M. A. Newton Sexual Trauma, Psychosis, and Betrayal in Antonia White’s

Conflicting Psychoanalytic Theories of Sexual Trauma and Psychosis

Freud’s position on psychosis, which cements his patriarchal view of women as inferior to their male counterparts, is a development of his earlier ideas on hysteria that is part of a larger psychoanalytic discussion between him and other major psychoanalytic theorists at the time. In his early development of paranoia and the role of the ego, Freud suggests in ‘The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’ (1894) that, in a state of psychosis, the patient’s ego willingly attempts to forget and by ‘willingly’, Freud refers to a conscious act of repression. Nonetheless, should a person have suffered from a traumatic event, this forgetting usually leads to hysteria. In some cases, hysteria itself can lead to what Freud describes as ‘hallucinatory psychosis’ (48). He proposes that, initially, as in the case of hysterical individuals, a memory of a traumatic event becomes ‘innocuous’, and the ego is unable to cope with it, so the memory itself goes through a process of conversion. The original memory is seemingly eradicated by the ego. However, this is not the case because, in truth, it has merely been repressed, and in its place is what Freud describes as a ‘mnemic symbol’, a ‘sort of parasite … in the form of an unresolvable motor innervation or as a constantly recurring hallucinatory sensation, which persists until a conversion in the opposite direction takes place’ (49). This opposite direction is what leads the individual into a state of psychosis. There is treatment for this: due to the splitting being an act of will, one can be treated for psychosis through hypnosis in that it enables the analysand access to that part which has been split off (50). I propose that the split-off part is what constitutes the unconscious part of the ego, an alter ego, if you will, in the subject’s mind, which is perhaps what Freud is suggesting here.

The overriding point that Freud intends to make about psychosis in ‘The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’ is that it is ‘the capacity for conversion’ from consciousness to unconsciousness that describes an hysteric’s journey into psychosis. Freud proceeds to write, ‘If someone with a disposition [to neurosis] lacks the aptitude for conversion, but if, nevertheless, in order to fend off an incompatible idea, he sets about separating it from its affect, then that affect is obliged to remain in the psychical sphere’ (52-53). To illustrate his point, Freud provides a case of a young girl whose ideas were so incompatible with the ego that the ego rejects them altogether, thus securing the young girl’s psychosis. In this case study, a girl gives her affections to a young man but is then subject to unrequited love. The girl’s ego could not accept this outcome and became ill, all the while in denial that this man would not someday come back to her for her hand in marriage. The descent into psychosis involved the hallucination that he did arrive and that she met him in the garden. This made her ecstatic and she lived in this state for two months.

In The Major Symptoms of Hysteria: Fifteen Lectures Given in the Medical School of Harvard University (1907), Pierre Janet returns to definitions of hysteria in order to make headway on the idea of dissociation and how a subject arrives at this point. In acknowledgement of some views at the time in which the hysteric suffers from fixed ideas that are then represented organically (e.g., M. M. Mathieu, Roux, Charcot, Moebius 325), Hippolyte Bernheim suggests, ‘the hysterical realises his accident just as he conceives it’ (qtd. in Janet 327). Even Freud and Breuer have been party to these same suggestions when they proclaim in their early work in Studies on Hysteria (1895) that ‘the hysteric suffers mainly from reminiscences’ (42). Janet reminds the reader of Breuer and Freud’s observations on their definition of dissociation, which will become a key term in Janet’s subsequent explorations in an examination of the dissociative depths to which hysterics will go. Breuer and Freud state, ‘The disposition to this dissociation and, at the same time, the formation of states of consciousness, which we propose to collect under the name of hypnoid states,²³ constitute the fundamental phenomenon of this neurosis’ (qtd. in Janet 332). While the focus is on neurosis in Studies on Hysteria, from which Janet pulled this statement,²⁴ Freud and Breuer open the door to what led to later developments in psychosis by Ferenczi while bypassing a possible connection between psychosis and sexual trauma: ‘We have found … that a severe trauma (such as occurs in a traumatic neurosis) or a laborious suppression (as of a sexual affect, for instance) can bring about a splitting off of groups of ideas even in people who are in other respects unaffected; and this would be the mechanism of psychically acquired hysteria’ (47). The term psychically acquired hysteria suggests to me that psychosis itself is really an hysterical symptom, in Freudian terms, which blurs the meanings of neurosis and psychosis.

One case that is particularly striking in this regard is ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (1918 [1914]) about Sergei Pankejeff (a.k.a., the famous Wolf Man), who suffered from ‘manic-depressive insanity’ (8). This case is one of the most clearly laid out descriptions of the primal scene as the source of infantile neurosis, the castration complex, and the beginning of a child’s journey through the Oedipus complex. It is also a striking case of sexual seduction in which Anna, the subject’s sister, also suffers from dementia praecox, commonly known as the early onset of psychosis in adolescence. Unfortunately, Freud does not make any connections between Sergei’s illness and his sister’s. He asserts that Sergei’s illness stems from his witnessing the primal scene, which Freud was able to deduce from dream interpretation.

Freud states that Sergei had been seduced by his sister Anna, who suffered from depression and ended up killing herself (21). However, at no point does Freud suggest that Anna was sexually seduced herself, even though there may have been indications of this seduction: ‘Towards the end of [Sergei’s] childhood there was an estrangement between him and his father. His father had an unmistakable preference for his sister, and he felt very much slighted by this’ (17). At the age of four or five, Anna had sat on her older cousin’s lap ‘and opened his trousers to take hold of his penis’ (21). When Anna poisoned herself after beginning to suffer from severe depression in her early twenties, Freud concludes that her death is attributable to hereditary dementia praecox (21).

In ‘The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis’ (1924), Freud writes: ‘There is nothing new in our characterisation of neurosis as the result of a repression that has failed’ (183). Where neurosis does not ‘disavow reality, it only ignores it; psychosis disavows it and tries to replace it…. and this is most radically effected by means of hallucination’ (185-86). In this brief statement, Freud clings to his view that there is no reality in the unconscious and in so doing maintains the position that fantasies are what constitute his subjects’ psychic lives, without really paying heed to the experience itself or its accompanying affect.

Freud’s views on sexual trauma and psychosis as non-resolution of the Oedipus complex by the time he wrote about this case had been firmly established in opposition to his earlier seduction theory. And yet there is one psychoanalyst who stood his ground, despite all the odds, and in the face of extreme scrutiny and ridicule: Sándor Ferenczi. He did not give up on Freud’s earlier seduction theory. In a diary entry dated July 24, 1932, in response to Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex, Ferenczi argues that mechanisms attached to the complex may actually be ‘the result of real acts on the part of adults, namely violent passions directed toward the child, who then develops a fixation, not from desire [as Freud maintained], but from fear. ‘My mother and father will kill me if I don’t love them, and identify with their wishes’’ (qtd. in Masson 147). The child is placed under perpetual fear that if she does not acquiesce to her parents’ wishes, she will not be loved. Due to the child’s fear of her parents, she develops a ‘pathogenic defense mechanism’ that Ferenczi named ‘identification with the aggressor’ (qtd. in Masson 148).

Ferenczi makes one point clear and that is the relationship formed between the child and her aggressor creates an unhealthy, sadomasochistic situation:

In addition to passionate love and passionate punishments there is a third way of binding the child to oneself and that is the terrorism of suffering. Children have the compulsion to smooth over all kinds of disorders in the family, that is to say, to take onto their tender shoulders the burdens of all others; naturally, in the final analysis, not out of pure unselfishness but to regain the lost peace and the tenderness that is part of it. (qtd. in Masson 150)

In Ferenczi’s important paper ‘Confusion of Tongues Between Adults and the Child’ (1933), he sets out to bring real sexual seductions of children back to the forefront of psychoanalytic attention.²⁵ In his opening reference on the topic of sexual seduction, Ferenczi observes that

even children of very respectable, sincerely puritanical families, fall victim to real violence or rape much more often than one had dared to suppose…. The immediate explanation – that these are only sexual fantasies of the child, a kind of hysterical lying – is unfortunately made invalid by the number of such confessions, e.g., of assaults on children, committed by patients actually in analysis. (161)

In an examination of the sexual perpetrator’s reasoning behind his seduction, Ferenczi states how, for example, in a child’s harmless fantasized role playing as an adult, he or she may oftentimes behave in a manner that is perceived by a pathological adult as not a demonstration of tenderness but of eroticism. What ensues is that the adult misperceives the child’s playfulness as ‘desires of a sexually mature person or even allow themselves—irrespective of any consequences—to be carried away’ (161).

Furthermore, Ferenczi states,

It is difficult to imagine the behaviour and the emotions of children after such violence. One would expect the first impulse to be that of reaction, hatred disgust and energetic refusal … if it had not been paralysed by enormous anxiety. These children feel physically and morally helpless, their personalities are not sufficiently consolidated in order to be able to protest, even if only in thought, for the overpowering force and authority of the adult makes them dumb and can rob them of their own senses. The same anxiety, however, if it reaches a certain maximum, compels them to subordinate themselves like automata to the will of the aggressor, to divine each one of his desires and to gratify these; completely oblivious of themselves they identify themselves with the aggressor. Through the identification, or let us say, introjection of the aggressor,²⁶ he disappears as part of the external reality … the attack as a rigid external reality ceases to exist and in the traumatic trance the child succeeds in maintaining the previous situation of tenderness. (162)

In the child’s silence, she is then forced into an identification with the aggressor (as aforementioned by Masson) by way of introjection,²⁷ one that can potentially and paradoxically become positive for the child because she is still receiving some form of tenderness. Nonetheless, due to the adult’s unconscious sense of remorse as a result of anger at his own actions, this unconscious sense of guilt is also projected on to the child, and in turn introjected by the child. The child is often punished for the adult’s actions but often feels deserving of this punishment (162). It is important to note that the child, nonetheless, is at all times in a passive role. Somehow, this very important paper became lost in the wave of Freudian observations in connection to the Oedipus complex and its non-resolution that can lead to hysteria and/or psychosis.

According to Ferenczi, in order to cope with the trauma of engaging in incestuous relations, psychosis is symptomatic of a child’s unconscious defence mechanism. He observes that ‘trauma involves an enduring division of the personality, in which one dissociative part manifests itself as “the guard against dangers … and the attention of this guard is almost completely directed to the outside. It is only concerned about dangers, i.e., about objects in the outside world all of which can become dangerous”’ (qtd. in Van der Hart et al. 50).

According to Masson, Freud was among the number who sought to ostracise Ferenczi from the psychoanalytic group for his views. Masson argues that Ferenczi’s paper presented to the 12^th International Psycho-Analytic Congress in Wiesbaden, September 1932, met with the same public display of disgust as Freud’s paper in 1896: ‘The dissemination of such views constituted a danger to society’ (Masson 151). Masson also states that Ferenczi’s paper was not published and that his untimely death gave his colleagues an opportunity to go against his wishes of having the paper published because, as Jones writes in an unpublished letter to Freud on June 3, 1933, ‘Its scientific contentions and its statements about analytic practice are just a tissue of delusions, which can only discredit psychoanalysis and give credit to its opponents’ (qtd. in Masson 152). However, according to Michael Balint, ‘Confusion of Tongues Between Adults and the Child’ was initially entitled, ‘The Passions of Adults and their Influence on the Sexual and Character Development of Children’ and was published in 1933.²⁸ Ferenczi’s paper was also later published by Michael Balint in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 1949.

More recently, there has been a strictly scientific exploration into a relationship between psychosis and sexual abuse that validates Ferenczi’s findings and echoes some of White’s own descriptions of her feelings of losing sanity and her sense of self. In ‘Psychotic Experiences in People Who Have Been Sexually Assaulted’ (2008), Aoiffe M. Kilcommons et al. conducted a study of a control group that included forty survivors of sexual assault. In this study, Kilcommons et al.’s objective is to find a connection between psychosis and sexual abuse that includes an examination of psychological factors that contribute to the psychosis, namely dissociation. Kilcommons et al.’s initial findings suggest that ‘a significantly higher rate of psychotic phenomena (delusional ideation and predisposition to hallucinations) was found in the sexually assaulted group compared to the control group’ (602).³⁶ Interestingly, the sample came from police and court records after the abused had received some form of support. Read and Hammersley, however, argue that Spataro et al.’s findings do not take into consideration those who do not make it to court and do not receive support to help them deal with their experiences, often resulting in more severe psychotic episodes (603).

Kilcommons et al. also break psychosis itself down into relevant categories. The type of childhood assault may determine the kind of psychotic experience. For example, delusions are more likely to occur in those who have endured physical assault, whereas hallucinations are typically within the realm of childhood sexual assault. Again, why this is the case is not developed, but Kilcommons et al. have done their research and draw on important observations made by Allen and Coyne who suggest that

trauma-induced dissociative symptoms may place the individual at risk of having a psychotic experience. They propose that dissociative detachment undermines the individual’s grounding in the outer world, thereby hampering reality-testing and rendering the individual with post-traumatic symptoms ‘vulnerable to the nightmarish inner world’. (qtd. in Kilcommons 332)
Kilcommons et al. further hypothesise that severe dissociative detachment leaves individuals vulnerable to psychosis because internal anchors—the sense of being connected to one’s body, a sense of self or identity, one’s own actions—do not appear to exist. This may not only impair reality testing but also result in severe confusion, disorganization, and disorientation (604). Of importance is Kilcommons et al.’s findings; they observe how experiencing trauma can also ‘shatter one’s basic assumptions about the self (self-worth, vulnerability), the world and others (in relation to fairness, dangerousness, trustworthiness, equality), and with the suggestion that traumatic experiences may confer vulnerability to the development of psychosis via cognitive and behavioural processes’ (609).

While some important observations are made by both Allen and Coyle and Kilcommons et al., what is not addressed is why psychosis may be a product of sexual assault. Nonetheless, they do suggest that it comes about as a result of extreme mental distress, in which case psychosis is one of many possible responses to a traumatic event (608). Although Kilcommons et al.’s study in particular has some limitations, i.e., the results are generated from self-report measures, as opposed to structured clinical interviews, this study is still important in that it identifies a need for a possible correlation between sexual assault and psychosis to be taken seriously (609).

It is becoming increasingly common to consider the correlation between sexual trauma and psychosis. In the past couple of years, research into psychosis and sexual trauma has picked up. In ‘Childhood Trauma and Psychosis: What is the Evidence’ (2011), Helen Fisher offers further support for studies that propose a correlation between sexual abuse and psychosis with the following typical symptoms:

Childhood sexual abuse has specifically been linked to hallucinations and delusions and the content of these positive symptoms may be related to patients' traumatic experiences. Psychotic patients with a history of childhood trauma tend to present with a variety of additional problems, similar to that of other populations with childhood trauma. Victims of abuse report increased levels of suicidal ideation and more frequent suicide attempts. They have also been reported to be less able to sustain intimacy, and to be more prone to emotional instability. (par. 4)

Andrew D. Thompson et al.’s article ‘Sexual Trauma Increases the Risk of Psychosis in an Ultra High-Risk ‘Prodromal’ Population’ (2013), provides findings of a self-report questionnaire:

Data were available on 233 individuals. Total [Childhood Trauma Questionnaire] CTQ trauma score was not associated with transition to psychosis. Of the individual trauma types, only sexual abuse was associated with transition to psychosis (P = .02). The association remained when adjusting for potential confounding factors. Those with high sexual abuse scores were estimated to have a transition risk 2–4 times that of those with low scores. The findings suggest that sexual trauma may be an important contributing factor in development of psychosis for some individuals. (1)

Furthermore, Thompson et al. note that ‘the higher the sexual abuse score, the higher the risk of transition to a psychotic disorder in the medium-to-long term. This was not the case for other types of trauma or total trauma score’ (5). What the study also observes is that what the psychotic disorder shows by way of symptoms is ‘a disruption of ‘internal anchors’ of the sense of self, resulting from dissociative detachment’ (7).

Given conflicting psychoanalytic positions on sexual trauma and White’s protagonist’s Oedipal narrative that leads to a descent into psychosis, there are two different views of the relationship between her psychosis and sexual trauma. Is it possible that White’s account of her dreams is intricately connected to repressed sexual desires that have become distorted in a state of psychosis as a result of extreme emotional angst? Or, is it the case that her psychosis is actually evidence of a psychological reaction to a real experience of sexual abuse that has been repressed but comes out in psychotic symptoms? Ultimately, the reader is presented with two diametrically opposed views, where the similarity is repression but the difference is that one side pertains to fantasies of unfulfilled sexual desires and a failure to navigate the Oedipus complex; the other side pertains to a descent into psychosis that is symptomatic of a psychological reaction to a real traumatic sexual experience.

While both Freud’s and Ferenczi’s views present viable positions on the correlation between psychosis and sexual trauma, in this chapter, what I have sought to illustrate through White’s life and autobiographical fiction is that her life was an Oedipal drama, and as a result of this, she appropriated a Freudian Oedipal narrative in her autobiographical fiction. However, at no time does White overtly state that she was a victim of father-daughter incest. Undergoing Freudian psychoanalytic treatment herself, this should come as no surprise because she may have perceived her traumatic relationships with her parents against the backdrop of an Oedipal narrative. White’s autobiographical fiction, therefore, does more than highlight the complexities associated with conflicting psychoanalytic stances on sexual trauma. In no other autobiographical fiction is an Oedipal drama so poignantly described that also places a spotlight on problems inherent in Freud’s Oedipus complex theory.

Although there are present ruptures in White’s Oedipal narrative that could signal the presence of a history of sexual abuse, for example, as illustrated in her references to psychosis in her autobiographical fiction, White’s stint in Bethlem Royal Hospital is not described at any great length in her diaries. How much stock can readers place in White’s accounts of psychosis in her autobiographical fiction, a genre that blurs the lines between reality and fiction, being an authentic description of any lived traumatic experience? It is to this question that I shall turn my attention in the next chapter.

Chapter Two

Psychosis: A Crisis of Self-Expression in Antonia White’s

‘The House of Clouds’ and Beyond the Glass

Form and Theory of Autobiographical Novel (on Personality)

Memory and Identity – Psychosis and Agency of Alter Ego
In the previous chapter, I addressed the sexual trauma argument through opposing psychoanalytic perspectives. However, it is important to take into consideration the genre in which White chose to write about her experiences, the autobiographical novel, which blends non-fiction with fiction. Early on in her writing, White struggled with the idea of writing autobiographical fiction because she wanted to write real novels. After accepting that the best material for her to write about was her life, White sought to find a balance between writing a personal testimony of her traumatic experiences and appealing to literary aesthetic values. From a literary scholar’s perspective, this is a challenging undertaking. How much stock can readers place in White’s autobiographical novels being true reflections of any lived traumatic experiences? Providing an answer to this question is not an easy task because writing in any autobiographical genre, whatever degree of truth is purported, produces ambiguity.

This chapter will be divided into three sections that address these knotted areas of authenticity, memory, and identity. The first section will discuss the form and theory of the autobiographical novel in an examination of Phillipe Lejeune’s text, On Autobiography (1989). Although other writers have expressed views on autobiographical fiction as a genre, such as Elizabeth W. Bruss, James Olney, and, more recently, Leigh Gilmore, for my purpose, I delve more deeply into Lejeune as an authority whose thinking on personality and memory is aligned with dominant historical perspectives of authorship against a backdrop of controversial critical literary theories and criticism on authorial intention at the time in which White was producing her autobiographical fiction. Key thinkers in this controversy are E. M. W. Tillyard, C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley. In the second section, I juxtapose literary and psychoanalytic writings on psychosis in a development of the previous line of inquiry. In an exploration of the limitations and possibilities of authenticating narratives of psychosis as a means to generating coherent and viable meaning, I argue, in the third section, for a space to be carved for White’s autobiographical fiction to be taken seriously as creative works that aspire to both an authentic expression of personal experience and aesthetic values.

The arguments I put forward oppose what I perceive to be literary theoretical structures that have developed analyses of the author’s conscious and unconscious ways of communication using linguistic arguments that have no bearing themselves on lived reality. For example, in a development of Freud’s views on psychosis from a psychoanalytical linguistic perspective, Jacques Lacan purports that it is impossible to authenticate narratives of psychosis and draw any meaningful value from them as readers because they lack a coherent transfer of metaphorical language from the unconscious to the conscious. He uses Judge Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) to support his case, which is certainly valid from a technical standpoint. However, he does not give due credit to Schreber’s attempts to grapple with sexual and spiritual preservation and suicidal tendencies through the agency of his alter egos; these are similarities Schreber shares with White’s alter egos in ‘The House of Clouds’ and Beyond the Glass. In a similar vein to Lacan’s thinking, post-structuralist literary critic Paul de Man seeks to reduce the visual recollection of experiences to a linguistic structure due to his notion that visual recollections captured linguistically have no value because past experiences cannot be restored just as they were. It is the same complaint he had with the Romantics. Similarly, it is also a concern that Lejeune expresses in his analysis of the relationship between author, narrator, and protagonist. Nonetheless, these analyses denounce the autobiographical subject’s testimony and, in so doing, have created an elitist separatism between autobiographical narratives and pure fiction; this discrimination between the genres has also served to silence authorial voices of trauma.

Whilst an account of subjective truth with regard to psychosis as a viable representation of objective reality, for example, would certainly be subject to scrutiny, I place a spotlight on how White’s experiences—and my willingness as a reader to listen to those experiences as she relates to them—shape her personality and sense of being. White’s testimony of psychosis in her autobiographical fiction is complicated by a tension between attempts to secure some kind of agency through her writing within the confines of a patriarchal Oedipal narrative; it is this collision that shapes her testimony in its raw portrayal of an identity in crisis.