite literally. Idealization can be a way of constructing a debt. If manic-depression revolves around a foreclosure of debt, refashioning a new debt makes sense, especially if it is felt to be such a massive one. The feeling of indebtedness to some authority can sometimes help to stabilize a manic-depression, and it would be hasty to campaign against idealizations without giving due reflection to their function in each individual case.

This may also be linked to the pervasive search for perfection experienced by so many manic-depressive subjects. Faced with the inconsistency of a parent, the terrifying limbo of not knowing whether one will be loved or ignored when one next sees them, the child may construct an ideal of both personal and parental perfection. If personal perfection entails an identification with an ideal image, conforming with how we imagine the parent wants us to be, parental perfection means that the mother or father’s own vacillations are negated. With great frequency, this operation is carried out later in life using parental substitutes, so that someone is found to embody a consistent and benevolent gaze: a doctor, a therapist, a friend. Usually this person has a little bit of distance from them, allowing the idealization to be perpetuated. Too much proximity would mean, after all, inevitable disappointment.

When things are going badly, there may be an effort to appeal to this ideal, which could take the form of a perfect man or woman or, at times, the ‘perfection’ of a home or some object. Duke describes how she would do her best to create the perfect meal or holiday for her family, yet get angrier and angrier when the ideal was compromised.

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