Autobiographies of Former Mental Patients

Abstract

Many years ago one of us was introduced by a senior colleague to Thomas Hennell's fine book, The Witnesses (23), and so began in a desultory way to collect accounts of their illnesses written by mentally ill people. We have found that many people know a few books of this genre and speak warmly about their usefulness. One gets the impression that these books are unobtainable. In 1956, after reading Hunter's and MacAlpine's (44) translation of the Schreber Memoirs, and later Schizophrenia, 1677 by the same authors, which consists of Haitzman's account of his illness, we realized that these books had played and could play an important part in the development of psychiatric theory. Indeed, the psychoanalytic theory of schizophrenia derives from the Schreber Memoirs and, although Hunter and MacAlpine rebuke Freud for his extremely selective use of those memoirs, they do not suggest that any systematic study of these writings would be valuable. Psychiatrists of many different persuasions have been given to examining a host of historical, literary, and mythical characters from Moses to Popeye the Sailor; but so far we have been unable to find any systematic study of this uniquely valuable body of information provided by the sick themselves.