ABSTRACT
In “Howl,” with its bitter references to futile somatic psychiatric treatments including ECT, Allen Ginsberg was addressing his friend Carl Solomon, whom he met while both were patients at the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey. The circumstances behind their admissions were rather different. Ginsberg’s followed his arrest after stolen goods were found in his apartment and a vehicle he was riding in. Solomon’s admission was voluntary. His “Report from the Asylum” provided an account of insulin coma therapy that was both vivid and dismal. 1 Solomon began the essay by citing Kalinowsky and Hoch’s textbook, which he rightly named as the era’s defi nitive work. He cited it to show, as the authors conceded, that the reason ECT worked was mysterious. Solomon wrote:
This confession of ignorance (and it is extended to both insulin and electric shock therapies), by two of the men who usually place the electrodes on the heads of mental patients at one of four psychiatric hospitals, certainly opens the fi eld of inquiry to the sensitive layman as well as to the technician. 2
But the mystery of the effi cacy of shock treatments would prove to be a minor complaint. Solomon conceded the fact of his illness early in “Report from the Asylum,” but concluded the essay with what he called a “total rejection” of psychiatry, and indeed by questioning the category of madness itself. He quoted French poet Antonin Artaud, whose involuntary ECT itself became notorious: “A vicious society has invented psychiatry to defend itself from the investigations of certain superior lucid minds whose intuitive powers were disturbing to it.” 3
Beat literature was an opening salvo in the attacks on psychiatry that would collectively be called the antipsychiatry movement. Another example is Seymour Krim, whose brother had a lobotomy-which Seymour cosigned for-that ended in death by cerebral hemorrhage. 4 When Seymour himself was 33 and living in Greenwich Village, he wrote, “The pressures in my head exploded.” He ran barefoot in the street, spat at family members, exposed himself in public, and ultimately was taken to a private institution
in Westchester, where he received insulin coma therapy. He complained there that the causes of his illness were never explored, and he was treated condescendingly, like a child. After discharge, he moved back to Manhattan, where he stayed at a cheap Broadway hotel because he felt too ashamed to go back to the Village. After a suicide attempt he was again institutionalized, and received ECT at a Long Island hospital. Here again, he complained that most of the patients in the hospital were not truly insane, but simply people with problems, and that there was no serious attempt to make them independent adults, but only efforts to suppress their problems with pills and shock treatments. A mental hospital, he said, “is not an asylum or a sanctuary in the old-fashioned sense: it is just a roped-off side-street of modern existence, rife with as many contradictions, half-truths and lousy architecture as life itself.” 6 His psychiatrist, by contrast, touted the values of adjustment to society and called Greenwich Village a “psychotic community.” 7 Krim regarded his cure more of a chastisement than a true healing process, and he considered it necessary to completely rethink the idea of insanity. The best minds of his generation, he concluded, were destroyed not by madness, but by a certain interpretation of madness. 8
Historian Gerald Grob has argued that it was the infl uence of the Freudian domination of psychiatric thought, and the expansion of that way of thinking into everyday life, that above all led to the antipsychiatry movement. 9 Freudian psychiatry, he argues, encouraged a social activist psychiatry. By moving attention away from biology and to the social environment, it led psychiatry to aspire to leading social reform, assuming a priest-like mantle. This overreach, Grob maintained, led to the reaction of antipsychiatry.
