treating them as equals. In most cases, I believe, that would amount to a compliment because a language-generated psychosis implies creative imagination at a very high level.
They want me to write down my life. In addition the plan is to subject me to regular panel interviews. I’m not saying every psychotic is by definition brilliant, at least in the area of language, but to read such a ‘patient’ requires a special intelligence. I’ve already decided I shan’t write about my life in what the shrinks probably call a normal way. Nor shall I reveal everything about myself. Some truths I intend to keep to myself, perhaps to share with a ghostly alter ego, whom psychiatrists no doubt will take as evidence of further mental disturbance. As if ghosts didn’t exist! Some may call them their consciousness or soul. We have all experienced their presence during what clinicians call sleep paralysis. It’s a prevalent condition generating hallucinations everybody experiences now and then. The old Anglo word for it was ‘nightmare’. The ‘mare’ gives its proper meaning away: it communicates a story. (The German word for tales is Mär, as in fairytales, Märchen ). Anyone who dismisses hallucinations will also disregard dreams, visions, apparitions and imagination. Yet that is the language in which mankind has expressed its profoundest values and beliefs. So how can I submit to treatments of the spoken and written at Humanitas ? Why would I diminish the magic and imagination of my otherwise quite ordinary life by succumbing to the bland and mundane? Didn’t Freud himself say quite categorically in one of his introductory lectures on psychoanalysis that analyst and patient are equal? In fact, he went further: he insisted the psychoanalyst was in constant need of analysis himself.
I won’t allow my life to be told or edited by professional psychotics whose lives are unknown to me.
But here I am, and there is no escape, the result of a momentary lapse of reason, a fatal error for an academic. In my discipline, the history of writing (another non-scientific branch of knowledge), professors adhere to a theory of spontaneity. It was a spontaneous comment of mine that got me to this place. Humanitas is, like most of Switzerland, a luxurious prison, a democracy built on alpine visions. Small is beautiful. Small creates wealth. It’s the mountains that are big. In this charitable confinement I am expected to find myself. Or, as the staff would put it, I’ll either be cured or remain institutionalised until further notice. Neither option is a prospect I look forward to. I just want to go home.
Who am I? O yes, of course. I didn’t introduce myself. I’m already being infected with the morale of the place. You see, that’s what they’re trying to find out: who I am. In fact, they’re keen to let me know that because they believe I’m confused and not in full control of my senses. I’ve been scribbling first-form variations of the alphabet on Humanitas’ exclusive letterhead stationery. Vandalising expensive handmade Swiss quality paper. That’s what I think of their instruction to write down all I can remember of my own life. As if! Would you be able to do that? I mean, how would you select the important parts, how suppress all the embarrassing and humiliating things that have happened to you? It’s impossible to do justice to one’s life simply by writing about it. Whatever we select and whatever we decide to leave out is a distortion of the facts. Or the truth, if you like. All writing is a kind of forgery. If you’re lucky, people will take it as valid currency. But that would only prove you’ve turned yourself into a work of fiction. I don’t have to tell you that in our Age of Facts fiction is equated with lies, falsehood and fabrication. Yet it is facts that have long joined the public culture of urban myths. The pollution of so-called reality shows on TV is only one example of contemporary society’s insidious infection destroying what’s left of human imagination. Those of vision, inspiration and creativity are left behind in a desert of consumerist apathy.
So, instead of doing what I’m supposed to do, I’ll talk to you for a while if you’re interested and haven’t got anything urgent to attend to. Pretend you are a ghost and I’m a writer. Speaking to a ghost makes a change from reading a ghost writing for another to pass off as his or her own. Whatever I’ll tell you will be off the record. When we talk the precious sheets I’ve been given will remain blank, virginally pure. I promise. I’ll use them only as ordered, to record parts of my life for the Medical Board of Humanitas . They don’t need to know I’ll have already told you what I remember. It’s clear they want a clinical version, unemotional, cool and detached. They shall have it, but it will be their own.
Like most children I acquired the habit of investing everything around me with special meanings I was quite sure only I could recognise. There was no doubt in my mind that the world I transformed into secret codes was mine alone. Yet soon a reverse process was taking place. Learning the alphabet, I discovered there was already a sign language I was expected to acquire. Putting the letters of my name together, I thought I would find out who I was, or at least who I was meant to be. What would my very own sequence of letters reveal about me? I wrote and read the names again and again. MANFRED JURGENSEN. It proved a frustrating and disappointing exercise. The words didn’t mean a thing. I had no idea what MANFRED JURGENSEN stood for. (But didn’t I already know who I was?) Exhausted and angry, I dismissed the alphabet as a con. Relying on letters didn’t really add up. It needed more to convince me it could tell me something I didn’t already know. I was ready never to fully trust them again.
But then Grandmother’s delicious alphabet soup revived my explorations into language. I found it deeply satisfying to swallow sweet milky spoonfuls of letters … not without first checking whether, contrary to my earlier experience, they might not after all, coincidentally or otherwise, carry a meaning, perhaps even a secret message for me. To my disappointment they never did. What I was gulping down was a meaningless conglomeration of chance. Was that the kind of reality they were preparing me for at school? Coincidence was a word often used by one of my uncles, a war veteran, who kept saying his survival was a fluke, a happy accident. I found it hard to believe that all those crippled men who’d returned to our city or came as destitute refugees had experienced a stroke of good luck.
My grandmother told me the name I was given meant ‘man of peace’. At first I thought that funny because I was born at the height of the Second World War. But then I began to realise my parents must have chosen it because, secretly, they were longing for peace, even if in company they praised the war as the historic destiny of the glorious fatherland. My given name continued to confuse me. It seemed reassuring that my parents appeared to be against the death, misery and destruction I saw around me. Yet I was told my father was ‘in the war’, heroically fighting to protect us from the Enemy. Who was he fighting for? Who was the Enemy? Why would he do that if he didn’t believe in it? Was that also just a matter of words?
And my surname meant ‘son of George’. According to my all-knowing grandmother. That was clearly untrue. My father’s name wasn’t George. I’m honestly surprised not more people complain about the names they’ve been given. Seems to me there’s a lot of falsehood and misinformation going on.
I’ve no idea why I’m telling you all this. It’s probably no more than an attempt to avoid doing what I’ve been asked to do, write about my life. And kill time. I can’t just sit here staring at blank pages, least of all in a place like this. It gets on my nerves. I wonder when they’re coming to collect my biographical notes. Without them they’re lost because they too have no idea what’s happened to me. If I weren’t a foreigner, they’d probably classify me a hopeless case along with the other demented and deserted rich patients, provided there was someone to pay for my being here.
I admit I can’t remember exactly how I came to this place, a palatial building set in the grounds of a beautifully landscaped park, complete with ornamental fountains, classical statues and manicured lawns. But this epitome of luxury I knew was in fact a tastefully disguised Swiss psychiatric clinic, a home away from home for the mentally challenged. (That description, I discovered,
