When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia by Christopher Bollas

Author:Christopher Bollas
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Science, Health, Psychology
ISBN: 9780300223651
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-11-23T22:00:00+00:00

13

Hiding the Mind



the eighteenth- century village of Stockbridge, Massachu-

setts, is a fitting location for the gracious buildings that house the

Austen Riggs Center, the last residential treatment provision of its

kind in the United States. The center fits in comfortably with the

brick and clapboard houses on Main Street, and few would know

it was anything other than one of the palatial estates that characterize

the town. It is across the street from the Red Lion Inn, a wonderful

old wood- frame building that dates back to 1773, when it was on

the stagecoach route between Boston and Albany. The inn became

a grand hotel in the mid–nineteenth century, after the Housatonic

Railroad was built and Stockbridge changed from being a sleepy

farming community to a weekend and summer retreat for the

wealthy.

The center was founded in 1919 by Austen Fox Riggs, chartered as

the Stockbridge Institute of Nervous Disorders and Such Other

Charitable Work as may be Incident Thereto. The next year it was

renamed after its founder. To this day its ethos harks back in some

ways to nineteenth- century psychiatry and theories of cure: the idea

that mentally disabled people suffered from a certain character loss

124

and needed rebuilding through moral reeducation, hard work, and

rehabilitation.

My time in London during the mid- 1970s working at the PCC

and the Tavistock Clinic was followed by nearly ten years spent in the

solitude of private practice. Next came the Austen Riggs Center,

where I worked in the mid- 1980s, and relished the opportunity to be

part of a team of fellow clinicians. In addition, I was on the faculty of

the Institute of Child Neuropsychiatry of the University of Rome,

visiting every other month for a week at a time. This was invaluable,

as it returned me to the world of child psychology, and “Via Sabelli”

(as it is known to the Romans) was the finest psychiatric hospital for

children I have ever known. Over twenty years there I supervised

many cases presented by highly gifted clinicians, and life at the hospi-

tal was akin to being part of a wonderful family. Frances Tustin and

Paula Heimann were the two other regular visitors to this hospital.

At Via Sabelli I continued to work with psychoanalysts and child

analysts on the problems posed by the psychotic child. At Riggs,

however, I was to learn more about schizophrenics than I could ever

have dreamed of.

Schizophrenics create a particular universe, and it is simply not

possible for an analyst to enter this idiosyncratic world by working

with them in a consulting room. It is essential to see how they create

daily life: to get to know where they place certain objects and which

parts of a room they avoid and why, to witness various physical

movements—their changes of pace and body angle—and where and

how they sit.

As we have seen, the person suffering from a catastrophe in his

world must find ingenious strategies for survival. I do not mean to

deny for a moment, or to romanticize, the immense pain of such a sit-

uation, but schizophrenia can be, in its own way, a kind of art form; a

Hiding the Mind

125

vast, complex performance art in which the person moves about in the

world, often acting out thoughts rather than speaking them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.