ABSTRACT
Mary Barnes was born into a family which was to be accused by her of madness-inducing perversity. A decade after Barnes was beginning her affair with anti-psychiatry a book was published describing the intimate and intense details of her emotional and bodily performances during the height of her period of madness in the 1960s. Much of the detail about Barnes's muddled journey into and through life is taken from Barnes and Berke's book. Barnes undertook a pre-nursing course at a technical school and then became a probationer nurse at the age of 17 years. She hated nursing, she hated her superiors, and she hated what she describes as the 'nursing machine'. The use of mental institutions as 'therapeutic communities' had been inferred in the work of nineteenth-century psychiatrists Esquirol and Griesinger. At times Barnes hits Esterson, a practice she was to extend to other medical practitioners while at Kingsley Hall, one of whom was to reciprocate likewise.
