The Bughouse by Daniel Swift

Author:Daniel Swift
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Overholser was a figure of great probity, and because he was so self-evidently right he was also accustomed to being misunderstood. Perhaps all psychiatrists feel this way. The first hero of modern psychotherapy is the French physician Philippe Pinel, who served at the Bicêtre asylum in Paris in the last years of the eighteenth century. When he explained his new methods to the prisons commissioner – he wished to treat the patients with kindness and to undo their chains – he was mocked. ‘Why not proceed to the zoo and liberate the lions and tigers?’ the prisons commissioner demanded, but Pinel persisted, and this story is recounted in a book called Man Above Humanity: A History of Psychotherapy, which was published in 1954 with a foreword by Overholser. This same gesture – of striking the shackles from the bodies of the distressed – reappears in the origin story often told about St Elizabeths. Dorothea Dix was visiting a jail in Massachusetts on a cold winter day and when she saw that the insane inmates were not provided with stoves to warm themselves or blankets at night, she resolved to found a new hospital for the mentally ill.

One story that psychiatrists might tell themselves goes something like this: the world is a hard and suspicious place, and the doctor’s noble duty is to stand between the bodies of the distressed and those who would punish instead of trying to understand. This is their myth, and it was known to Overholser from the history books, and it can only have deepened his resolve to protect Pound from popular mistrust. To betray his patient would in effect have been to side with the prisons commissioner who compared patients to tigers, or the guard who froze his charges, and the history of psychiatry celebrates those who stand up to authority. Lecturing at Harvard in November 1952 Overholser treated precisely this discord between the institutions of psychiatry and the law. ‘It is a fact that the law still proceeds on the basis of psychological assumptions which are not in line with prevailing psychiatric points of view,’ he said, and noted that the two do not even share a common language, for the term ‘insanity’ is ‘entirely a legal one, which is not used by physicians except on those relatively rare occasions when they have to answer questions about it in court.’ Once you shift the perspective, Overholser is no longer the fraud who harboured Pound, but instead his noble guardian against an uncomprehending world.

* * *

The first conspiracy theory about Pound at St Elizabeths is a thriller of disguises and closed doors, and it centres upon Overholser. The second, rival theory is closer to a Western, with Pound as a lone gunslinger taking on the crooked system. This second story features a curious character named Eustace Mullins, who stalks around the edges of the Pound universe and who I came in time to think of as a representative sent from some dark Pound underground. But

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