The Politics of Interior Decoration

As mentioned in a recent post to our  In the Frame thread, Oliver Sacks devotes a chapter of his recent book Hallucinations to recounting the hallucinogenic experiences of himself, his patients and correspondents and those who have featured in medical literature on the subject since the 1840s. He could have included the visionary experiences to which Christopher Mayhew was subject after he took mescaline as part of a 1955 experiment for the BBC’s Panorama programme, footage of which was withheld from broadcast.

Mayhew was a British Labour MP with a sustained interest in issues of public health. (Later, in 1957, he checked himself into Warlingham Park Hospital in a bid to obtain first-hand experience of what a mental hospital was like, and also in order to interview staff and patients for the BBC.) During the experiment, which was conducted by Dr Humphrey Osmond, Mayhew pays unusually close attention to patterns he saw on a curtain hanging just out of shot, which he describes as having “the most extraordinary gradations of mauve, and ah, and ah, lights (sorry, it’s just my own poverty of vocabulary, I can’t describe it)”, and declares himself “amused” when Osmond ventures that “it look[s] to be a rather dull orange-red curtain”.

A variety of other causes of hallucinations are discussed in Oliver Sacks’ book. Among them is sensory deprivation (“the prisoner’s cinema”), which is commonly held to be the cause of the most celebrated fictional hallucinations in modern literature – those of the unnamed female protagonist in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper – an early example of the multiple forays writers of fiction have made into the arena of “madness” and mental health treatment over the last century and a half. Gilman’s spare prose does not actually assert, but encourages readers to infer, that the growing fascination with the wallpaper which is the central preoccupation of the book is the direct result of the application of a form of the ‘rest cure’ promulgated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Dr Silas Weir Mitchell.

This managed regime of seclusion, bed rest and diet inter alia became a target of early feminists such as Gilman and (Virginia) Woolf, and it is easy to see why. They thought that the “rest cure” amounted to an assault upon the wills of (usually female) patients on the part of (usually male) doctors, in the context of unequal power relations between the sexes. No doubt they were right about the inequality of power between the sexes, but, as has been acknowledged within second wave feminism, it hardly seems fair to lay the blame for this entirely at the door of medical practitioners. “The nervous women of the fin de siècle were ravenous for a fuller life than their society offered them, famished for the freedom to act to make real choices,” writes Elaine Showalter. The doctors of that generation did nothing to dismantle patriarchy, true enough, but they did employ the “rest cure” to restore their patients, some of whom “had been total invalids of many years’ duration”, to “lives that were much more active and satisfying than the ones they had been leading”.¹

Of course, such was not the case for the fictional protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper. Her visual hallucinations, of the patterns on the wallpaper forming bars behind which a woman was (or many women were) trapped, comprise an eloquent protest, not so much against Weir Mitchell, Gilman’s ostensible target, as against the historical and social constraints that framed Victorian womanhood.

1 Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady (Virago, 1985), pp. 140-144.

In the Frame for April

This month’s In the Frame is ‘Red and Blue Abstract’, an anonymous work produced as part of a series of experiments, overseen by Maudsley doctors Eric Guttman and Walter Maclay in the 1930s, into the hallucinogenic effects of the drug mescaline. Since “mescaline hallucinations are predominantly, though not exclusively, visual,” they wrote, “a description of them by  means of drawings and pictures could be expected to be somewhat more impressive, and perhaps more realistic, than a verbal account”. “Artists who were willing to volunteer their services” were “given enough mescaline to cause hallucinations and were asked to sketch what they saw”.¹

The Archivist has chosen to highlight ‘Red and Blue Abstract’ on the strength of his reading of Oliver Sacks’ latest book, Hallucinations, which (according to one reviewer) is “a superb synthesis of the literature on these arresting, disturbing and sometimes terrifying phenomena” as well as “a profound work of humanity”.² In the public imagination, hallucinations are most closely associated with the experience of schizophrenia, and are often highly feared on that account, but Sacks writes relatively little about schizophrenic hallucinations (phenomena that demand separate consideration, in his view), preferring to focus his attention on hallucinations arising from “organic” psychoses – “the transient psychoses sometimes associated with delirium, epilepsy, drug use, and certain medical conditions”.³

Anyone who has read the description, cited by Sacks, of the drug-induced hallucinations written by Daniel Breslaw – a participant in a 1960s experiment not entirely dissimilar to Guttman and Maclay’s – might be forgiven for detecting shades of ‘Red and Blue Abstract’ in his account.

“I closed my eyes. ‘I see stars!’ I then burst out, finding the firmament spread out on the inside of my eyelids. The room about me receded into a tunnel of oblivion as I vanished into another world, fruitless to describe…The heavens above me, a night sky spangled with eyes of flame, dissolve into the most overpowering array of colours I have ever seen or imagined; many of the colours are entirely new – areas of the spectrum which I seem to have hitherto overlooked.”⁴

‘Red and Blue Abstract’ is by an anonymous artist, but another participant in the mescaline experiments, Basil Beaumont, wrote to Dr Guttmann in 1936 that his “appreciation of beauty, particularly flowers; is still enhanced greatly” and that his “painting is becoming more brilliant in colour”. Another of Guttman’s correspondents, a medical colleague, drew attention to a far less welcome by-product of the experiments:

“I hope you will not feel that I am interfering in writing to you, but I wonder if you know what sort of an experience taking mescaline can be in some cases? Have you taken it yourself? … In the case of the younger man [to whom you gave mescaline last Friday] it was an experience so hideous that no human being ought to undergo it without the very gravest necessity.  No one would go into it voluntarily if he had the slightest notion what it was going to be like; also in his case, it might have had disastrous consequences.  … I must tell you that but for luck, in that I happened to see him and detain him, I firmly believe he would have murdered his friend that night in a state of hallucination and I think also that if he not been under observation at the Maudsley he might at one point… have committed suicide.”

Sacks’ chapter on drug-induced hallucinations, in which he describes visionary experiences – in turn elevating and terrifying – that resulted from his own habitual drug use in the 1960s and 70s, makes for equally unsettling reading, and invites as much wonder concerning the abandon shown by previous generations of researchers as ‘Red and Blue Abstract’ does concerning the vision of the artist.

¹ W. Maclay and E. Guttmann, ‘Mescaline Hallucinations in Artists’, Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, vol. 45, no 1 (1941).

² Raymond Tallis, ‘Oliver Sacks on Drugs’, The Times Literary Supplement, 13 February 2013.

³ Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations (Picador, 2012), p. xiii.

⁴ ibid, p. 99.

Biography and Psychology III: Walter Abraham Haigh

Walter Abraham Haigh was first admitted to Bethlem in October 1882. He was a tutor, who held a B.A. from Oxford University, and was 27 years old. He was diagnosed with Delusional Insanity and described as excited, and subject to fixed delusions and hallucinations, particularly of persecution. Victorian society was heavily class-based, and it may thus have been Haigh’s educated background that made his own explanations of his illness seem particularly interesting to his doctors: his casenotes are peppered with quotations, apparently reported verbatim.

Moreover, the extensive nature of the notes concerning Haigh suggests that he often conversed with the doctors, in addition to his usual asylum pursuits of playing the violin and chess. Haigh and superintendent, George Savage, certainly worked closely together. In March 1885, it was recorded that he “has during the last year rendered considerable assistance to Dr Savage in the production of his Manual of Insanity.” Indeed, Haigh is one of just two people acknowledged in the preface to Savage’s textbook: “W. Haigh, Esq., who has not only corrected my proofs, but has by criticism aided me much in the legal chapters.”

Without prior knowledge, it would be impossible to tell from Savage’s book that Haigh was one of Savage’s patients. Indeed, Haigh and Savage’s relationship serves to blur the distinction between doctor and patient entirely: it is Haigh who suggests his own treatment (the insertion of a seton in his neck – see image below for explanation of this treatment by “counter-irritation”), and the doctors quickly acquiesce. Moreover, despite continuing to admit to hallucinations and delusions often considered “dangerous” by Victorian psychiatrists, Haigh is given a free pass key to the asylum, although he is unwilling to leave the grounds, feeling suspicious of strangers.

Walter remained in touch with doctors at Bethlem after his discharge, regarded as well, in July 1888. He visited the Hospital over the Christmas of the same year, mentioning that he had been living in Dieppe as a tutor. The next year, he decided to go into the Church, and in 1890 took priest’s orders. Judging from his many letters, Haigh continued to suffer from the “hallucinations and illusions of contempt and persecution” that he had long complained of, but was nonetheless able to work and live outside the asylum (without, of course, the aid of medication), and does not appear to have been certified again, although he did return to Bethlem three times for a short stay as a voluntary boarder in the 1890s. “As to what my perversions of sensations are no “sane” person would have any idea.” He wrote in 1890, “But I do despise those who know I have been certified and who judge ignorantly.”

 

Image from Armamentarium Chirurgicum by Johannes Scultetus, c. 1655

Wellcome Library, London

Phantasmagoria: New Exhibition Explores Hallucinations in Art

A new exhibition opens at the Bethlem Gallery next week, exploring hallucinations in Surrealist paintings and drawings from the collection of the Bethlem Archives and Museum. Artworks, by Basil Beaumont, Herbrand Williams, Julian Trevelyan and others, were created as part of series of experiments at the Maudsley Hospital into the hallucinogenic effects of the drug mescaline in the late 1930s.

In the late 1930s two of the Maudsley doctors, Dr Eric Guttman and Dr the Hon Walter Maclay started a series of unprecedented experiments. In previous studies both doctors had noted that many patients suffering from schizophrenia wanted to make art in an attempt to ‘explain themselves’. However, they also noted that only a minority of patients had the capacity to translate their hallucinations into pictorial form. These findings led the doctors to invite professional artists from the Surrealist movement, who they believed shared their interests in the unconscious and irrational, to take part in experiments involving the drug mescaline. The results of these Mescaline hallucinations or ‘experimental psychosis’ are a vivid and revealing insight into the psychology of those involved.

All are welcome at the Opening Event, which takes place on Wednesday 25 August, from 3 – 6pm.

Exhibition continues: 26th August – 10th September
Opening times: Wed, Thurs, Friday, 11am – 6pm
(including Saturday 4th September 11am – 6pm, when the Archives and Museum will also be open)
Address: The Bethlem Gallery, Bethlem Royal Hospital, Monks Orchard Road, Beckenham, Kent BR3 3BX
Travel: Nearest British Rail: Eden Park (or a short bus ride from East Croydon on route 119 or 194)