Quotations/Comments

730-701

730

Greyhound has scrapped an advertising campaign that extolled the relaxing effects of bus travel, above [There's A Reason You've Never Heard Of "BUS RAGE" / over a picture of a Greyhound bus], after a passenger was accused of repeatedly stabbing and then beheading a traveler in the next seat while their bus was on a desolate stretch of highway in Manitoba last week.
Abby Wambaugh, a Greyhound spokeswoman, said Wednesday that a billboard and some posters near a bus terminal in Toronto would be removed before the end of the day; similar advertisements in western Canada and other parts of Ontario had already been removed, she said. Vince Weiguang Li was charged with second-degree murder in the death of Tim McLean, the traveler.

[ Canada: Greyhound Pulls Ad Campaign, Associated Press, in The New York Times, 8/7/08, p. A 9 ]

Toronto - The animal rights group PETA has tried unsuccessfully to run a newspaper ad comparing the beheading and cannibalizing of a passenger on a Greyhound bus in Canada last week to the treatment of animals by the meat industry.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said on its Web site that it wanted to run the ad in Manitoba's Portage La Prairie Daily Graphic, which is distributed in the city where a man stabbed a fellow passenger multiple times, then beheaded him and ate pieces of the body.
But city editor Tara Seel said Thursday that the newspaper has no intention of running the ad, which uses imagery of a victim's throat being cut.

[ Newspaper won't run PETA's Greyhound ad, The San Francisco Chronicle, 8/9/08 ]

This ghastly case once again demonstrates the horrifying consequences which can result from the actions of a person driven berserk by schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease. Tim McLean, 19, the innocent and unsuspecting victim of his seat-mate and fellow bus traveler Vince Weiguang Li's sudden outburst of frenzied, lethal madness, had been sleeping peacefully in his seat with his headphones on - according to news reports - when his life was brutally and quickly ended by the crazed actions of Mr. Li.

Somehow this sight of Tim McLean in the seat next to him must have precipitated in Mr. Li an overwhelmingly powerful surge of homosexual feelings, feelings which Mr. Li had long dealt with by total denial and repression until this fateful moment when finally he could no longer hold them back, converting them in his unconscious mind - in the typical paranoid schizophrenic projective pattern - from intense homo-erotic love into furious hate. "No, I don't love him, I HATE him," followed immediately by "No, I don't hate him, HE HATES me and is tempting me homosexually, so I have to KILL him in order to protect myself from his satanic, perverted designs on me."

The insane ferocity of the attack on Tim McLean clearly demonstrates the strength, depth and passion of Mr. Li's homosexual attraction to him, and it was this sudden, fateful eruption of long-repressed homosexual cravings which drove him to attempt to obliterate completely any vestiges of this person who had so maddened him with homosexual temptation - even to the point of cannibalizing parts of his body.

Furthermore, lurking directly beneath this cannibalization there must have existed very powerful, paranoically repudiated oral-erotic drives focused on the body of his victim, drives which could have served as the specific "trigger” initiating Mr. Li’s frenzied assault on Tim McLean, whose hapless body Mr. Li could so easily observe lying vulnerable and unprotected - and homosexually tempting - close beside him in the adjacent seat.

The above theorizing about the cause of Mr. Li's sudden homicidal attack on his sleeping seat-mate on the Greyhound bus might seem difficult to comprehend, but in reality it is just one more of countless tragic examples of the devastating consequences which can ensue when an unfortunate person afflicted with schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, "runs amok." [See also preceding Quotations/Comments # 728 and # 727.]

To reference one of Sigmund Freud's favorite quotations,

There are more things in heaven and earth,
Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

[Hamlet, I,v,166]

729

The Incident

On a snowy winter day in 1991, Lu Gang, a slightly built Chinese scholar who had recently received his Ph.D. in plasma physics, walked into a seminar room at the University of Iowa's Van Allen Hall, raised a snub-nose .38-caliber Taurus pistol, and killed Professor Christoph Goertz, his thesis adviser; Robert A. Smith, a member of his dissertation committee; and Shan Linhua, a fellow graduate student and rival.
Next, Lu went to the office of the chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Dwight R. Nicholson, who was also on his dissertation committee, and fired three more fatal shots. Then, he walked over to Jessup Hall and demanded to see T. Anne Cleary, associate vice-president for academic affairs. When she emerged from her office, he killed her and then shot and maimed her twenty-three-year-old assistant. Finally, in an empty conference room, Lu raised the pistol to his head and killed himself.
Why a brilliant, hard-working young Chinese physicist, who had come to the US six years earlier filled with pride and hope, had come to such a bitter end is the subject of Dark Matter, a recently released feature film by Chinese-born director Chen Shi-Zheng. [......]

[from the film Dark Matter]

But he gradually becomes persuaded that his professors are conspiring to delay his degree and deny him his rightful recognition as a scholar. His growing paranoia is only heightened when his Ph.D. orals committee refuses to sign off on his thesis until he redoes some of his computations, making it impossible for him to win the top dissertation prize he feels he deserves. By the end of the film, his acute sense of humiliation has led to a psychotic state, and in a fit of murderous rage he kills the professors he once idealized.

[ Dark Matter, a film directed by Chen Shi-Zheng; in China: Humiliation & the Olympics, by Orville Schell, The New York Review of Books, August 14, 2008, p. 30. ]

Paranoia is precisely a disorder in which a sexual aetiology is by no means obvious; far from this, the strikingly prominent features in the causation of paranoia, especially among males, are social humiliations and slights. But if we go into the matter only a little more deeply, we shall be able to see that the really operative factor in these social injuries lies in the part played in them by the homosexual components of emotional life. So long as the individual is functioning normally and it is consequently impossible to see into the depths of his mental life, we may doubt whether his emotional relations to his neighbors in society have anything to do with sexuality, either actually or in their genesis. But delusions never fail to uncover these relations and to trace back the social feelings to their roots in a directly sensual erotic wish. So long as he was healthy, Dr. Schreber, too, whose delusions culminated in a wishful fantasy of an unmistakably homosexual nature, had, by all accounts, shown no signs of homosexuality in the ordinary sense of the word.

[ The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII, (1911-13), The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London, p. 60. ]

Once again Schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, had taken its deadly toll. And it answers the question posed above by the writer Orville Schell as to "Why a brilliant, hard-working young Chinese physicist, who had come to the US six years earlier filled with pride and hope, had come to such a bitter end..."

As Mr. Schell reports, citing biographical information gleaned from the movie, Dark Matter, the crazed killer Lu Chang "gradually becomes persuaded that his professors are conspiring to delay his degree and deny him his rightful recognition as a scholar." His "growing paranoia" slowly intensifies to the point he loses all control of his emotions and, in a typical "homosexual panic", erupts in a spasm of lethal fury, with all its horrifying consequences.

It was not Lu Gang's "acute sense of humiliation" which led to his psychotic state but the overpowering pressure exerted upon his beleaguered psyche by his repressed homosexual passions. "By the end of the film," Mr. Schell writes, "his acute sense of humiliation has led to a psychotic state, and in a fit of murderous rage he kills the professors he had once idealized." The substitution here of the word "idolized" for "idealized" would have been more psychologically perceptive, for it was upon these "idolized" male professors, or at least upon one of them, that Lu Gang's unconscious homosexual passions had become fixated.

Sigmund Freud has brilliantly unraveled for us the psychic "mechanics" of paranoia: "The mechanism of symptom-formation in paranoia requires that internal perceptions - feelings - shall be replaced by external perceptions. Consequently the proposition 'I hate him' becomes transformed by PROJECTION into another one: 'HE HATES (persecutes) ME, which will justify me in hating him.' And thus the impelling unconscious feeling makes its appearance as though it were the consequence of an external perception:
'I do not LOVE him - I HATE him because HE PERSECUTES ME .
Observation leaves room for no doubt that the persecutor is some one who was once loved." [The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, the Hogarth Press (1911-13), Vol 12, p. 63]

In this tragic case, Lu Gang, "the slightly built Chinese scholar", massively resisted any conscious acknowledgement of homosexual feelings towards any one of his professors, instead making the typical "paranoid shift", as outlined above by Dr. Freud, wherein his repressed feelings of love were transformed by unconscious denial into their exact opposite: "No, I don't love Professor X, I hate him," followed immediately by "No, I don't hate him, he hates me and is persecuting me, and thus I have to kill him to protect myself from harm." By this end stage in the malignant paranoid process, total insanity has finally overtaken its victim, with often disastrous consequences such as those which have been so shockingly described in this case. [See also the preceding Quotation/Comment # 728.]

In summary, the pathogenic etiology underlying every case of paranoid schizophrenia, and likewise the primary operative factor in all cases of functional mental illness - in both men and women - resides invariably in the repression and denial of exceedingly powerful homosexual passions, combined with compelling opposite-sex feelings and identifications.

Bisexual conflict and gender confusion have always ruled the world of madness - and always will.

728

Jessica was Steve's confessor. He told her everything - his long mental health history, his anxiety, his family turmoil, his recent hunger for sex with women he met through the internet, with a male professor.
He told everyone else almost nothing. [.......]

STEVE GREW UP WATCHING horror movies with his mother. Fleshy, enormous, laid out beside him on the couch. Middle of the day, and all shades are drawn. Dark. She's protective, doesn't want Steve to go outside. Won't let him play much with other children. She's not mentally right, according to Steve's godfather, but what can he do? A family feud. [.......] Whenever he focuses on work, the back of his wrist against his forehead, hand hanging out limply. Kids call him fag because of the hand. He and Adam get notes to leave class as often as possible, especially gym class, whenever a concert or performance of any kind is on the schedule. [.......] He takes fifty Depakote, goes to sleep. He's surprised to wake up. Goes to school. "I want to die," he tells the nurse. "Life sucks." [......] On colder nights, they hang out in one of the bathrooms. Twenty by twenty feet, stand-alone cinder-block huts in the wilderness. Their own concrete chalets. They're used, also, by gay cruisers. If you back into a parking space here, you're asking for a visit.
   Steve has been with a man before. He'll admit this to Jessica years later. But his friends in high school don't know. Secret sex, like his summer with Kim. [.......]
    December 14, 1996, Steve overdoses on Tylenol and calls Beth King. His parents throw him into Rush University Medical Center for a week, but it doesn't help. Nothing does. He's anxious all the time, depressed, unable to sleep. He blows up on the meds, goes from skinny to obese, three hundred pounds, in just a couple months. Rich can't understand what's happened. Steve is like a zombie, with a faraway stare. "It's like the personality was just sucked out of him," he says. [......]
   People talk about him at school that winter. He's sitting in the cafeteria, an enormous open room right off the main hall, a place you can't hide. He's with Julie and a couple of jocks come up to him. They know his sister, Susan, and they know Joe Russo's older brother and sister. They know all about him. "Hey, Suicide Steve, what's up?" one of them asks. "Uh-oh, don't say that, Crazy Mierczak might off himself," the other says. Then the first one flips Steve's tray onto the floor, all his food.
   Steve walks out to the Goth lot and Julie follows him. "Who cares about them," she says. [......]
   "Medications: Steve is currently taking Prozac 20 mg in the a.m., Zyprexa 10 mg at hs and Depakote 500 mg in the a.m. and 1,000 mg at hs. Past medication includes Paxil, Cogentin, Risperdal, Lithium and Cylert.
   "SYMPTOMS: Steve stated that when symptomatic he becomes anxious, depressed and unable to sleep. He reports losing interest in all leisure activities... has suicidal thoughts and feels worthless--." [......]
   Rather than getting better, his symptoms get worse. He's over-sedated, overweight, doesn't want to take his meds. He has special powers, though, he tells his psychiatrist. He can see his old girlfriend, Beth. And he can read minds. He has been able to do this all his life, but the power is stronger now, for some reason. He knows what they think of him here, how they underestimate him. [......] They place him in a job at Walgreen's, but he's fired after a month, in April, for poor attendance. He's hired at Osco pharmacy in June, but fired six weeks later. The next stop is Kmart in September. He thinks people are following him, that they're against him, ganging up. He gets in arguments with his coworkers, anxious and emotional. He's on Seroquel and Clozaril. [......] Seung-Hui Cho kills thirty-two at Virginia Tech. Steve's excited. He's firing off e-mails. "Crazy," he tells Jessica, and sends her Cho's writings. [......] He and Jessica move to Champaign in June, rent an apartment together. Separate bedrooms. They're not a couple any more. Relationships just don't work out for him. [......] He can't sleep, gets up to check again that he's paid all his bills, checks the alarm clock three times. He's anxious and worried about everything, paranoid. [......]
   That same day he decides to buy guns. Perhaps it's just a whim. Or maybe he's concerned that his visit to the hospital will go on his mental-health record and his gun license will be revoked. He drives to Tony's guns and Ammo, which is just Tony's house. Steve trades in his Glock .45 caliber, his .22-caliber pistol, and his 20-gauge shotgun. He buys a Sig Sauer .380. [......]
A month later he's back at McKinley, September 4, says his mother's death was a traumatic experience, still is. The doctor notes it in his evaluation. Steve worries, also, about his father, who has diabetes and hypertension and recently had a stroke. [......] The doctor asks him whether he is planning to kill himself or anyone else. He says no. They up his Prozac to 50 milligrams a day and add Xanax, 0.5 milligrams a couple times a day as needed for anxiety.
   Around this time, he calls his sister, Susan. Their relationship has always been rough. She resented all the attention he sucked in high school, and he resented how perfect she seemed. But today he's feeling okay, he wants to talk. He tells her that he thinks he might be gay. [......]
   He goes back on meds a few days later, but around this time something primal kicks in. First it's the guns. Now it's sex. He begins surfing the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist.
   He tries to hook up with "Katie," with her 44 D's, but that doesn't work out, so he moves on. Meets a male biochemistry professor from U. of I. They give each other blow jobs.
   Then he meets Kelly, an undergrad. In introduction he describes himself as "very gentleman like and respectful in person, but have a wild side." She says meeting him in a public place first "isn't absolutely necessary as long as you don't plan to chop me up and store me in the freezer. So -- don't do that.:)" He reassures her, "I'm not a serial killer/psycho or anything." [.......]
   He drives to her apartment for sex on October 23. Long blond hair, round and busty and wholesome, a bit of a redneck. They have a similar dark sense of humor, love the macabre. They're both excited about Saw 1V coming out on Friday. He has a great time with her, fun sex, and they spend a lot of time e-mailing and on the phone over the next few weeks.
   But not even Kelly is enough to satisfy his appetite now. Steve sets up a meeting with "Tracy" the next night at a bar in Champaign called the Phoenix. According to police testimony, they go to a hotel, the Econo Lodge. It's right off the freeway, the crack-and-ho section of town. They have sex. In the morning he is a gentleman, buys coffee and cigarettes. [......]
   But it doesn't help. He cannot control himself and he knows it.
   He confesses everything to Jessica. He calls her at work, tells her he is not gay. She comes home to find him a puddle of tears on the carpet. He's sobbing that she was here all along. Why couldn't he see that? [......]
   He's back on Craigslist after class, compulsively now, checking the Erotic Services section. He posts his own ad, too.
   He meets "Megan" that night at the corner of North Prospect and Bloomington in Champaign, just off the highway, the same crack-and-ho neighborhood where he had sex with "Tracy" in the fall. She's with her friend "Elyse," who doesn't look bad either. "Megan" gets into his car. They park behind a building near the Econo Lodge. Steve on top, she tells the police later. [......] He buys stamps for the package he's planning to send to Jessica. He talks with "Katie." Drives to her place. She's lit candles. He doesn't feel like talking. The have sex, and afterward, he tells her he is going out of town. [......]
   He meets again with "Megan" that night at Walgreen's. They have sex in the car again. They're back and forth eighteen times on the phone that night, dirty talk, and Steve also calls calls "Elyse."
   In the morning about 10:00, he tells Jessica not to go to work.
   "Just stay. Just hang out with me today."
   "I have to go to work," she says.
   She doesn't know and he can't tell her.
   In their apartment, he saws off the barrel of the shotgun. The guitar case, the two new guns, the extra magazines and holsters - he's hidden these things from her. He duct-tapes half of the inside of the guitar case, black tape - a riddle the police will never quite figure out. He puts the Remington 12-gauge inside, loaded. Picks up the case and it's not too heavy. [......] He's bought longer ammo clips for the pistols. They hold 33-rounds each. But the problem is they're so long he'll have to carry the pistols in his hands. [......] He wants to use the shotgun first to create confusion. And for theatrical effect. That's Kevin's theory in hindsight. [......]
   Steve's last call to Jessica is just before midnight on February 13, wishing her Happy Valentine's Day, promising her he will see her tomorrow. "Goodbye, Jessica," he says. [......]
   VALENTINE'S DAY. 3:04 P.M. Cole Hall Room 100. The end of class. Intro to Ocean Science. Many of the students are gone, since they had a test two days before.
   The stage door behind the screen bursts open. Steve walks abruptly onto the stage. He stands for the briefest moment just looking at the class, then he raises the shotgun.
   He fires into the front row of students. [......]
   He keeps shooting, a few rounds at a time. Five dead. Eighteen injured. [......]
   Then he walks away, hops back onto the stage. He's shot forty-seven bullets.
    One more shot, then silence. [......]
    A few months earlier, he told her, "One day I might just disappear and you will never find me. Nobody will ever find me."
    A few months before that, he told her, "If anything happens, don't tell anyone about me."

[ Portrait of the School Shooter as a Young Man, by David Vann, Esquire magazine, August 2008, pp. 114-126. ]

These considerations therefore lend an added weight to the circumstance that we are in point of fact driven by experience to attribute to homosexual wishful fantasies an intimate (perhaps an invariable) relation to this particular form of disease. Distrusting my own experience on the subject, I have during the last few years joined with my friends C.G. Jung of Zurich and Sándor Ferenczi of Budapest in investigating upon this single point a number of cases of paranoid disorder which have come under observation. The patients whose histories provided the material for this enquiry included both men and women, and varied in race, occupation, and social standing. Yet we were astonished to find that in all of these cases a defense against a homosexual wish was clearly recognizable at the very centre of the conflict which underlay the disease and that it was in an attempt to master an unconsciously reinforced current of homosexuality that they had all of them come to grief.1 This was certainly not what we had expected.

[ On The Mechanism of Paranoia, The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII (1911-13), London, The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1958, p. 59. ]

In the above-quoted excerpts from David Vann's brilliantly-reported story in Esquire magazine, a stunningly clear picture emerges of the horrifying consequences which can occur as the direct result of the actions taken by a young man suffering from the malignant effects of schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease.

The story of Steve Mierczak, running amok, is a story as old as history. It has been told countless times in the past and will be told countless times in the future, or at least until the root cause of such paranoid (schizophrenic) madness is finally universally recognized as being what Sigmund Freud first discovered and then explained it was in 1911 - in his penetrating and insightful analysis of the case of Daniel Paul Schreber - namely, severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion. And it will only be when a general recognition of this profound truth belatedly occurs that persons suffering from this havoc-wreaking disease will finally be treated in an appropriate manner, and if no alleviation of their symptoms can be effected by the most intensive psychological efforts, then henceforth be confined in a secure but civilized manner so that running amok, with its oft-disastrous outcomes, will no longer be a crazed option for them.

It has strikingly been demonstrated here by the Steve Mierczak case that the myriad number of psychotropic drugs often prescribed for the emotionally disturbed person are definitely not the answer to "managing", or "curing", their mental illness, and that in fact these highly toxic drugs often exacerbate the symptoms of the mental illness while simultaneously masking its underlying and often potentially lethal pathology, thereby placing everyone within the social orbit of the disturbed person in physical danger, as has been so graphically described in this particular case by the writer David Vann.

Steve Mierczak was doomed from the very the beginning of his life. Fate dealt him an unplayable hand by saddling him with a mother who was mentally ill, over-protective and verbally abusive, while concurrently establishing a crippling, castrative, emotionally symbiotic relationship with him. To quote the famed psychiatrist Dr. Harry Stack Sullivan, "From my material, in which negative instances are conspicuously lacking, I am forced to the conclusion that schizophrenic illnesses in the male are intimately related as a sequel to unfortunate prolongation of the attachment of the son and the mother." (Dr. Sullivan, who dealt almost exclusively with male schizophrenic patients, could correctly have added similar symbiotic mother/daughter relationships into his schizophrenia-engendering formulation.)

Mr. Mierczak unavoidably experienced sex-role alienation in early childhood due to his toxic relationship with his schizophrenogenic mother, and his consequent underlying effeminacy was quickly intuited by his male classmates, some of whom began calling him a "fag" and generally ridiculing him.

As his bisexual conflict and gender confusion grew more severe, fueling the varied symptoms of his mental illness, he was treated by psychiatrists with multiple hospitalizations and myriad toxic psychotropic drugs, none of which interventions addressed the true cause of his schizophrenic symptomatology.

He was finally able to gain a modicum of self-insight into his severe bisexual conflict, prompting him to visit his sister Susan to inform her he thought he might be "gay." Unfortunately, this painful admission was quickly overshadowed by a massive new self-denial of his powerful and insistent homo-erotic feelings, ones which had previously been inflamed by actual homosexual experiences with various men. "He tries to hook up with 'Katie,' with her 44 D's, but that doesn't work out, so he moves on. Meets a male biochemistry professor from U. of I. They give each other blow jobs."

His psychological defense against these ever-increasing, urgent homosexual cravings was to embark upon an obviously sexually-unsatisfying orgy of pseudo-heterosexual relationships, with many girls, leading him finally to declare to his best-friend "girlfriend", Jessica, whom he was now living within a purely platonic relationship, that he was not "gay." But by this time he had already begun his inexorable descent into a classic schizophrenic "homosexual panic," fueled as it invariably is by frustrated, overpowering homosexual cravings, thus precipitating his final bloody episode of murderous frenzy - the same frenzy which in many other societies is commonly referred to as "running amok", with its identical schizophrenic "homosexual panic" etiology.

Schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, had struck once more, leaving horrendous personal devastation in its wake.

727

Hi Mike, Well, believe it or not, we could find no one qualified to treat schizophrenia in [city deleted]. No psychotherapist. People who would talk as counselors but that is it. In [name deleted] latest episode he said that everyone at the place he is staying at had raped him. Pretty obvious but no one with insight. It is a sad state of affairs. Wish me luck in the ongoing search for someone qualified. Thanks for the brochure on Menninger. [name deleted]

[ Source: a personal communication. ]

The schizophrenic person referred to in the above quotation has existed in a paranoid schizophrenic delusional state for some time, despite all efforts to help him. The person closest to him, his mother, adamantly rejects the theory that his illness could in any way be related to severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion, the "bearded lady" disease, despite such obvious evidence of its truth as his paranoid belief he had been homosexually raped by all the other male members of the group-home where he has been living. His unshakable belief in the reality of these multiple homosexual rapes is nothing more than the paranoid expression of an unconscious wish-fulfillment of his severely repressed, overwhelmingly powerful sexual cravings to experience exactly this type of passive, feminine, anal-erotic sexual activity with other men. (As Dr. Sigmund Freud has so insightfully stated, What man represses at the deepest level are his passive pederastic instincts.)

In this case, as in all cases of schizophrenia in males [and females], the schizophrenia-engendering symbiotic relationship between mother and son [or daughter] is palpably evident. In the words of the brilliant psychiatrist, Dr. Harry Stack Sullivan, speaking here only of male schizophrenics, but applying equally to female schizophrenics:

From my material, in which negative instances are conspicuously absent, I am forced to the conclusion that schizophrenic illnesses in the male [and female] are intimately related as a sequel to unfortunate prolongation of the attachment of the son [daughter] and the mother. That schizophrenic disorders are but one of the possible outcomes of persisting immature attitudes subtending the mother and son [daughter] relationship must be evident. The failure of growth of heterosexual interests, with persistence of autoerotic or homosexual interests in adolescence, is the general formula. The factors that determine a schizophrenic outcome may be clarified by a discussion on the one hand of the situations to which I shall refer as homosexual cravings and acute masturbation conflict - often immediate precursors of grave psychosis - and of the various homoerotic and autoerotic procedures, on the other.
---Personal Psychopathology, Harry Stack Sullivan, M.D., p. 211

726

As an example of the developed schizophrenic, let us consider a former patient of mine who often sat for hours in a corner staring vacantly into space, his lips moving and silly, grimacing smiles flitting across his face. Sometimes this man would not answer questions, apparently not even hearing them, so absorbed was he in subjective contemplation. Again he would grin glassily and wink his eye or occasionally speak with passion about strange machinery in a distant city which enemies whom he referred to merely as "they" were using to inject queer colors into his thoughts and sometimes to make him ejaculate. This man at times suddenly attacked others. It was eminently necessary to keep him on a closed ward and under close supervision.

[ The Mask of Sanity, Fourth Edition, Hervey Cleckley, M.D., The C.V. Mosby Company, Saint Louis, 1964, p. 197. ]

This desperately ill schizophrenic man is blaming "they" for putting strange thoughts into his mind and at times causing him to have involuntary orgasms. Of course the "they" in his paranoid mind are undoubtedly a group of unknown male figures conspiring against him in some far-off location to bring him to orgasmic release, although Dr. Cleckley never specifically states the gender of his patient's hallucinated tormentors.

Here the patient's severe bisexual, "bearded lady" conflict is brought into sharp focus by the content of his most pathogenic delusion, that of becoming sufficiently sexually excited by other males to the point of his reaching sexual climax. And his psychological defense against, and denial of, his homosexuality would be that he was not a willing participant in these sexual escapades but had been forced to partake in them by these unknown, hostile forces.

Thus his only chance to recover from his severe psychosis would be for him finally to consciously admit that these homosexual feelings and cravings were his very own and not ones which had been forced upon him by hallucinated strangers. He would then be able to claim a "social recovery with insight," the holy grail of all psychotherapy but also the most arduous one to achieve and consequently the least often accomplished.

Lastly, He was extremely dangerous because he would suddenly physically attack other men to whom he was homosexually attracted, utilizing the "paranoid shift" (Freud) wherein he projected onto these other male figures the homosexual feelings which were really his own. "No, it is not I who am sexually attracted to these other men, they are the ones who are attracted to me and thus I have to defend myself violently against their anticipated homosexual advances."

Countless tragedies have occurred down through the ages due exactly to the above-described "paranoid shift" mechanism in mentally ill persons, of both sexes, and will continue to occur far into the future, unfortunately, or at least until the "bearded lady" cause of all functional mental illness is recognized and treated as such by all.

725

Many more come to mind whose delusions are less extreme but who for decades have manifested autistic withdrawal, oddities, emotional distortions, and impairments consistent only with a schizoid reaction.

We also see manifestations identical with those of full-blown schizophrenia in every respect except their transience. A 30-year-old man who, after taking a small dose of testosterone, experienced not only hallucinatory sexual and spiritual sensations within himself but also in others will serve as an excellent example. Vivid delusions were very prominent for approximately a week. These included an absolute conviction that all virtuous women at the mere sight of him caught the impact of magic, glowed with a fire both erotic and holy, and were visibly transformed. It was also his belief that this caused harlots who might sense his powers a block off to run up alleyways in shame. For several days, through false perceptions, he specifically "felt" men and women some miles away responding viscerally, intellectually, and spiritually, and in diverse ways, to what had miraculously become incarnate in his person. After being psychotic for a week and without specific treatment, he regained insight, lost his schizophrenic symptoms, and has for a number of years remained entirely free of them.

[ The Mask of Sanity, Fourth Edition, Hervey Cleckley, M.D., The C.V. Mosby Company, Saint Louis, 1964, pp. 348-9. ]

The importance of this case lies in its demonstration of how a sudden increase of libido in a person with an underlying psychosis - triggered in this instance by a "small dose of testosterone" - can overwhelm long-repressed "bearded lady" bisexual fantasies and desires and lead to florid schizophrenic symptomatology, directly due to the toxic effect of this newly undischarged libido. This man had been able to keep these fantasies repressed, along with the intense sexual excitation cathected to them, until the sudden addition of the sexual hormonal upsurge provided by the testosterone. Still unable, or psychically unwilling, to discharge this long-repressed sexual excitation in a "normal" manner through genital orgasmic discharge, the frustrated sexual excitement took the only route left open to discharge itself and that was through the process of physiological "conversion" into the "fuel" which energized all the various psychotic symptoms he experienced during the week or so he was ill.

After the upsurge in his libido subsided as the effect of the extra testosterone naturally diminished, he was able to resume his previous precarious balance of mental health, although still menaced by a return-of-the-repressed which could occur at any time in the future, and with the same deleterious psychotic consequences. Only through long-term psycho-analytic therapy would he be able to gain the necessary conscious insight into his repressed "bearded lady" sexual fantasies and cravings and consequently become inoculated against any future schizophrenic breakdowns.

Finally, Note should be taken of the fact that during his brief psychotic episode he felt that both men as well as women were responding "viscerally, intellectually and spiritually" to his belief that he "glowed with a fire both erotic and holy" and to that which had "miraculously become incarnate in his person."

His repressed bisexual conflict, the root cause of all functional mental illness, quite obviously reveals itself in the content of these grandiose, paranoid delusions.

724

A 39-year old man who blamed a Manhattan psychiatrist for having him institutionalized 17 years ago was charged Saturday with killing a female therapist in a furious knife attack and then slashing the psychiatrist when he had come to the woman's aid. [......] Mr. Tarloff told investigators he went to the doctors' offices with plans to rob Dr. Shinbach. Mr. Tarloff then planned to take his ailing mother, Beatrice, either out of the country or to Hawaii. [......] As Mr. Tarloff waited at the 19th Precinct station house, where he was questioned, a portrait emerged of a quiet, eccentric person who had shared a second-floor apartment in Corona, Queens with his mother until she recently moved to a nursing home. A balding, 5-foot-10 man, he was sometimes seen walking on his block dressed in slippers and a corduroy blazer. He was prone to bursts of anger, those who knew him said, and had agitated some of his neighbors by knocking on their doors and asking for money. [......] Growing up, Mr. Tarloff seemed popular with his friends, said one neighbor, Phyllis Zicherman, who said she had know the Tarloffs for decades. She said he had attended college but left under unknown circumstances - around the time she and other neighbors said they noticed he began to change. And his mother's absence profoundly affected him, several neighbors said. "He was depressed because of his mom," Ms. Zicherman said. [......] In August 2007, officers responded to his father's Staten Island address and treated him as an emotionally disturbed person. At that time, his father, Leonard, told officers he was "off his medications," the police said.

[ Queens Man Is Arrested In the Killing of a Psychologist in Manhattan, by Al Baker, The New York Times, Sunday, February 17, 2008, p. 23. ]

This week, Mr. Tarloff's father, Leonard, said his son did not seem to realize he had killed anyone. He quoted Mr. Tarloff saying, "Dad, they say I killed some lady," and then adding, "What are they talking about?"

[ 2 Experts Find Suspect Fit to Stand Trial in Fatal Stabbing of Therapist, by Anemona Hartocollis, The New York Times, February 23, 2008, p. B12. ]

Detectives have found two suitcases the assailant left behind in the office. One held women's fluffy slippers and a blouse, as well as disposable diapers for adults; the other had eight knives, three lengths of rope and duct tape. The crime scene provided a trove of forensic evidence: blood at the scene was being collected and analyzed, traces of the attacker's DNA were being sought and detectives were trying to gather fingerprints and fibers.

[ In Killing of Therapist, Police Question Pennsylvania Man Linked in E-mail, by Al Baker, The New York Times, February 15, 2008, p. C10. ]

From my material, in which negative instances are conspicuously absent, I am forced to the conclusion that schizophrenic illnesses in the male are intimately related as a sequent to unfortunate prolongation of the attachment of the son and the mother. That schizophrenic disorders are but one of the possible outcomes of persisting immature attitudes subtending the mother and son relationship must be evident. The failure of growth of heterosexual interests with persistence of autoerotic or homosexual interests in adolescence, is the general formula. The factors that determine a schizophrenic outcome may be clarified by a discussion on the one hand of the situations to which I shall refer as homosexual cravings and acute masturbation conflict - often immediate precursors of grave psychosis - and of the various homoerotic and autoerotic procedures on the other.

[ Harry Stack Sullivan, M.D., Personal Psychopathology (Early Formulations), W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, 1965, 1972, p. 211. ]

This is the tragic story of a schizophrenic man driven to a murderous rage by the sexual and emotional frustrations arising from his severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion.

Mr. Tarloff's case fits the classic picture of the emotional background of a person who develops schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease. Beginning at a young age (the original name for this devastating illness was "dementia praecox", or precocious dementia, because it was noted that its symptoms first became operative early in a person's life, around the age of puberty or shortly thereafter), Mr. Tarloff's neighbors first reported that he "began to change" after he had dropped out of college, for reasons unknown to them. From that point on his life followed a predictable schizophrenic pattern, becoming ever more eccentric and bizarre, with paranoid suspicions insidiously beginning to predominate in his psyche.

He had apparently very early in life developed what has often been referred to by certain psycho-analytic investigators as a "close-binding-intimate", or "CBI", relationship with his mother, a psychically very intense, castrative, symbiotic attachment which is extremely difficult to overcome and which is also frequently to be observed in the background of men (and women) who later in life become homosexual. This fact adds further proof to the theory that schizophrenia invariably springs from the repression of a person's homosexual, or opposite-sex tendencies and identifications. Homosexuality and schizophrenia are in reality the opposite sides of the same coin, both conditions springing from the pathological symbiotic mother-child relationship which is described above. Homosexuality repressed becomes schizophrenia.

The fact that on the night Mr. Tarloff's long-simmering, repressed bisexual conflict and gender confusion triggered his violent episode of "running amok", with tragically fatal consequences for an innocent female victim, it was discovered that in the two suitcases he was carrying with him were knives, ropes and other paraphernalia in one and "women's fluffy slippers and a blouse, as well as disposable diapers for adults" in the other. Since his original intent had been to rob the male psychiatrist and not violently to assault the female psychologist, these female items of wear must definitely have been meant for his own use and gratification in some type of cross-dressing behavior which partially satisfied his repressed homosexual, opposite-sex tendencies and longings. It was further reported by his neighbors that he was often seen out "walking on his block in slippers and corduroy blazer." It could arguably be surmised that these were the same "women's fluffy slippers" that he had in the one suitcase on the night of his psychotic rampage, and perhaps also that he was wearing the same feminine "blouse" under his "corduroy blazer".

Mr. Tarloff was a "mama's boy" of the most extreme type and this inevitably schizophrenia/homosexuality-engendering condition eventually culminated in his explosive paranoid schizophrenic breakdown with its accompanying fit of lethal madness.

"Dad, they say I killed some lady....What are they talking about?", the delusional Mr. Tarloff is reported to have told his father. This case is but one more example of the countless human tragedies which have been caused by schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, throughout the history of mankind.

Mr. Tarloff's madness caused the suffering and death of one person. The madness of Hitler and Stalin caused the suffering and death of many millions. Of course not all such cases of schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, lead to such violent death and destruction, but nonetheless they all do lead to immense emotional and physical suffering, not only for the individual schizophrenic himself (or herself) but also for all other persons who are, or become, in any way involved in that unfortunate person's life, thereby becoming directly impacted by his or her paranoid thinking and "crazy" behavior.

723

Continuing, she said the bedspread in the master bedroom had been damp from Mike sitting on it after his bubble bath. She'd tossed it in the trash. Mike had forgotten to turn off the spigots, and water had overflowed onto the hardwood floors. Their insurance agent had already inspected the damage and issued them a check to replace - not clean, but replace - all their upstairs carpet and to remove and replace the hardwood floors. It seemed extreme to me, but I kept silent. I couldn't answer most of her "whys." My son had been psychotic. How do you explain the actions of a mentally ill person? But I apologized again, and then again. But she wasn't finished. What if Mike came back? She said she was frightened for her teenage daughter. Mike had taken his bubble bath in the bathroom that the girl used. Her daughter was scared, too. The woman said her family had loved this house. It had been their dream home. Now none of them felt safe in it. Whenever she heard a noise, she wondered: Is someone breaking in? Is it a crazed person?

[ Crazy, A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness/ Pete Earley, Berkley Books, New York, April 2007, p. 30. ]

The fact that this young man, in the overpowering grip of a schizophrenic breakdown, would smash his way into a stranger's home, rummage throughout it, ending up in a teenage girl's bedroom and bathroom where he stripped naked and then proceeded to take a leisurely bubble bath, points inexorably to deep-seated bisexual conflict and gender confusion on his part. He was obviously unconsciously identifying himself as a female in an area where he was surrounded by feminine trinkets and accessories, while indulging himself in that most feminine of all bathing rituals - the bubble bath. So there was definitely "method to his madness," i.e., the fulfillment of very powerful opposite-sex urges and desires which had long been repressed and had finally broken through to gain some semblance of symbolic satisfaction by means of his schizophrenic "bearded lady" psychosis.

722

A.

Schreber is by no means the only patient ever to have experienced being unmanned, or transformed into a woman. In Psychopathia Sexualis Richard Von Krafft-Ebing reports just such a case, which he diagnoses as "METAMORPHOSIS SEXUALIS PARANOIA" (l965: 261). The patient was a physician with a wife and five children. What precipitated his experience of being transformed into a woman was not, as with Schreber, either a half-asleep or a fully-awake thought of female voluptuousness but "extract of Indian Hemp." The patient consumed "three of four times the usual dose of it and almost died of hashish poisoning." Suddenly he saw himself "a woman from my toes to my breast." He felt that "the genitals had shrunken, the pelvis broadened, the breasts swollen out." The next morning he experienced "himself completely changed into a woman," with "vulva and breasts" (1965: 267). He felt "like a woman in a man's form." and even when he was "sensible of the man's form," he always experienced it "in a feminine sense." He experienced "penis as clitoris," "urethra as urethra and vaginal orifice," and "scrotum as labia majora." Occasionally he felt "fetal movement" (1965: 269). He also felt the "physiological desire for procreation" (1965: 270). He experienced sexual intercourse in a feminine way and always felt that "I am impregnated" (1965: 271). Like Schreber, he too engaged in cross-dressing, wearing such "female attire" as "gloves" or "a veil" (1965: 272) or "a bracelet above the cuff" (1965: 273). He liked "female drawers and petticoats" and "crinolines" (1965: 274).
Both Krafft-Ebing's patient and Schreber experienced the illusion of being transformed, or "metamorphosed," into a woman. They both feel that their male bodies have been changed into female bodies and that they have been impregnated. They both cross-dress. The only difference between them is that Schreber believes that his unmanning is the result of divine intervention to serve a supernatural purpose, the renewal of mankind.

[ The Fantasy Principle / Psychoanalysis of the imagination, by Michael Vannoy Adams, Brunner-Routledge, New York, 2004, pp. 109-110. ]

B.

       From then on my wife's visits ceased; when after a long time I did see her again at the window of a room opposite mine, such important changes had meanwhile occurred in my environment and in myself that I no longer considered her a living being, but only thought I saw in her a human form produced by miracles in the manner of the "fleeting-improvised-men." Decisive for my mental collapse was one particular night; during that night I had a quite unusual number of pollutiuons (perhaps half a dozen).
       From then on appeared the first signs of communication with supernatural powers, particularly that of nerve-contact which Professor Flechsig kept up with me in such a way that he spoke to my nerves without being present in person. From then on I also gained the impression that Professor Flechsig had secret designs against me; this seemed confirmed when I once asked him during a personal visit whether he really honestly believed that I could be cured, and he held out certain hopes, but could no longer - at least so it seemed to me - look me straight in the eye
       I must now discuss the nature of the frequently mentioned inner voices which since then have spoken to me incessantly, and also of what in my opinion is the tendency innate in the Order of the World, according to which a human being (" a seer of spirits") must under certain circumstances be "unmanned" (transformed into a woman) once he has entered into indissoluble contact with divine nerves (rays). The next chapter is devoted to an exposition of these circumstances; this is, however, infinitely difficult.

[       MEMOIRS OF MY NERVOUS ILLNESS, by Daniel Paul Schreber, Translated, Edited, with Introduction, Notes and Discussion by Ida Macalpine, M.D. and Richard A, Hunter, M.D., M.R.C.P., D.P.M., Wm. Dawson & Sons Ltd., London 1955, pp. 68-69. ]

C.

For all students of psychiatry, Schreber, its most famous patient, offers unique insight into the mind of a schizophrenic, his thinking, language, behaviour, delusions and hallucinations, and into the inner development, course and outcome of the illness. His autobiography has the advantage of being complete to an extent no case history taken by a physician can ever be:
its material in not selected or subject to elaboration or omission by an intermediary between the patient and his psychosis, and between both and the reader. Every student therefore has access to the totality of the patient's products. Indeed the Memoirs may be called the best text on psychiatry written for psychiatrists by a patient. Schreber's psychosis is minutely and expertly described, but its content is - as Dr. Weber explained to the court - fundamentally the same and has the same features as that of other mental patients. Schrebe's name is legion.

[ Ibid., Macalpine and Hunter, p. 25 ]

The schizophrenic man described in Quotation A., a married physician with five children, is afflicted with schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease, in exactly the same way as is is Daniel Paul Schreber, a German Superior Court judge, also married but with no children, who vividly describes his own psychosis in Quotation B. Both of these highly educated and professional men have succumbed to their mental illness as the direct result of having repressed immensely powerful homosexual, or opposite-sex tendencies and sexual desires - in the case of Dr. Schreber, these repressed sexual feelings were initially particularly directed towards Professor Paul Emil Flechsig (see Quotation B. above), Director of the Psychiatric Clinic at the University of Leipzig where Schreber was first hospitalized.

As dramatic as the schizophrenic symptoms of these two men are, as presented to the reader in Quotations A. and B. above, the "content" of Dr. Schreber's psychosis "is - as Dr. Weber explained to the Court - fundamentally the same and has the same features as that of other mental patients. Schreber's name is legion." (Ibid, Macalpine and Hunter, p. 25.)

Dr. Weber was the Superintendent of the Sonnenstein Asylum in Germany where Dr. Schreber was held for many years before his final release. Along with the unnamed physician in Quotation A., he and Dr. Schreber prove the inarguable correctness of Dr. Weber's assertion that all mental patients have basically fallen ill due to their severely repressed, overwhelmingly powerful, bisexual conflict and gender confusion - the "bearded lady disease."

Schreber's name truly is legion, and it applies equally to all mentally ill women as well.

721

Studies that evaluate only sex differences offer few clues as to how recovery interventions might be customized for men and women with schizophrenia. Nasser and associates (4) recently noted the critical need for future research initiatives in schizophrenia that expand beyond the dichotomous comparison of male and female differences.

Cultural expectations for men and women with schizophrenia may differ, and it has been reported that men with schizophrenia may be less able to carry out normative gender role activities than their female counterparts (4). A limited body of literature on gender identity and schizophrenia suggests that men and women with schizophrenia may experience disturbed sex role identification (5). Perhaps in relation to deep and pervasive stigmatization of mental illness, men and women with schizophrenia often appear "genderless" insofar as mental illness itself is perceived to eclipse other factors in identity.

In the study reported here we evaluate gender identity among men and women with schizophrenia by characterizing level of self-identification with traditionally masculine and feminine role concepts. We hypothesized that gender identity among persons with schizophrenia is likely to differ from normative gender orientations among men and women. Specifically, we hypothesized that men with schizophrenia would have less identification with characteristics associated with male gender than would men who did not have schizophrenia.
....particularly directed towards Professor Paul Emil Flechsig (see Quotation B. above), Director of the Psychiatric Clinic at the University of Leipzig where Schreber was first hospitalized.

[ Gender Identity and Implications for Recovery Among Men and Women With Schizophrenia, by Martha Sajatovic, M.D.; Janis H. Jenkins, Ph.D.; Milton E. Strauss, Ph.D.; Zeeshan A. Butt, M.A.; Elizabeth Carpenter, M.A.; PSYCHIATRIC SERVICES, January 2005, Vol. 56, No 1. ]

The final sentence quoted in this excerpt from the above article would have been more accurate and informative if it had ended with the following phrasing: "...and that women with schizophrenia would have less identification with characteristics associated with female gender that would women who did not have schizophrenia." Bisexual conflict and gender confusion applies equally to both sexes in its relationship to those unfortunate persons who are afflicted with schizophrenia, as has been documented countless times in the book "Schizophrenia - The Bearded Lady Disease" and also on this website under the New Quotations/Comments section, and in the Impressions section.

The comment by the authors of this quoted article that "Perhaps in relation to deep and pervasive stigmatization of mental illness, men and women often appear 'genderless' insofar as mental illness itself is perceived to eclipse other factors in identity," have incorrectly tried to fathom this oft-noted appearance of "genderlessness" in schizophrenics. Schizophrenics appear "genderless" solely because their severe bisexual conlflict/gender confusion has left them unsure, at a deep unconscious level, of which sex they really belong to.

The authors of this article assigned to the 90 schizophrenic subjects of their investigation a "Masculine T score" and a "Feminine T score." The average Masculine T score among the 49 men in the study was 37.8 and Feminine T score was 49.5. In other words, these 49 schizophrenic men identified more strongly with feminine values (49.5) than with masculine ones, (37.8). The 41 female schizophrenics had an average Feminine T score of 50.4 and a Masculine T score of 39.9, a male/female score somewhat more sex-appropriate then the men showed but still edging close to a 50-50 split (50-40). No wonder, then, that these schizophrenic persons appear "genderless - the men more female-oriented and the women split fairly evenly between a male/female orientation.

Because these schizophrenics are so bi-sexually conflicted, it is almost impossible for them to obtain normal orgasmic sexual satisfaction, the lack of which is the immediate cause of the toxic effect of the undischarged libido which triggers and "fuels"- by the physiological "conversion" process of the blocked sexual energy - the multitudinous psychiatric symptoms encountered in both schizophrenia and all other closely-related functional mental illnesses. In reality, functional mental illness is but one disease process invariably caused by severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion - regardless of the different names attached to the variegated symptoms of the illness.

For an excerpt from an excellent article on this same topic, please refer to Quotation/Comment 250 in "Schizophrenia - The Bearded Lady Disease," or refer directly to the article itself, "A Serendipitous Finding: Sex Roles and Schizophrenia," by Frances E. Cheek, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 69, No. 4, 1964, p. 393.

720

Mike I didn't go to the mountains today. It was snowing. If the weather is good I will go tomorrow.

I had a dream today which I have never had before. I dreamt that I made love to a woman who had breasts and penis. I had to tell you this. I feel free by telling you. I think that it points to my bisexual conflict. I am going to start rereading your book today. You are the most intelligent man I know. Please tell me what you think about the dream.

Mike I think that a basis for a successful relationship is to have the same point of view on things. I love you.

[ A personal communication approved by sender for release. Likewise the following comment. ]

The person who wrote the above-quoted message is a 33-year-old unmarried female, presently unemployed and living at home with her parents. She has been suffering from a very severe case of paranoid schizophrenia [See item # 37 in the Impressions section of this website] and is currently under the care of a female psychiatrist who has prescribed psychotropic drugs which the patient intensely dislikes taking.

Lately, there has been a marked diminution in her paranoid symptoms as she begins to come to grips with her severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion, the pathogenic core of her mental illness, as it invariably is in all such cases. Her first breakthrough in this regard was a recent dream wherein she had no breasts. The next such dream is the one quoted above where she dreams she has made love to another woman who has breasts and a penis.

Both these dreams obviously refer to her repressed bisexual conflict and gender confusion.

Slowly but surely, however, she is allowing these long-repressed, wishful homoerotic and gender-confused fantasies to emerge from her unconscious mind where they have long festered and grown toxic due to their heretofore total psychic and physiological denial. And it is the libido attached to these repressed fantasies which has provided the "fuel" which has been energizing her paranoid symptomatology. Thus, no repressed libido - no paranoid symptoms. (Actually, no repressed libido - no mental illness of any kind, for functional mental illness is but one disease, with one invariable cause - repressed bisexual conflict/gender confusion, as we have now learned by examining countless similar cases. This is an universal truth, an immutable law of nature.)

Thus as this young woman, at first cautiously and presently mainly with the aid of her dreams, courageously begins a conscious evaluation and analysis of her formerly repressed, thus unconscious, homoerotic and transvestite desires and feelings, she is in effect slowly curing herself of her malignant mental illness - paranoid schizophrenia. She is well on the road to achieving that best of all possible outcomes in her battle against mental illness - a social recovery with insight - thereby providing herself with the means and the potential for experiencing a happy and fulfilling future, regardless of whatever sexual orientation she eventually adopts as being the most compatible with her maturing psycho-physiological needs.

For a somewhat similar case, please refer to the book, Mary Barnes (Two Accounts of a Journey Through Madness), by Barnes, M. and Berke, J., as quoted from in Schizophrenia - The Bearded Lady Disease, Quotations 321-331 (inclusive). [See this latter cited book in its link on this website.] Fortunately for Mary Barnes, she was able to achieve her life-saving and life-affirming insight without the use of powerful, toxic anti-psychotic drugs.

Again, the principal reason these drugs can sometimes be useful in curbing the more florid manifestations of psychosis is due to their libido-inhibiting affect, consequently diminishing the "fuel" supply which energizes the symptoms. Or, as so perfectly expressed by the above correspondent (sender) in a separate communication, "My libido is small now due to the drugs."

719

Even modern young people might find it difficult to understand that one could doubt one's physical sex. Cases of a contrary feeling of sex identity are rare, but they exist, and they are, in a marginal way, relevant to my theory of lesbianism. There are homosexual women and men who suffer from psychosis, and with them contrary sex identity is not uncommon. The illusion of being a member of the opposite sex occurs more frequently in the lesbian than in the male homosexual.

Although this condition is not directly relevant to the research on which this book is based, and has no general application to lesbianism per se, it nevertheless throws some light on certain lesbian predicaments. We learn about extraordinary behavior through extreme cases, and mental illness is therefore a valuable teacher in our understanding of the unusual. I vividly remember two patients of mine who believed themselves to be male. Both were homosexual; one told me she was able to 'penetrate' her girl friend, and the other assured me that she had frequent ejaculations of semen. Both were schizophrenics.

[ Love Between Women, Charlotte Wolff, M.D., St. Martin's Press, New York, 1971, pp. 47-48. ]

Again we see, as noted in the last two cases in the above quotation, that the pathogenic, elemental core of schizophrenia invariably consists of severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion. A similar, starkly revealing case proving this point is outlined by Dr. R.J. Stoller in his book, Splitting (A Case of female Masculinity), wherein his patient vehemently and delusionally insists, despite all arguments to the contrary by her attending psychiatrist, that she does indeed have a normal, functioning penis which she uses with great effect and genital satisfaction in sexual intercourse with her female lovers. [See Quotations 99 through 105 in the book, Schizophrenia, The Bearded Lady Disease, posted in a separate link on this website.]

Every mentally ill woman suffers, to a greater or lesser degree, from this same "splitting" between her male and females sides, as, of course, does every mentally ill man. In lay terms, "schizophrenia" has always stood for "split personality." How accurate that assessment has proved to be can be corroborated by the above cases. When Dr. Eugen Bleuler, in the early 1900's, chose the name "schizophrenia" for the serious mental pathology formerly called "dementia praecox," he was incorporating the Greek word "schizo", meaning "split", into the new name for the disease without fully realizing that the "split" being referred to was in actuality the split between the male and female sides of each patient. All humans (and animals) have this same essential bisexual split, but only in man does it become pathogenic to the point of engendering mental illness because of the unnatural sexual repression of the young of almost all races, due to harsh religious and cultural taboos. This repression makes it extremely difficult for the young person to work through sexually his or her natural bisexual nature and then emerge from the acute hormonal upsurge at puberty with a satisfactory sexual identity which coincides with their genital, biological sex.

718

A family spokesman said Murray grew up in a loving home. But other interviews and what appears to be Murray's online ramblings portray a disturbed individual who resented his sheltered upbringing, had problems with his mother, heard voices in his head, felt rejected and abused -- and yet appeared to be searching for a place to belong.

He sought refuge in everything from an online forum for recovering Pentescostals to an occult group.

These volatile ingredients combined Sunday morning when the 24-year-old Murray killed five people, including himself, and injured several others in a rampage that spanned 70 miles, from a missionary training center that expelled Murray to Colorado Springs' New Life Church, a symbol of the Pentescostal and charismatic Christianity he so despised.

Murray, as promised on the Web, came "armed to the teeth" with an assault rifle, handguns and 1,000 rounds of ammunition.

[ “Walking a Twisted Path,” By Eric Gorski, Associated Press, Marin Independent Journal, 12/13/07, p. A4. ]

Matthew Murray was afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease. The fact that he "heard voices in his head" is but one of the myriad symptoms he displayed confirming this diagnosis, it being one of the illness's most striking symptoms.

Most information about Murray has become known in recent days through ranting Internet posts that appear to be the shooter's words. On one, a poster called Chrstnghtmr complained of not being able to "socialize normally" after being home-schooled.

One posting was to a site called Independent Spirits, a gathering place for those affected by a strict Christian home-schooling curriculum.

[ Ibid, Gorski, p. A4. ]

Whenever it can be shown that a person regularly engages in "ranting" behavior, it is but one more proof of that person's paranoid schizophrenic symptomatology. (See the reported incident of Chris McCandless's "ranting" diatribe in the preceding Quotation # 717.) This same diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia may be accurately applied to many past and present world leaders who have also been known to indulge in similar ranting-type behavior.

Chrstnghtmr [the Internet post] writes that at age 17, after an attempt at going "all out for Jesus," he plunged into a "dark suicidal depression."

Chrstnghtmr describes his parents putting him on two antidepressants after he shared his feelings.

None of it helped, he wrote. "Everyone prayed, they laid their hands on me, spoke in tongues over me, sought out every kind of spiritual help I knew of," the post added.

[ Ibid, Gorski, p A4. ]

A stranger happening upon this scene of a quiet young man being surrounded by a group of people babbling "in tongues over" him while they "laid hands on" him might understandably surmise that the young man being thus ministered to was the only sane member of this group.

The fact that Matthew had succumbed to a "dark suicidal depression" highlights the deadly nature of his schizophrenic breakdown and portends the tragedy to come, as suicide and homicide are always the opposite sides of the same schizophrenic coin, self-directed murder or other-directed murder. In every case of mass killings such as this, the perpetrator, or "shooter", has invariably been in the grip of just such a suicidally depressed mental state as had been Matthew Murray when he embarked upon his own lethal rampage.

A former YWAM [Youth With a Mission] staff member, Michael Werner, said Murray was painfully shy and had trouble socializing after growing up sheltered. Later he exhibited extreme moods swings, spreading rumors about homosexuality at the center and performing dark rock songs by Marilyn Manson and Linkin Park at a 2002 Christmas celebration.

[ Ibid, Gorski, p. A4. ]

Matthew's "strict home-schooling curriculum" kept him from the normal heterosexual socialization which he would have been able to experience in a regular school setting, thereby contributing greatly to the strengthening of his already latent homosexual proclivities. As a result, these proclivities eventually became so powerful and insistent that a paranoid state developed, clearly demonstrated by his act of "spreading rumors about homosexuality at the center." He had by then made the typical "paranoid shift," - (No, It is not I who am homosexual, it is the others at the YWAM center.) And once this paranoid shift had occurred and been locked into his psyche, the path led inexorably to the tragedy of his "running amok" in an orgy of mayhem similar to that which had recently transpired in the case of the Virginia Tech massacre, committed by another "suicidally depressed" young man, Seung-Hui Cho.

Cho, like Matthew Murray, was afflicted with schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease, as were the perpetrators of the Columbine school massacre and the countless other blood-baths before and since, on ad infinitum.

717

"I don't recall Alex ever talking about any girlfriends," says Westerberg. "Although a couple of times he mentioned wanting to get married and have a family some day. You could tell he didn't take relationships lightly. He wasn't the kind of a guy who would go out and pick up girls just to get laid."

It was clear to Borah, too, that McCandless hadn't spent much time cruising single bars. "One night a bunch of us went out to a bar in Madison," says Borah, and it was hard to get him out on the dance floor. But once he was out there, he wouldn't sit down. We had a blast. After Alex died and all, Carine [his sister] told me that as far as she knew, I was one of the only girls he ever went dancing with."

In high school McCandless had enjoyed a close rapport with two or three members of the opposite sex, and Carine recalls one instance when he got drunk and tried to bring a girl up to his bedroom in the middle of the night (they made so much noise stumbling up the stairs that Billie [his mother] was awakened and sent the girl home). But there is little evidence that he was sexually active as a teenager and even less to suggest that he slept with any woman after graduating from high school. (Nor, for that matter, is there any evidence that he was ever sexually intimate with a man.) It seems that McCandless was drawn to women but remained largely or entirely celibate, as chaste as a monk.

[ Into The Wild, by Jon Krakauer, First Anchor Books Edition, February 1997, pp. 65-66. ]

The story of Christopher Johnson McCandless (self-named “Alexander Supertramp”) is the story of a young man slowly but surely succumbing to the ravages of schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease, caused by his severe unconscious bisexual conflict and gender confusion. The severity of this conflict triggered his inexorable descent into a suicidal depression following the total relinquishment of any "normal" heterosexual interests.

Chris seldom contacted his parents that year, and because he had no phone, they couldn't easily contact him. Walt and Billie grew increasingly worried about their son's emotional distance. In a letter to Chris, Billie implored, "You have completely dropped away from all who love and care about you. Whatever it is--whoever you're with--do you think this is right?" Chris saw this as meddling and referred to the letter as "stupid" when he talked to Carine.
"What does she mean 'whoever I'm with'?", Chris railed at his sister, "She must be fucking nuts. You know what I bet? I bet they think I'm a homosexual. How did they ever get that idea? What a bunch of imbeciles."

[ Krakauer, Ibid, pp. 124-5 ]

Perhaps Chris's parents did think he might be homosexual, but more importantly, as shown by his comments here, Chris was unconsciously questioning his own very shaky sexual identity. As that old saying goes, "Methinks the lady doth protest too much!", here becomes "Methinks Chris McCandless doth protest too much!"

In the final postcard he sent to Wayne Westerberg, McCandless had written, "If this adventure proves fatal and you don't ever hear from me again I want you to know you're a great man. I now walk into the wild." When the adventure did indeed prove fatal, this melodramatic declaration fueled speculation that the boy had been bent on suicide from the beginning, that when he walked into the bush, he had no intention of ever walking out again. I'm not so sure, however.

[ Krakauer, Ibid, pp. 133-134 ]

Author Jon Krakauer is intuitively correct when he states that he was "not so sure" that Chris was, without a doubt, intent on committing suicide. What Chris was displaying here was the schizophrenic's typical overwhelming ambivalence about every aspect of his (or her) existence, invariably rooted in the unconscious conflict over that person's sexual identity - male or female, homosexual or heterosexual. A part of Chris wanted to commit suicide to ease the pain caused by his terrifying - because it had been denied and repressed - bisexual conflict and gender confusion, while the other, healthier part of his personality, wanted to live and thrive in the manner of all natural living organisms. Tragically Chris made several fatal errors in judgment about the techniques required and the conditions needed to ensure his survival in the wilderness.

Immediately after graduating, with honors, from Emory University in the summer of 1990, McCandless dropped out of sight. He changed his name, gave the entire balance of a twenty-four-thousand-dollar savings account to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet. He then invented a new life for himself, taking up residence in the ragged margins of our society, wandering across North America in search of raw, transcendent experience. His family had no idea where he was or what had become of him until his remains turned up in Alaska.

[ Krakauer, Ibid, page one, Author's Note ]

This paragraph describes classic, or text-book behavior in a young person being overwhelmed by paranoid schizophrenia, one of the myriad symptoms of which illness is a suicidal, clinical depression. Giving away all one's possessions, fleeing family, friends and relinquishing any relationship to society's everyday life and pursuits are always "red flag" warnings to mental health workers which indicate that a person's emotional stability and physical well-being are in great danger of total collapse, with sometimes fatal consequences, as was the eventual outcome in Chris McCandless's case.

"Nice guy, yeah, a pretty nice guy," Charlie reports. "Didn't like to be around too many people, though. Temperamental. He meant good, but I think he had a lot of complexes--know what I'm saying? Liked to read books by that Alaska guy, Jack London. Never said much. He'd get moody, wouldn't like to be bothered. Seemed like a kid who was looking for something, just didn't know what it was. I was like that once, but then I realized what I was looking for: Money! Ha! Ha hyah, hooh boy!

"But like I was saying, Alaska--yeah, he talked about going to Alaska. Maybe to find whatever it was he was looking for. Nice guy, seemed like one, anyway. Had a lot of complexes sometimes, though. Had 'em bad. When he left, was around Christmas I think, he gave me fifty bucks and a pack of cigarettes for lettin' him stay here. Thought that was mighty decent of him."

[ Krakauer, Ibid, p. 42 ]

Charlie is a very intuitive psychologist. He clearly realizes, without ever having had the benefit of any formal psychological or psychiatric training, that his young friend Chris McCandless is a very seriously disturbed individual.

More than a minute passes before Franz speaks again; squinting at the sky, he begins to reminisce further about the time he spent in the youngster's company. Not infrequently during their visits, Franz recalls, McCandless's face would darken with anger and he'd fulminate about his parents or politicians or the endemic idiocy of mainstream America life. Worried about alienating the boy, Franz said little during such outbursts and let him rant.

[ Krakauer, Ibid, p. 52 ]

These Hitler-like, ranting "outbursts" on McCandless's part are typically to be encountered in persons afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia.

There are similarities among Rosellini, Waterman, McCunn, and McCandless. Like Rosellini and Waterman, McCandless was a seeker and had an impractical fascination with the harsh side of nature. Like Waterman and McCunn, he displayed a staggering paucity of common sense. But unlike Waterman, McCandless wasn't mentally ill. And unlike McCunn, he didn't go into the bush assuming someone would automatically appear to save his bacon before he came to grief.

McCandless didn't conform particularly well to the bush-casual stereotype. Although he was rash, untutored in the ways of the backcountry, and incautious to the point of foolhardiness, he wasn't incompetent--he wouldn't have lasted 113 days if he were. And he wasn't a nutcase, he wasn't a sociopath, he wasn't an outcast. McCandless was something else--although precisely what is hard to say. A pilgrim, perhaps.

[ Krakauer, Ibid, p. 85 ]

All the evidence presented in this book points to the unalterable fact that Chris McCandless definitely was mentally ill, despite the author's misguided insistence that he was "perhaps" no more than a mere "pilgrim", seeking exactly "what" it "is hard to say." It was glaringly obvious to even the most casual observers whose paths happened to cross McCandless's during the latter's hysterical, paranoid flight from reality across the country during the months following his graduation from Emory University, that he was an extremely disturbed young man - or a "nutcase" - a fact strangely discounted by author Jon Krakauer. The author has candidly admitted in his book that in some ways he strongly identifies with the young Chris McCandless, and if this self-identification is valid it would explain Krakauer's great reluctance to accept the reality of what was plainly evident to everyone else, namely that McCandless indeed was "crazy", or just another of the multitude of persons throughout the world who are victims of paranoid schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease.

As for the thought that McCandless may also have had sociopathic tendencies to go hand-in-hand with his paranoid schizophrenia, one has to look no further than the wanton, unprovoked destruction and vandalization of the two vacant bush cabins located just several miles distant from the abandoned bus whose interior McCandless had made over into his final home. It was never positively established that McCandless was the perpetrator of this senseless cabin vandalization, but according to author Krakhauer one of the cabin owners was thoroughly convinced that McCandless had been the culprit. Ironically, if he was responsible for having destroying the cabins, in a fit of insanity, he thereby also destroyed his last chance to seek shelter later in much warmer and better-equipped quarters than those prevailing on the bus he lived in. Either one of the cabins could have provided him with the shelter he so desperately needed to save his life when the living conditions on the dilapidated bus were rapidly and lethally deteriorating.

Chris McCandless was afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia, the same illness that had afflicted Judge Daniel Paul Schreber and countless other unfortunates down through the history of man. And this dreadful disease will continue to wreak its havoc presently and for ages to come unless the pathogenic force lurking at it core - severe bisexual and gender confusion - is recognized for what it is, accepted as the truth and then acted upon in order to attack and destroy the illness. The mental image of a young Chris McCandless dying alone in his derelict bus, terrified, freezing and starved, when he obviously had such great potential but for the destruction wrought upon his mind and body by his paranoid schizophrenic symptomatology, makes it imperative that this malevolent disease be conquered once and for all.

"Schreber's name is legion," as was stated by Doctors Macalpine and Hunter, translators from the German of the book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, written by the paranoid schizophrenic jurist, Judge Daniel Paul Schreber, and made famous by Sigmund Freud's brilliant and insightful interpretation of Schreber's madness as being caused by his repressed bisexual conflict and gender confusion. Judge Schreber, incarcerated for many years in a German mental asylum in the late 19th century, finally partially recovered from his severe mental illness by consciously accepting his theretofore fiercely denied and repressed transvestite, or opposite-sex, tendencies, at least to the point where he was able to be discharged from the asylum and resume control of his everyday personal affairs.

Unfortunately, however, Judge Schreber was never fully able to face the painful truth that his powerful opposite-sex feelings were really his very own sexual feelings and not ones which had been forced upon him by an all-powerful and demanding God for the sole purpose of using his newly-formed female body with which to bring forth upon the earth a new race of human beings. Thus, tragically, Judge Schreber remained mentally ill until the end of his life due to his psychological inability to integrate completely his transvestism, harmoniously and without repression or conflict, into his conscious awareness and self-image as a distinguished German jurist, intellectual and husband.

It should again be emphasized that a psychosis is in reality nature's way of trying to cure the individual of his or her madness by forcing into psychic awareness all of the toxic emotional and sexual material which the mentally ill person has long repressed into his or her unconscious mind. There it has festered and grown like an infected boil until invariably erupting - the psychosis itself - and letting escape into conscious awareness all of the pathogenic material inside. It is only then that the organism can begin the long, tedious process of healing itself.

To reiterate, the psychosis facilitates the person's repressed - thus toxic- mental and physical bisexual imagery and cravings, the frustrated, dammed-up sexual energy from which "fuels" the myriad symptoms of the mental illness, to emerge into conscious awareness where they can then be more constructively dealt with through the processes of sublimation and/or abreaction - hopefully to the point where they lose their toxic energic power to keep the various symptoms of the mental illness actively in operation. [As a clear example of this process, see Quotation/Comment #528 in the book, Schizophrenia-The Bearded Lady Disease.]

If today's anti-psychotic drugs had been available in his time and given to Judge Schreber, his "invaluable book" (Freud) could never have been written and consequently it would have taken Dr. Freud much longer, if ever, to have ascertained the true cause of paranoia - repressed homosexual cravings. And since paranoia in reality encompasses all functional mental illness, science owes an incredible debt of gratitude to Schreber's bravery and painful self-honesty in laying bare before an astonished world the torments he had suffered in his illness and the critical insights he had gained from them. Most unfortunately the current multitude of psychotropic drugs all act as great depressors of self-insight, and because of this deleterious and unforeseen consequence of their use, the person's mental illness is perpetuated indefinitely. Only self-insight into their bisexual conflict and gender confusion will enable the psychiatric patient to heal himself or herself. There is no other way, and never will be. "A social recovery with insight" is the magic, golden phrase, and this result should be the final, salubrious goal of all psychotherapeutic and psychiatric intervention.

In every mentally ill person's case, the only hope for a "cure" of their mental illness is for him or her to gain conscious insight into the bisexual conflict/gender confusion issues lying at the core of their illness, and furthermore the only way this can ever be accomplished is by the mentally ill person engaging in intensive, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, thus allowing the person the opportunity consciously, for the very first time, to face and work through these bisexual issues which are so painful and terrifying to the person's self-image and self-esteem, and therefore are the basic reason they had been repressed originally. As a consequence of this psychoanalytic psychotherapy, hopefully the mentally ill person will be enabled to gain the desperately-needed, curative insight into the bisexual conflict/gender confusion issues which invariably form the pathogenic core of their "mental breakdown," call the latter by whichever arbitrary psychiatric name you will.

As R.D. Laing's famous patient, Mary Barnes, once explained, by being allowed to experience fully, and then work through, her psychosis in a secure setting and without the use of any mind-numbing psychotropic drugs with which to damp it down and mask its most salient features, she was enabled to gain the critical insight which helped her go back "to my real girl self through my pretence layers of girl on boy." In other words, she was finally enabled to become a truly mentally healthy, feminine woman, "a social recovery with insight."

Likewise, for a psychotic male to effect a similar "social recovery with insight", he too must be helped to acquire the psychological tools which will enable him to go back "to my real boy self through my pretence layers of boy on girl." Only then will he be psychologically ready to accept his truly natural, masculine self, just as Mary Barnes had finally been enabled to accept her truly natural, feminine self - thereby effectively curing herself of her schizophrenic "bearded lady" illness. Exactly the same path, except in reverse order, must be trod by the male schizophrenic patient if he wishes to be cured of his own schizophrenia.

Consequently it can never be emphasized strongly enough that it is only by means of intensive, psychoanalytic psychotherapy - without the use of self-insight-deadening psychotropic drugs - that this marvelous goal of normal mental health and well-being can ever be achieved. Admittedly drugs are sometimes needed to tranquilize a berserk person, but always the final goal of any psychiatric intervention should be to stabilize the individual to the point where intensive psychotherapy can be initiated.

716

Yet those who know her say that questions about Sergeant Lannaman's death remain unsettled, and go well beyond psychic agonies that she struggled with her entire life. "From the day she was born she was different," Barbara Lannaman, her mother, said. "Life was not satisfactory to her."...

... Born in Kingston, Jamaica, she spent nine years in the Navy, then bounced from job to job. By the time she was 42, in the spring of 2003, Denise Lannaman had been a firefighter, a sailor, a film-maker, a scuba diver, a paramedic and an auto mechanic.

She also had been a frequent psychiatric patient, her family says, an iron-willed perfectionist who had dealt with life's ragged edges by making four suicide attempts.

"I knew she was different all along," her sister, Michelle Forgenie, said. "On top of that she was also lesbian. They're very homophobic in Kingston. And we didn't understand it, either, at a time when she needed us to understand it."

After she left the Naval Reserve in 1992, she passed the examination for New York City corrections officer, but could not get past the psychological screening, Ms. Forgenie said ...

... "She missed one of the enlistment interviews because she was in a psychiatric bed," Ms. Forgenie said. "She had to get a note that she was in the hospital. That time, she tried to kill herself with pills and liquor, sitting out in the driveway."

Her doctor refused to clear her for duty. "She found another one, I guess, who took her blood pressure, vital signs, signed the note," Ms. Lannaman said. Somehow, she passed the military's psychiatric review. On May 23, 2003, she enlisted in the New York Army National guard, and in January 2005, deployed to Iraq as a sergeant, based in Tikrit. She often drove to Baghdad at night. She thrived, say family and friends. ...On a convoy, a truck blew up in front of her, killing soldiers. She shook it off. She waived the limit on her service and signed up for another three years.

Then she took on what, for her, was a more dangerous assignment: a desk job at a procurement office in Camp Arifjan in Kuwait. In December 2005, Sergeant Lannaman was assigned to work with a logistics group that purchased millions of dollars in supplies. ...On Oct. 1, she had a private meeting with a superior officer, said George Roach, a retired Army sergeant first class who served as the military liaison with the family. A military investigator later told the family that at this meeting, Sergeant Lannaman was told that she would be sent home in disgrace, Ms. Forgenie said. "We were not given a reason," she said.

A few hours later, she was found dead in a jeep from a gunshot wound. She had just turned 46.

"Were they trying to scare her, had she stepped on toes of people who were profiteering, did someone threaten to expose her homosexuality," Ms. Forgenie asked.

[ From Queens to Kuwait, “Where a Life Was Ended,” by Jim Dywer, the About New York column, New York Times, 9/19/2007, p. A-24. ]

This is basically the story of a woman who had suffered from schizophrenia - the bearded lady disease, almost her entire life. She was a male in every aspect of her life but biologically/genitally. She thought like a male; acted like a male; dressed like a male; loved like a male; looked like a male - and, finally, suicided like a male, using a firearm instead of the "softer", more "feminine" methods of self-destruction such as sleeping pills or alcohol, etc.

To reverse the wording in the famous quotation attributed to the noted paranoid schizophrenic patient, the nineteenth century German judge, Daniel Paul Schreber, "I would like to meet the woman who, faced with the choice of either being a demented human being in female habitus, or a spirited man, would not prefer the latter."

Sgt. Lannaman definitely chose the "latter," which enabled her to escape being floridly psychotic her entire life. Undoubtedly her suicide resulted from her having been officially informed that she was being discharged from her beloved Army, where her masculine, warrior-like ways stood her in excellent stead, due to accusations of homosexual activity on her part. After being tormented by her severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion for so many years, leading to four previous suicide attempts, she had finally found a "home" in the Army and a way of life that agreed with her masculine self-identity completely, only to have it suddenly taken away from her.

Tragically, It was more than she could stand.

715

“At 10:55 am Dr. Minor came to the bottom gate, which was locked, and he called out: 'You had better send for the Medical Officer at once! I have injured myself!'"

The words are the first lines of a brief penciled note that lurks anonymously among the scores of other papers that measure out the trivial details of the life of Broadmoor's patient number 742. Reports of the more mundane features of William Minor's now almost solitary life - his diet, his steadily diminishing number of visitors, his growing frailty, his curmudgeonly lapses, his insane ruminations - are usually made in ink, the writing steady and confident. But this single page, which is dated December 3, 1902, is very different. The fact that it was written in thick pencil sets it apart - but so does the handwriting, which makes it look as though it was scrawled urgently, in a hurry, by a man who was breathless, panicky, in a state of shock.

Its author was the Block 2 principal attendant, a Mr. Coleman. He had good reason to be appalled:

I sent Attendant Hartfield for the Medical Officer and went to see if I could assist Dr. Minor. Then he told me - he had cut his penis off. He said he had tied it with a string, which had stopped the bleeding. I saw what he had done.

Dr. Baker and Dr. Noott then saw him and he was removed to the B-3 infirmary at 11:30am. [sic]

He had taken his walk before breakfast as usual. Also he took his breakfast. I was talking to him at 9:50 in Ward 3, when he appeared to be just as usual.

[ The PROFESSOR and the MADMAN, A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Simon Winchester, Harper Perennial, New York, 1999, pp. 189,190. ]

[See also New Quotations/Comments 714 and 701.]

… He was a compulsive and obsessive masturbator. God would be certain to punish him dreadfully should he fail to halt his wholesale dependence upon self-abuse.

His prodigious sexual appetites in particular started to become particularly abhorrent to him: He began to be haunted by the memory - or the fantastic supposed memory - of his past sexual conquests. He began to loathe the way his body responded, and with the way God had so inappropriately and unjustly equipped him. As his medical file reported:

He believed there had been a complete saturation of his entire being with the lasciviousness of over 20 years, during which time he had relations with thousands of nude women, night after night. The nightly dissipations had had no perceptible influence on his physical strength, but his organ had increased in size as the result of such constant use, his constant priapism had allowed it to develop enormously. He remembers a Frenchwoman remarking "bien fait!" on first seeing it; another woman had called him "an apostle of pleasure"; sexual adventure and fantasy gave him as much pleasure as anything else in the world.

But when he became Christianized he saw that he must sever himself from the lascivious life that he had been leading - and decided that the amputation of his penis would solve the problem.
(Ibid, p. 192)

He was desperately certain that it was his penis that had led him to commit all the unsavory deeds that had so dominated his life. His continuing sexual desires, if not born in his penis, were at least carried out by it. In his delusional world he felt he had no alternative but to remove it. He was a doctor, of course, and so knew roughly what he was doing.

So on that Wednesday morning he sharpened his knife on a whetstone. He tied a thin cord tightly around the base of his member to act as a ligature and to pressure-cauterize the blood vessels, he waited for ten minutes or so until the vein and artery walls had become properly compressed - and then, in one swift movement that most would prefer not to imagine, he sliced off his organ about one inch from its base.

He threw the offending object into the fire. He relaxed the string and found that, as he had expected, there was almost no blood. He lay down for a while to ensure there was no hemorrhage and then walked almost casually to the lower gate on the ground floor of Block 2 and called for the attendant. His training taught him he would probably now go into shock, and he supposed that he needed to be put into the asylum infirmary - as indeed the astonished Broadmoor doctors ordered.

[ (Ibid, pp. 193,194) ]

When author Simon Winchester says of Dr. Minor that "he began to loathe the way his body responded, and with the way that God had so inappropriately and unjustly equipped him," without realizing it he was describing the hidden psychological reasoning and motivation behind Dr. Minor's self-castration; for unconsciously the Doctor's greatest wish was to become a woman so he could have sexual relations with men and avoid being called that hated and feared word, a homosexual. The sexual equipment chosen for him by God - the despised penis - rendered that deepest and most repressed desire impossible of fulfillment. Thus in his schizophrenic, delusional state he attempted to rectify this frustrating sexual dilemma by destroying the penis which, at some deep psychological level, he intuitively recognized was the basic source of all his misfortunes and of his mental illness. In this regard his self-castration made perfect "rational" sense, just as it does today for any male transgendered person who wishes to submit to such gender-altering surgery in order to turn himself into, as far as physically possible, a full-fledged female.

His obsessive, compulsive, pseudo-heterosexual masturbatory behavior over the years he spent in the asylum was his defense against his much more powerful and deeply repressed homosexual cravings, whose frustrated, thus ever-present sexual tension he was partially able to drain off by means of his constant masturbation to ostensibly heterosexual phantasies. When even this final avenue of escape from his fiercely insistent homosexual cravings failed him, he took the only course left to him which was to neuter himself by cutting off his offending penis. (It should be noted here that in every case of satyriasis in men and nymphomania in women, this same element is always at work, namely, a defense against repressed homosexual cravings.)

Again to quote the profoundly intuitive words of the psychotic German Judge, Daniel Paul Schreber, the subject of Sigmund Freud's brilliant interpretive study and analysis of paranoia, "I would like to meet the man who, faced with the choice of either being a demented human being in male habitus, or a spirited woman, would not prefer the latter. Such and only such is the issue for me." (Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, p. 149, Wm. Dawson & Sons Ltd., London, 1955, translated from the German by Doctors Ida Mcalpine and Richard A. Hunter.)

Schreber partially overcame his demented, paranoid state by becoming psychologically, and to some extent even physically, a female in order to fulfill God's wishes for him to do so. Fortunately, however, he never went so far as to castrate himself outright as did the totally deluded Dr. Minor, in the unforgiving grip of his "bearded lady" disease.

Among schizophrenic males, cases of self-castration have occurred sporadically throughout recorded psychiatric history, always for the same reasons as illuminated above which drove Dr. Minor to perform his own.

714

Except Dr. Minor, that is. Fiends have been creeping about in the interstices between floors and ceilings and have wrought mischief and committed crimes - not least in Broadmoor, where they hide and crawl out at night, to abuse the poor doctor nightly, mark his books, steal his flute, and torture him cruelly. The hospital, he says, must have solid floors built in: otherwise, no fire insurance, and a host of nightly misdeeds.

The daily reports flow in a kind of seamless syrup of insanity. Four cakes stolen; his flute gone; his books all marked; he himself frog-marched up and down the corridor by Attendants James and Annett. A spare key used at night to allow villagers into his rooms to abuse him and his possessions. Doctor Minor, in his drawers and shirt, stockings and slippers, complaining that small pieces of wood were forced into his lock, that electricity was used on his body, that a "murderous lot" had beaten him during the night and left a savage pain all along his left side. Scoundrels came to his room. Attendant Coles came at 6 A.M. and "used my body" - "It is a very dirty business," he screamed one morning, standing now only is his drawers, "that a fellow cannot sleep without Coles coming in like that." Again as before: "He made a pimp of me!"

[ THE PROFESSOR and the MADMAN, A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Simon Winchester, Harper Perennial, New York, 1999, p. 158 [See also New Quotation/Comment 701.] ]

Although the men talked principally about words - most often about a specific word, but sometimes about more general lexical problems of dialect and the nuances of pronunciation - they did, it is certain, discuss in a general sense the nature of the doctor's illness. Murray could not help noticing, for instance, that Minor's cell floor had been covered with a sheet of zinc - "to prevent men from coming in through the timbers at night" - and that he kept a bowl of water beside the door of whichever room he was in - "because the evil spirits will not dare to cross the water to get to me."

[ (Ibid, p. 179 above) ]

It is very obvious that Doctor Minor's insanity is caused by his repressed homosexual longings and cravings, which ego-dystonic elements of his psyche he has long denied and consequently repressed into the depths of his unconscious mind, where, unfortunately, and as is invariably the case, they have consequently become powerful enough to unhinge his mind due to the toxic affect of their undischarged libidinal, or orgasmic, tensions.

The "electricity" that Dr. Minor complains was "used on his body" is the direct result of his repressed homosexual phantasies which, due to their repression, have no other way to express themselves physiologically. The cure would be for him to masturbate to these phantasies to relieve the tremendous, pathology-causing orgasmic pressure which their damming-up has effected. (This "cure" would apply equally to insane women.)

713

        Ramírez somehow avoided deportation. But through an apparent misreading of letters from his family, he had already decided never to return to Mexico, believing that the Cristero Rebellion had irreparably divided his household when it consumed his property.
       In 1931, The San Joaquin County police arrested him for vagrancy. And believing him incoherent, perhaps because of their own inability to speak Spanish, they had him committed to Stockton State Hospital.
       After several incidents of escape and re-arrest, psychiatric authorities pronounced Ramírez incurably schizophrenic. His eventual transfer to DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn provided an environment stable enough to allow him to draw frequently, something he had begun to do in the margins of letters in the mid-'20.
       Confined for decades and isolated from fellow Spanish-speakers, Ramírez appears to have made a world on paper in which to roam and shelter. He used whatever materials he could scavenge until his keepers began to make them available. He continued to produce drawings until shortly before his death of pulmonary edema at DeWitt hospital in 1963. ... … Even a glance at the 90-odd drawings at the San Jose Museum registers the mysterious magnetism of Ramírez's work.
       Lines and structures repeat themselves relentlessly in his drawings, typically forming hills or valleys when they curve, and when angular, room-like or stage-like enclosures. Ramírez seemed to draw these patterns with unwavering conviction. Through or within them, tracks and trains pass pistol-wielding horsemen - such as Ramírez himself had once been - or Madonna-like figures present themselves.
       Ramírez's images have provoked speculation as to their meaning since before the public first saw them. The exhibition contains an excellent survey of his art's critical reception, to which it adds fresh nuances.

[ “An artist tragically confined still found freedom of expression” by Kenneth Baker, Chronicle Art Critic, San Francisco Chronicle, July 14, 2007, p. E1, E10. ]

The key to Martin Ramírez's "bearded lady" conflict, the cause of his schizophrenic breakdown, can be found in the two themes which are constantly present in the great majority of his pictures - either that of the "pistol-wielding horsemen" or of the "Madonna-like figures." These two themes represent his basic bisexual conflict and gender confusion, the "pistol-wielding horsemen" standing for his active, masculine side and the "Madonna-like figures" standing for his passive, feminine side.

On the cover of the newspaper article about Ramírez, on the left side of the page there is an old, faded, standing photograph of the artist, while on the right is a much larger standing drawing of one of his "Madonna-like" figures. This latter figure is drawn with thick, dark eyebrows and shows a startling resemblance to Ramírez's own facial portrait. Two tiny hands protrude from long sleeves and the fully-clothed figure has a markedly feminine "hour-glass" figure, with a very small waist.

Even the casual observer of these two pictures could not help noticing a strong connection between them due to the facial similarities in the photograph of Ramírez and the one in his drawing. Basically in this latter figure he has drawn himself as the Madonna, as he has also done in countless other of his drawings during his artistic career. And it was directly due to this powerful, unconscious self-identification as an ultra-feminine "Madonna", clashing so violently with his conscious, masculine self-identification as a fierce, "pistol-wielding" horseman, that eventually caused him to succumb to the ravages of schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, which is the invariable outcome in all such cases of severe, unconscious bisexual conflict and gender confusion.

Lastly, the actual photo of Ramírez shows him to be a handsome man, but of very slight build and with noticeably small hands. These hands resonate strongly with the tiny hands he has drawn on the Madonna figure described above, adding further weight to the thesis that in the drawing he was in reality depicting his unconscious feminine self-image.

712

"I found her sitting on the roof chanting at 4 a.m.," her husband [name and age deleted] said of that day about 25 years ago. "She was puffing away at four packs of cigarettes. She said her mountain gods had saved our son in a sort of bargain. I slapped her face to help her get her wits back.

"Then her eyes blazed like those of a wild dog about to bite a man."...

... Korean Shamanism is rooted in ancient indigenous beliefs shared by many folk religions in northeast Asia. Most mudangs are women who say they discovered their ability to serve as a mediator between the human and spirit worlds after emerging from a critical illness. They believe that the air is thick with spirits, including those of dead relatives, a fox in the hills behind a village, an old tree or even a stove. These spirits interact with people and influence their fortunes....

... There are shamans who venerate Jesus, the Virgin Mary, even Park Chung-hee, the late South Korean military strongman. Under the pro-American military governments of the 1970s, there were shamans who took Gen. Douglas MacArthur as their deity. When MacArthur's spirit possessed them, they donned sunglasses, puffed on a pipe and uttered sounds that some clients took for English.

[ “Shamanism Enjoys Revival in Techno-Savvy South Korea,” by Choe Sang-hun, The New York Times, July 7, 2007. ]

The woman whose husband found her sitting on the roof chanting in the early morning hours was obviously undergoing a paranoid schizophrenic psychosis. As is the case with all such "prophets" or founders of new "religions," the sudden discovery of their mystical, prophetic powers comes after their "emerging from a critical illness, " which is invariably a paranoid schizophrenic breakdown caused by severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion.

In this particular incident, the wife's great underlying anger against her husband in particular, and undoubtedly against all men in general, is clearly demonstrated by the husband's description of her after he had "slapped her face to help her get her wits back," as having eyes that "blazed like those of a wild dog about to bite a man." Clearly this is not a portrayal of a normal, feminine-oriented woman or wife. Her long-repressed masculine feelings and instincts had finally broken through their repression in the unconscious and gained ascendancy and expression through her paranoid psychosis.

It should be noted here that a psychosis is in reality nature's way of trying to facilitate the emergence of long-repressed, ego-dystonic and opposite-sex sexual and emotional feelings into the conscious awareness of the person undergoing the breakdown. Thereafter these ego-dystonic feelings may either be re-repressed (a social recovery without insight) or else worked through until they are no longer toxic to the individual (a social recovery with insight).

"Prophets" fall into the first category of those individuals who quickly re-repress these ego-dystonic feelings and thereafter construct around them an elaborate and religiously-toned paranoid fantasy system which is then presented to the world as being either a uniquely new religion or else a different world-view of an already existing one.

The invariable underlying "bearded lady" aspect of schizophrenia is here perfectly demonstrated by those shamans, predominantly female, who chose Gen. Douglas MacArthur "as their deity," and then "donned sunglasses, puffed on a pipe and uttered sounds that some clients took for English."

This is clearly an outright example of transvestism being practiced by these particular female shamans. They had been "possessed" by an opposite-sex gender identification, which identification invariably "possesses" all such individuals who fall prey to schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease.

711

        Included was her favorite wedding portrait, in which she sits at the center of a pool of white satin. "My Cinderella dress spread out," she writes, "my husband kneeling on it as we share a kiss." Alexei was her first boyfriend.
       When they married in 1990, he was welcomed into the family. She calls the wedding joyous, with her father waving like the mayor as he walked down the aisle of the seaside Catholic church in their New Jersey hometown.
       After the honeymoon, they settled in Michigan, where Alexei, a fine artist, worked toward a graduate degree at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. She had been loath to leave her New York magazine job until her editors suggested that she could cover the book world in the Midwest. Everything appeared to be copacetic, but, all too soon, the marriage began to show strain. Kinsella was broadsided. "Alexei started spending more and more time at school," she writes. "He was pulling away from me." She didn't know why - or how to fix it.
       "The panic attacks to which he had always been prone came on more regularly," she writes.
       "So, we did what people do and sought counseling. After months in both couples' and individual therapy, Alexei was finally able to uncover a long-buried truth, which she details in the book. He had been molested as a child. With that dark nightmare exhumed, he then was able to acknowledge, and eventually accept, his homosexuality.

[ “Love Bloom Behind Bars,” by Heidi Benson, San Francisco Chronicle, July 1, 2007, in her review of Bridget Kinsella's book, Visiting Life: Women Doing Time on the Outside, Copyright 2007, Harmony Books, a division of Random House, Inc. ]

This marriage was obviously doomed from the start due to the groom's long-standing but deeply repressed homosexual nature. His denied and frustrated homo-erotic energy had found its disguised outlet in the so-called panic attacks to which he "had always been prone," and whose source, or trigger, was finally uncovered thanks to the intensive psychotherapy which he had undertaken.

The repressed homosexual basis for these "panic attacks," which usually occur at inopportune times and are seemingly unrelated to any current events in the afflicted person's life, has long been understood and consequently such attacks are routinely designated as "homosexual panic attacks" in Freudian psycho-analytic literature and teachings.

This factor of repressed homosexuality, deeply buried in the psyche of the bride or of the groom, and oftentimes of both, is a constant and important factor in the deterioration and termination of the great majority of such marriages, if not of all marriages.

710

The psychotherapy of neuroses and psychoses is practically differentiated into two important steps, as experience has shown. The first step is best begun with the impressive sympathetic advantages of the first interview.

Without taking a routine case history or making notes at the time, well-directed analytic- suggestive questioning is begun with the precise purpose of inducing the patient into adopting a less fearful, more relaxed attitude toward his sexual cravings, whatever they are and no matter how strong and repetitious they are, and talking about them freely. The patient has generally convinced himself that he is the only one of his kind as the result of the superior moral pretensions of his elders having been especially aimed at him. As he realizes that his attitude toward his sexual cravings and methods of trying to manage them, and not the cravings as such, have produced his illness, he improves decisively and his capacity for working and thinking becomes adequate for the needs of everyday life.

The second step is more involved and requires the inductive analytic conversion of the conditioned erotic and other emotional cravings to heterosexuality whenever possible. The former step is usually well started in an hour or two of confidential, sympathetic, understanding talk with the patient if the physician is not preoccupied with thinking in terms of neurology and toxicology.

Psychological miracles often follow as the sexual fight becomes reduced. I am sure that literally thousands of autoerotic young men and women and children in our institutions and outside, who must otherwise remain incurable psychopaths, will be helped to readjust to a healthy personal integrity when psychiatrists adopt this method. The analytic readjustment to heterosexuality requires more time but generally it can be carried on outside of the hospital in private practice. It requires the recall and reliving of every decisive episode that tended to produce a repetitious emotional displacement until a normal readjustment follows without striving.

[ “Bisexual Factors in Curable Schizophrenia*,” by Edward J. Kempf, M.D., pp. 418-419, Short Articles and Notes, Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology, Vol. 44, 1949, pp. 414-419, (*Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, May 18, 1948.) ]

In the above quotation Dr. Kempf brilliantly and deftly lays bare for the reader the repressed bi-sexualilty basis of all functional mental illness and then follows that up with clear instructions outlining the method of de-repression which will "cure" it.

It can be stated without any exaggeration or qualification that the above two paragraphs so profoundly and insightfully penned by Dr. Kempf are the two most important ones ever written in the fields of psychology and psychiatry, for very simply they illuminate, in clear, understandable terms, first the etiology of mental illness and secondly, its only cure.

Psychotropic drugs can sedate and tranquillize, but the psycho-analytic method described above by Dr. Kemp is the only one which can restore the mentally ill individual to full psychological health and general well-being. Unfortunately this curative process requires much time and great effort on the parts of both analyst and patient, but the rewards are far-reaching and irreversible.

"Psychological miracles" indeed.

709

Every human, like the lower primates and other mammals, is a plastic, bisexual mechanism in which every cell, organ, and the organism as a whole and all of its behavior are bisexually differentiated in more or less male and female ratios by chromosomal, gonadal, and socially conditioning factors. Therefore social and other environmental successes and failures have more or less masculinizing or feminizing reactive effects upon the social-sexual attitude. Every person's ontogeny recapitulates its phylogeny and begins with hermaphroditic, self-loving, polyorificial (oral, anal, and genital) autoerotism. It passes through phases of autoerotic development up to late adolescence, attended with more or less homosexual infatuation and experimentation, and eventually matures by conversion of affection toward heterosexualism and reproduction.

[ “Bisexual Factors in Curable Schizophrenia*,” Edward J. Kempf, M.D., Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology, Vol 44, 1949, p.417. ]

What Dr. Kempf is describing here is the perfect outcome of the natural mammalian sexual growth process - mankind, of course, included - which begins at birth and culminates in the potent heterosexuality which enables a species to procreate its own kind and thus ensure its evolutionary survival.

Only in man, however, can these natural stages of development go awry due to his uniquely over-developed intellect which alone, among all other mammals, possesses the strength and the motivation to enable it to repress feared or otherwise unwanted sexual urges. When this happens, the natural processes of sexual development delineated by Dr. Kempf above become derailed and the mature heterosexual goal is relinquished.

Simultaneously with this relinquishment the powerful sexual urges veer off into a less mature homosexual state, and if this homosexual state itself is then further repressed, the first myriad, malignant symptoms of mental illness will invariably begin to make their appearance. Since man alone has the intellectual power to derail this natural chain of mammalian sexual growth stages, consequently only he has the potential to fall prey to the development of devastating schizophrenic madness - and obviously very greatly to his detriment.

708
(A)

You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience.

You thought it was one pathetic boy's life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people...... Your Mercedes wasn't enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren't enough, you snobs. Your vodka and cognac wasn't enough. All your debaucheries weren't enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything...... I didn't have to do it. I could have fled. But now I am no longer running. If not for me, for my children and my brothers and sisters that you [expletive]. I did it for them...... You just loved to crucify me. You loved inducing cancer in my head, terror in my heart and ripping my soul all this time...... You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today. But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off.

[ Excerpts from the video which Cho Seung-Hui, 23, the Virginia Tech "shooter" who killed 33 people, including himself, while wounding many more, sent to NBC News on Monday morning, April 16, 2007, the day of the massacre. ]

(B)

There is this condiscending [sic] attitude in business that when you get emotionally and mentally raped, well 'you got screwed' and the accepted results is that the victim is now supposed to go to work at 7-11 or become homeless and the rapist is admired and envied as a 'winner.' I have always admired and tried to copy winners, but rape of any kind is deplorable and against the law. Remember the time when the same sneakering [sic], laughing attitude was bestowed upon drunk drivers, and the victim got no sympathy? Remember the time when the person raped physically did not dare to report it because of the humiliation and redicule [sic] that the legal system put the [victim] thru... When you hire a consultant or an attorney you don't hire for the purpose of getting raped and then having all your efforts towards legal recourse totally thwarted by a corrupt legal system of 'esquires.' Esquires in the dark ages romed [sic] the countryside to steel [sic] from the working people and give to the prince. Do attorney [sic] want us to call them esquires because their allegiance is to the monarchy?

[ "Excerpts from Gunman's Letter," Gianluigi Ferri, San Francisco Chronicle, July 3, l993, p. A-12. See also Quotation 569, pp. 427-428, in Schizophrenia - The Bearded Lady Disease, by J. Michael Mahoney, AuthorHouse, Bloomington, IN, 2003, 2006. [Gianluigi Ferri went on a murderous rampage in a law office in San Francisco in early July, 1993, killing eight people, including himself, and wounding six.] ]

Note how both "shooters" in quotations (A) and (B) above have unconsciously identified themselves as females being raped, the direct result of their severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion. It was this pathological psychic state which triggered in each of them the paranoid schizophrenic ideation and actions leading to such horrific results, as it invariably does in all such cases of persons "running amok", or "going postal", as this condition is now often described in popular American parlance.

In a Special Report in Newsweek magazine of April 30, 2007, the package of material Cho Seung-Hui mailed to NBC was said to have "included a rancid manifesto in which Cho casts himself as a kind of avenging angel against the 'Christian Criminals' who have raped and sodomized, humiliated and crucified him and others he describes as the 'Weak and Defenseless.'" Cho's words strikingly highlight his overwhelmingly powerful, passive feminine homosexual desires which he, in typical paranoid fashion, has projected onto the outer world as being forced upon him against his will, i.e., his being raped and sodomized. This same paranoid ideation can be seen in Gianluigi Ferri's oft-repeated complaints about being "raped" and "screwed" by the powerful male figures in his environment. This ideation vividly illustrates the fact that both men's deepest and most fiercely repressed sexual desires were to play the passive, feminine sexual role in homosexual anal sex. As Sigmund Freud said, What man represses at his deepest level are his passive, pederastic instincts. When these ego-dystonic instincts become too intense, due to the psychological warping which occurs in the life of the child, the outcome in adulthood may be either the partaking in an active, conscious homosexual lifestyle or else attempted escape from such feelings into a state of complete denial and repression of them. In this latter case the outcome is always malignant, resulting in severe mental illness, most typically of the paranoid schizophrenic type which engulfed both Gianluigi Ferri and Cho Seung-Hui, with shockingly disastrous consequences both to them and to their immediate environs.

As further noted in the Newsweek Special Report, Cho Seung-Hui wrote a play in 2006 describing how a 13-year-old boy fights off the homosexual advances of an older man by trying to ram a "breakfast bar down his throat", but is then killed by the older man with a "deadly blow." Trying to ram something down someone's throat in this homosexual context seems to point specifically to oral sex, perhaps another of Cho's deeply repressed sexual desires, along with his wish to be "raped and sodomized", as mentioned earlier. Of course he attributes his paranoid delusion of being "raped and sodomized" to the hostile actions of others rather than to his own deepest unconscious longings.

Cho attempted desperately towards the end of his life to prove that he was a virile man when in actuality he was an extremely effeminate "mama's boy."

In an intuitive remark by one of Cho's roommates at Virginia Tech, Andy Koch, Cho was described as riding a stationary bike in a gym "like a 70-year-old woman."

In conclusion, Both Gianluigi Ferri and Cho Seung-Hui are classic examples of persons suffering from the malignant effects of paranoid schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease, invariably triggered by severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion. And when this long-repressed conflict finally becomes so powerful that it can no longer be contained by the conscious, rational mind, irrationality, or "craziness" takes over and the victim sinks into the pit of what is called, in psycho-analytic teaching, a "homosexual panic." And it is always at this juncture that the final psychotic break occurs and the afflicted person runs amok, lashing out indiscriminately at all around him or her.
The saying "I would rather die than admit it" pertains extraordinarily well to Gianluigi Ferri, Cho Seung-Hui and every other madman who finally snaps from the unbearable pressure of his or her long-repressed homosexuality and goes on a rampage, usually resulting in tragic collateral damage to many innocent bystanders, as well as to themselves. In short, they did "die rather than admit it."

707

"Fig. 1: Drawing made by a female hebephrenic patient.

Athletic women have masculine physical traits."

[Source not noted.]

"Anonymous painting from Japan of a woman struggling in waves."

[ Source: Centre Hospitalier Saint-Anne/Jeu de Pomme ]

In Picture A, the drawing done by a female mental patient afflicted with schizophrenia (hebephrenic sub-type), the main subject is a female clothed in a skirt with a halter top, with her left arm thrust straight out while holding in her hand what appears to be a ball approximately the size of a basketball.

An opening in the lower part of her skirt reveals two muscular, masculine-looking calves while her shoulders are broad and powerful-looking.

The face has been drawn with a severe expression on it. Her hair is parted in the middle, flaring out rigidly on each side at eye-level. Her breasts are drawn smallish and insignificant-looking. The overall impression of this figure is that of a woman who is a fierce, disciplined athlete, with a personality to match. There is a marked lack of femininity in the drawing.

Surrounding this central figure are smaller drawings of other women, some of whom are playing basketball and tennis, while others are engaged in aquatic diving and ballet dancing. All these supporting figures have also been drawn to emphasize the same masculine physiques and traits as personified in the drawing of the central figure. Even the skirted ballet dancers have wide, manly shoulders. As the heading under this drawing states, "Athletic women have masculine physical traits."

In the anonymous painting (Picture B) from Japan of a woman struggling fiercely amid raging blue-colored ocean waves, painted by a schizophrenic Japanese artist, what is most visible is a tangle of long dark hair being grasped tightly in the woman's right hand while the left hand is also grasping some loose ends of the hair. The contours of the face are very indistinct and it is glaringly obvious that the woman in the painting is engaged in a life-and-death struggle to keep from drowning.

The most arresting part of the picture, however, is the shape of the hands and arms of the swimmer. They are large, muscular and powerful-looking and it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to tell from the painting whether it is depicting a woman rather than a man were it not for two round breasts partially hidden by some strands of long dark hair. Thus on first sight the viewer is immediately confused by what sex the swimmer is - part of the figure appears feminine, i.e., the long dark hair and the breasts, but the rest of the picture gives the distinct impression of powerful masculine forces in action due to its striking presentation of the well-muscled hands and arms.

Once again, in two separate cases of schizophrenia, the underlying factor of severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion which is invariably the basic etiological factor operative in every case of the illness, is vividly illustrated here through the medium of the schizophrenic patients' artwork.

One of the artists (Picture A) is female while the sex of the other (Picture B) has not been indicated. But in reality their designated sex is unimportant since it is their underlying gender confusion as to which sex they belong to which has been the crucial factor in instigating their schizophrenic illness in the first place. This basic etiological factor is constant in every case of schizophrenia, as indeed it is in all cases of functional mental illness, regardless of the profusion of differently-named labels that are arbitrarily applied to its multitude of variegated symptoms.

706

It was inevitable that in the quest for motives some consideration should be given to the possibility that the beliefs of Jesus might be explained as those of a mentally abnormal person, perhaps even one clearly deranged. Possibly the merely nascent state of psychiatry furnished one reason why more of the iconoclasts did not venture earlier on this path of inquiry. Noack, (Die Geschichte Jesu, 2nd ed., 1876) referred to Jesus as an "ecstatic," but did not impute mental disease to him - that was left for the 20th century.

In the first two decades of the 20th century no less than three medical writers embarked upon a psychiatric "interpretation" of Jesus - a German, Dr. Georg Lomer, who wrote under the pseudonym of George do Loosten; a French writer, Charles Binet-Sanglé; and an American, Dr. William Hirsch. A fourth writer, Emil Rasmussen, Ph.D., included Jesus among a group of prophets whom he classified as psychopathological types. It is to a refutation of these four books that our author dedicates this volume, his thesis offered for the degree of Doctor of Medicine at Strassburg University in 1913. Dr Schweitzer, already the holder of degrees in philosophy and divinity, had shown himself a sound historian in his Geschichter der Leben-Jesu-Forschung in 1906; in his present study he marshals his historical data effectively, together with the knowledge of mental disorder as it then existed in Europe.

Since the authors discussed by Dr. Schweitzer agree on one point, namely that Jesus suffered from some form of "paranoia," a few words concerning this type of mental disorder may not be out of place. The word is an old one - it was used in the Hippocratic writings, though in a general sense, as meaning mental disease. It was introduced into German psychiatry as early as 1818 by Heinroth, but with so loose a definition that at one time from 70 to 80 percent of the patients in European mental hospitals were diagnosed as suffering from "paranoia." Indeed, as late as 1887 a French psychiatrist, (Séglas) referred to it as a word which had "la signification la plus vaste et la plus mal définie." Gradually it came to include a variety of clinical groups characterized by ideas of persecution and grandeur, in varying proportions. Some of these groups exhibited almost entirely a distortion and misinterpretation of actual facts, others some elaboration with fabrication, while some showed such a loss of contact with reality as to cause the patient to suffer from hallucinations in one or more of the sensory spheres. A religious coloring of the delusions is far from uncommon. Kraepelin, the great German descriptive psychiatrist, defined these various groups - paranoia, paraphrenia (now generally referred to as paranoid condition) and dementia praecox of the paranoid type, his final formulation appearing about 1913.

To Kraepelin and his school, as to the French school of psychiatry, paranoia was largely a question of constitution; it was based on the makeup of the person, developed insidiously and progressively, and was essentially unamenable to treatment. They looked on it as almost if not quite entirely a disturbance of the intellectual functions. It was only in 1906 that Bleuler emphasized the importance in the disorder of reaction to life situations, as opposed to fatalistic interpretation, and it was after the appearance of Schweitzer's answer to the psychiatrists that a more dynamic interpretation of the mechanisms of paranoia and the paranoid conditions came about as a result of Freud's penetrating observations. (Freud's notes on the Schreber case, published in 1911, were very likely unknown to Schweitzer as he wrote.) We know now, of course, that the emotional and homosexual factors are highly important, and that paranoia is no more a purely intellectual disorder than any other psychosis.

[ Winfred Overholser, M.D., President, American Psychiatric Association, Washington, D.C., 1948, in the Foreword to The Psychiatric Study of Jesus - Exposition and Criticism. by Albert Schweitzer, The Beacon Press, Boston, 1948, pp. 11-13. ]

Notwithstanding the tendentious and ill-informed attempt by Dr. Schweitzer to argue in his Ph.D. thesis that the historical personage named "Jesus" did not suffer from any mental illness, the general, unbiased consensus of his contemporary diagnosticians was almost unanimous in agreeing that he was afflicted with paranoia (now called paranoid schizophrenia). It took the brilliant analytic genius of Sigmund Freud to uncover the hidden mechanisms of this disease and to prove to the world that it was "invariably" caused by the repression and denial of homosexual passions, mixed equally with severe gender confusion. [Viz., the case of Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, published in 1900.]

The fact that Jesus suffered from schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease, puts into perspective the strong homosexual tinge which has always followed his teachings wherever they have led. For example, It is most interesting to observe how the following words, licentious, lustful, lubricious, lewd, lascivious, lecherous and wanton, all have a very negative connotation in present-day parlance and dictionary definition. Of course all these words originally referred to powerful heterosexual passions, and yet all are given "sinful" interpretations which are taught to "Christian" youth from the very earliest years. Small wonder then that with the force of this great negative emphasis placed upon what are really the most natural, healthy and "lustful" of heterosexual impulses, so many young people today are forced into struggling mightily with their sexual identity. If these natural heterosexual desires and tendencies are denigrated and despised from a child's earliest years onward, what other path is left for these powerful sexual feelings to take? The answer to that question appears to be strikingly self-evident. If not heterosexuality, what?

The fact that this country is now an "insanely religious" one, in the biting words of Professor Harold Bloom of Yale University, and that the exact same charge can be leveled against many other present-day countries and societies, does not bode well for the future of the world. Schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease, is the common enemy of all mankind.

According to historical records, Jesus' parents knew he was insane and tried their best to steer him away from his self-destructive and delusional messianic mission, but of course to no avail. The same situation applies to many, if not all, of the founders of the world's other major "religions." Their contemporaries may have realized that these early "prophets" were likewise insane, but they were nevertheless similarly powerless to stop them from their delusional and consequently too-often destructive missions, to the detriment once more of all mankind.

705

Source: An anonymous article by a minister.

Prophets, Apostles, and Mental Illness

I have kidded for decades about the fact that in my ministerial years I have met at least 23 of the Two Witnesses. One felt he was both of them, thus the odd number.

I remember going with a minister to a home in Idaho once where the woman heard the voice of God often in her head. She had a young baby so the minister asked me to tend to the baby while he talked to her about her visions and voices. The baby had not had a diaper change in a pretty long time, so I took care of that in the kitchen while the minister tried to help her. Seems she was killing chickens on the farm and trying to resurrect them…without much luck. We never made any connection to the danger and I doubt either of us understood the symptoms of schizophrenia, but I do now. After that, I returned to Ambassador for my last year and was reading the LA Times in the lounge before breakfast. My eye fell on a small article about a woman in a small town in Idaho who was found sitting in her car on a Mountain top waiting for Jesus to return. I knew the name. They found the baby dead on the farm. Or should I say, still dead.

From the Bible we find a man once laid on his right side for 390 straight days and then flipped over for another 40 because the voice in his head told him to. He built little models of Jerusalem in the sand and laid siege to a stone with a pot (Ez. 4). He even cooked his food with human waste (Ez. 4:9) and dug a hole in his own home and squeezed himself through it with his possessions on his back (Ez. 12). His name was Ezekiel. Maybe he was traumatized by the captivity or the destruction of the symbol of all that was holy and stable to him, the temple. He died forever ago and lots of the stuff he said was going to happen never really did far as we can tell. I hear a lot of minister types quoting him 2500 years later as if you can read the newspaper and immediately see what Ezekiel was talking about. I guess if they lay siege to a rock, lay on their sides for a year or more and give up charcoal for human waste at cookouts, …well…ewwww. Time to find another church. I know most will say that God told him to do these things….but think about what you are saying. Would you say that about Andrea Yates who God told to drown her kids or Mijailo Mijailovic who killed the Swedish Foreign Minister, Anna Lindh, saying when asked who told him to do it, "I think it was Jesus. That he has chosen me”?

An Old Testament character, Moses, went up into the mountains a few times because the voice in his head that no one else could hear, called him up for a meeting. He said it was God, but when he came back down the mountain carrying , what he said were the rules from the voice in his head, he ordered the murder of 3000 more pretty nice people, men women and children for not patiently waiting for him. And these people had already had a pretty tough time getting out of Egypt doing what the voice in this guys head told him to do. He had friends killing friends and families. Bummer… that was a heck of a lot of drama and walking for nothing. From what I understand, hardly anyone who fled Dodge City, Egypt believing the voices in this man’s head ever made it to the Promise Land. I’m not sure the story really happened, which would be a relief. I just can’t imagine this as a good way to begin their understanding of “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” This same fellow, was pretty sure that the voice spoke to him from bushes in the desert too. Not a good sign in the world of mental health types.

Yet again, an Old Testament figure called Abraham, decides to take his only son, up the mountain and kill him as a sacrifice. Perhaps a weird way to say thanks for the son that he could never have before. But I’d think that was going a bit too far. Reminds me of cutting off the nose to spite the face. Anyway, the voice in his head said to and then decided it was only kidding. The child, who probably refused ever again to go on any “just a campout” with dad, was replaced by an animal conveniently stuck in a nearby bush.

What’s the chance of that! I can’t imagine Isaac every quite trusted ol’ dad again.

There was a guy who married a prostitute because the voice told him to. We had to drop the standard laws of marriage for this one, but it’s ok if you are doing it for God. Man was his wife mad about that! The guy even began to think he was a reincarnated form of the guy before him who talked to the bush. Tons of people obeyed this guy for a time, but usually not for very long. Hosea I think.

The more I think about it, the more I have to admit that voices in the heads of people I never met, and no one at that time could hear themselves, have played a really big role in who gets the final say in religion. What if… Nah.

Paul in the New Testament fell off a donkey when he heard a voice in his head about giving Jesus a hard time in his old job. He even saw a flash of light in his head, brighter than the sun and it was already noon when this happened! That’s pretty darn bright! When people in the Bible light up, it’s ALWAYS brighter than the sun. You’d think more people would notice. The others either heard the voice but did not see the light, or saw the light but not the voice, stood up, or all fell down depending on the story your read in the Bible. The voice in Paul’s head told him it was time to change jobs and he’d get his vision back from a guy in town if he did what he was told. Today we might say he had all the symptoms of a sunstroke or maybe even temporal lobe epilepsy where voices and flashes are pretty darn common along with an intense sense of morality that others must get in tune with.

Paul went on to write most of the New Testament and continue to tell people nothing about any real Jesus he had ever met. No stories, no miracles, no teachings, nothing about the 12 guys Jesus had to follow him, and I would expect to have passed the teachings on to others. Maybe even write something about Jesus, after all there were 12 of them! But alas, they didn’t much and we have no clue what happened to that bunch. It’s all hearsay. Some say that they were merely a symbol of the twelve signs of the zodiac surrounding the central sun/son, and not real people, but let’s not go there.

Paul spoke volumes about the one who spoke to him in his head and he saw often in visions. When he gave the instructions for eating the body and blood of Jesus, he said very plainly Jesus himself told him about the details of that. Paul never met the real Jesus so I’m pretty sure he meant in vision. When he said, “have I not seen the Lord?” he didn’t mean in person. He meant in his visions. He even took a trip to the third heaven, but said the stuff he saw was too much to share at this time…Hey!

At any rate, Paul ends up in Rome for some unnamed offense and disappears. Sometimes I think his death or execution must have been an embarrassment to the church as the last we hear of him, he is under house arrest having a pretty good time. I’m sure they knew how it ended for the guy and why, but it might have annoyed the early Christians to know the truth of it all, so they left it out.

I even heard or read in the book of Mark that Jesus mom and brothers came down to Jerusalem to get him because THEY thought he was “mad.” I don’t think they thought he was angry, but rather a bit daft. Jesus kind of blew them off in a way that would have got me slapped by my dad for being so rude to mom. It was like he didn’t know them. Mary had evidently completely forgotten about his wonderful birth story and all those great things she kept and pondered in her heart. Besides he had to do what the voice in his head said.

Later, other guys who wrote about Jesus dropped this hot little tale and told a really cute story about how Jesus came to be. God himself had visited her, well no, I guess the Holy Spirit did. You know the third thing in the Trinity and she was pregnant by no less than the Deity. She burst into song about this in Luke and seemed to know that Jesus was literally “fully God and fully man”, whatever that means. I can understand one thing being fully something, but not two things being fully the same thing but different and coequal but not. Oh never mind. Church talk. I guess it’s one of those mysteries we hear about when one story leads to the next and we tie ourselves in a knot, wrapped in a enigma, coated with cheese.

Matthew tells a great story of Jesus birth, different from Luke’s, but at least they cleaned up that embarrassing tale about Jesus being hauled away by his family for being nuts. Mark must have been mistaken according to Matthew and Luke, but Mark was the embarrassing story and came before the cute story, I suspect it had a ring of truth to it, at least as Mary saw it. Sometimes I wonder if Jesus was so anxiety ridden not to know who his real father was that he took mom literal when she got tired of him asking and said “God is your father.” Who knows?

I always found it interesting that the poor kid in the New Testament who threw himself in both the fire and water often, or maybe just fell in them when this hit him, cried out, foamed at the mouth and then recovered pretty quickly when the demon was put out, had all the symptoms of infantile epilepsy. Every one!

Some say his cursing trees for having no fruit at a time of year when there is not supposed to be fruit, or attacking the legitimate money changers in the temple who really were simply changing pagan money into temple scrip for the purchase of sacrifices, were not good signs of quality mental health. That last act probably got him killed by the Romans, though somehow it ended up being the Jews fault. I guess it was easier and a bit wiser to blame the Jews who could not hurt you, rather than the Romans who could kill you. At any rate, this temper thing is not a good sign of good mental health.

I wonder how people back then would treat a kid with epilepsy! It runs its course in about 30 minutes so it would sure appear that the old demon was banished. I also wondered as a kid, what a kid would have to do to get a real demon lurking in his body. Must have been some weak minded kid to let that happen. I remember as a kid hoping no demon would jump on me. I’d vote infantile epilepsy and not blame the folks of 2000 years ago for not knowing the symptoms or how it manifested. Anyway, the demon was put out, but we don’t know if it ever came back. Jesus had a hard time doing this stuff in his hometown because a prophet has no honor in his own town or with his own family. Well duh! They know you pretty darn well and got so concerned they came down to retrieve you for your own good, if you believe Mark. Of course he blamed the weak faith of the group, but maybe that’s because they all know you so well and aren’t easily convinced. I mean, if Jesus was God, really, really, really GOD, would the force be thwarted just because the neighbors who knew you as a kid had a hard time accepting that? I think not! Since when does being God in the flesh depend on the acceptance of the people who know you best?

I once read a story about Jesus where, as a child he kills another playmate for some offense towards him. Gosh, I hope that didn’t really happen but I can see why it never made the cut. I guess Jesus could have heard about Moses knocking off the Egyptian for picking on a buddy and God said it was ok to express your anger that way if you need to.

Jesus also got rid of a whole legion of demons in a man that lived in a cemetery, naked and was really an angry guy that was so strong he broke the chains they tried to bind him in. I guess that was sorta the lithium of the times… chains. Anyway, aside from this man having every symptom of schizophrenia, all the demons got thrown into a herd of pigs and they ran down into the sea from a town no where near the sea and drown. Kind of a marathon run and by the time they got there, they’d be skinny and pooped out pigs. But this is another story. Boy, I bet that made the farmer mad at Jesus! Of course, this would not be a Jewish farmer so it’s ok. In the OT, if you found some animal that was defective, you couldn’t eat it yourself, but you could sell it to the pagans, so hey, not your problemo.

Anyway….I guess we could really wonder about the book of Revelation... Whoa…that is some good drugs! Whoever wrote that was one angry human being… Death, destruction, fire, plagues, trombones, vials and all sorts of stuff pour out on everyone! This Jesus is not such a nice guy. Sometimes I get to thinking the one in the Gospels can’t possibly be the same one as the guy in Revelation, but that’s what they say. The one in Revelation seems like an end stage schizophrenic gone amuck. I’m not sure I could be comfy in heaven or the kingdom with one who could be so freaking mean to everyone except those special ones. I always felt a few seminars or maybe a refresher type program would send a kinder gentler message, instead of all the butt kicking, death and destruction. Maybe a nice lunch between encouraging sessions and a Luau in the evening where we could all marvel at actually meeting the real God and Jesus. And hey…if the presenter is really God or Jesus come down…I mean really really…I’d listen and be good. But alas, this Jesus in Revelation is a case…maybe literally. It’s just one big vision in someone’s head hearing voices again that others can’t hear and seeing things others don’t see. Makes me nervous. And people today base their entire life perspective on a vindictive vision expressed almost as a “oh yeah, well this is what you get for not believing me.” Nuther symptom. Vengeance.

Someone once asked what’s the difference between a Bible Prophet or Christian fundamentalist and a paranoid schizophrenic? Well, one hears voices in their head, has a heightened moral code, is judgmental yet can be very deceptive and manipulative, has delusions of being on a mission from God, sees things that no one else present sees, hears things that one else hears, sees lights in his head, is the center of the universe and has special knowledge that must be kept secret until the right time an then can only be understood as explained by the one. The other, of course, is a paranoid schizophrenic.

I had a close friend in high school who in college came down with the classic symptoms of schizophrenia. Very intelligent but all of a sudden was overcome with the chemistry of schizophrenia that comes mostly between 18 and 35. He simply could not function in this world. His perceptions and his reality were far different than even he could understand. He died in his chair, alone in a dingy apartment last year. I wish I had gone to see him. Nice kid.

What if most, some or even ONE of the characters of religion, are humans who suffered from certifiable mental illnesses? What if some get followings because they are so darn fascinating and in combo with reading the Bible can seem so right? Perhaps we are dealing with traumatized human beings and their coping mechanisms. Schizophrenic and paraphrenic personalities can be brilliant yet fragile. A narcissist can rise to amazing heights of success and productivity. They can have “beautiful minds” and be very, very ill. They make great dictators and Televangelists.

We know more now than we did 3000 years ago. And yet when it comes to the Bible and those who declare themselves the special men of God, we go as blind as Paul claimed to go on the road to Damascus. (Even though Paul himself never says this was the mechanism of his conversion. Perhaps even worse, like Jeremiah and Jesus, he was called before birth in the womb as he notes in Galatians.) Pretty darn special! And yet we can allow that kind of perspective to be religious when today, we would get very uncomfortable with a real person saying that about themselves. What seems ok as long as it is in the distant past becomes freaky if in the present. Many who turned away from Paul or an Ezekiel may have had that gut level discomfort. I doubt anyone today would feel a religious zealot who cooked dinner with his own dung would be anything but twelve short of a dozen.

Why is this an issue? Because a minister, maybe sincere, and maybe simply mentally unstable or delusional can hide in the ministry much better than he can hide at IBM. A minister that is prolific, charismatic while also dictatorial and delusional looks spiritual and obedient. The quirkiness is mistaken for spirituality and obedience to God. They have the ability to be deceivingly compassionate one minute and intensely angry at anything and everyone the next. They don’t like to be contradicted, corrected nor have their mental processes questioned. They NEVER take personality tests! How is it that normal human beings, who have accurate perceptions about the mental instability of some at work, then lose that instinct at church? The quirkiness at work becomes the spiritually desirable trait in church! Go figure!

When Alexander Haig declared himself in charge of the government after the Reagan shooting, he was torn to shreds for his misstep and is still trying to explain it. But when a pastor type declares himself a “Watcher” or an “Apostle” or a Prophet or incredibly more special than the average human, it gets swallowed hook, line and sinker?

What if the behaviors recorded thousands of years ago that has been the basis for so much religious zealotry is simply better understood in the context of mental illness? We always say if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck and swims like a duck, there is a good chance we may be dealing with a duck. When it comes to religion however we change our perceptions. If it walks like a narcissist, if it talks like a Para or schizophrenic and if it has all the symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy, it must be a man of God!

What if some of the many heroes of faith, even some of the biggies, were simply mentally ill as we understand it today? Wow…what a thought! Makes you think doesn’t it?

[ Source: E-mail communication from the www.Schizophrenia-TheBeardedLadyDisease.com website ]

The person who wrote the above article has correctly intuited the truth in the supposition that the great majority of the early founders of the Judeo-Christian tradition was stark, raving mad, or suffering from what today would be designated clinically as "paranoid schizophrenia." The usual method for handling these severely mentally ill persons presently would consist in the administration of powerful, sedating psychotropic drugs, and/or their commitment to the nearest mental institution. It must be admitted, however, that there are currently many severely mentally disturbed "preachers" still plying their "holy" trade with relative impunity.

When the author of the above quotation asks in the final paragraph, "What if some? of the many heroes of faith, even some of the biggies, were simply mentally ill as we understand it today? Wow... what a thought! Makes you think, doesn't it" It certainly does make one think, or it should, and in Quotation 706 the thoughts and conclusions of some early investigators/researchers who did "think" about it very seriously will be presented.

It is strikingly evident from the above quotation that schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease, has bedeviled mankind for as long as he has been recording his own history, and undoubtedly for far longer than even that.

704

Subject: true schizophrenia
hello i would like to say first of all that i am a true schizophrenic and the topic of your book has deffenitely caught my eye for several reasons. i do know what it like to be possessed by a spirit of the opposite sex. I personally find it hell. how ever i also walk with the lord, not to mention my love for the male body. well any way i just want to say that i always have intrusive schizo thoughts popping in and out of my brain some sick and perverted and anitchrist like. but what is important to know is the all the schizo's in the world are chosen people. and if you know anything about being a true christian you know that sufforing is part of the deal when you follow him with true devotion. so i pray it away and i tell my demon inside to kiss my ass and get the hell behind me. i do not accept it, or any other perverse mind flash i have. i strongly recommend this to other sufforing with this illness. i find it not but a moment later that god lets me know he loves me and thanks me for holding on to what i know. peace

[name deleted for privacy reasons]

[ E-mail communication from the www.Schizophrenia-TheBeardedLadyDisease.com website ]

It is very obvious that the woman in the above quotation is seriously mentally ill, or schizophrenic, as she tells us. The man, or "demon", who inhabits her body is in reality her unconscious self-identity as a male, an identity which is totally ego-dystonic to her and which consequently has been repressed and denied and projected onto the outer world in the typical paranoid schizophrenic fashion. Her repressed, masculine, homosexual feelings are thus experienced as being forced upon her, against her will, by some alien, hostile force, i.e. by the "demon" of a man who has taken over her body and her life.

To be cured of her schizophrenia, it would be necessary for her, through intensive psychotherapy, to reach the stage where she could consciously admit to her powerful, manly sexual feelings and then abreact them either through actual homosexual experiences with other women, or by means of masturbatory phantasies. In this manner she would eventually exhaust the pent-up store of her long-repressed sexual phantasies and would then be in a position to make a conscious decision as to whether she wants to live as either a male or a female, homosexual or heterosexual. In any case she will have finally overcome the so-called "toxic affect of undischarged libido," the said toxicity being the sexual energy force which keeps all the varied symptoms of mental illness operational. Without this repressed sexual energy force, the symptoms of mental illness lose their power and fade away.

Finally, Note the overall masculine tone of her e-mail communication, specifically when she writes that "I tell my demon inside to kiss my ass and get the hell behind me." In any culture this would not be considered a typically "feminine" way for a woman to express herself. Actually the entire e-mail has as a distinctly masculine expressive tinge to it, to the extent that without knowing that the writer used a female name in her e-mail communication, it would be somewhat difficult to decide if the subject was a man or a woman. That she is definitely afflicted with schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease, is a given.

Lastly, The only slight hint of possible female sexuality in the subject is when she says she tells her demon to "kiss my ass" and get "the hell behind me." In the Middle Ages very religious women, as our subject also is, who were suffering from hysteria were often reported to have complained that the devil had engaged in sexual intercourse with them in the coitus a tergo position, i.e., from behind. With enough investigation of these coitus a tergo phantasies, it readily become apparent that these women actually desired this kind of sexual activity but considered it "sinful" and therefore repressed their wishes for it. This repression led directly to the projection of these intense sexual feelings outwards onto the "devil", which allowed for their guilt-free enjoyment and sexual satisfaction by means of phantasy-life. It brings to mind the old psychologically-astute saying that "I didn't want to, but the devil made me do it!" Thus here the subject may be demonstrating, in a very disguised fashion, an embryonic femininity which has long been overshadowed by her strong masculine nature. If she were to enter into psycho-analytic treatment as a means for overcoming her mental illness, one of the primary goals of the analysis would be to encourage and nurture her rudimentary feelings of femininity since that is what she is, after all - a woman.

703

The Aggrieved Husband - With her spouse incarcerated, Mirta secretly accepted a modest stipend from her brother Rafael, the deputy interior minister, through his office. When the arrangement became public, Fidel Castro refused to believe it, insisting that Ramon Hermida, the interior minister, was trying to blacken his name.

July 17, 1954

To Luis Conte Aguero:

This is a machination against me: the basest, most cowardly, most indecent, the vilest and intolerable. Mirta is too level-headed to have ever allowed herself to be seduced by her family, agreeing to appear in the Government employee roster, no matter how hard her economic situation. I am sure she has been miserably slandered....

Only an effeminate like Hermida at the lowest degree of sexual degeneration would resort to these methods, of such inconceivable indecency and unmanliness. Now I have no doubt that the statement attributed to me about being well-treated was his doing.

I do not want to become a murderer when I leave prison. Has a political prisoner no honor? Ought a political prisoner be offended in this way? May not a prisoner challenge someone to a duel when he leaves prison? Must he graze on the bile of infamy in the impotence and despair of confinement?

I am ready to challenge my own brother-in-law to a duel at any time. It is the prestige of my wife and my honor as a revolutionary that is at stake.

[ “Portrait of the Maximum Leader as a Young Man,” Ann Louise Bardach, The New York Times OP-ED, Sunday, August 13, 2006,
p. 10. ]

Fidel Castro is definitely exhibiting signs of paranoid schizophrenia, the bearded disease, in the above-quoted letter to his friend Luis Conte Aguero.

First are his paranoid feelings of persecution. "This is a machination against me," he complains. He is referring to the fact that his wife has accepted a small sum of money from her brother Rafael, a member of the Batista government which has jailed him, in order to provide for her daily needs while Castro is incarcerated. In this letter not only does Castro rage against his brother-in-law Rafael, the deputy interior minister, for understandably wanting to help his sister in her time of need, he also rages against his wife to the point that he soon divorces her for allegedly dishonoring his name. Castro here is exhibiting "false reasoning," the definition of the term "paranoia" in its original Greek derivation. Especially indicative of this paranoia is Castro's virulent attack on the interior minister himself, Ramon Hermida, for being an "effeminate like Hermida at the lowest degree of sexual degeneration," for having resorted "to these methods, of such inconceivable indecency and unmanliness." In reality what Castro is raging against here is his very own effeminacy and unmanliness, the total repression of which has inevitably resulted in the development of the paranoid schizophrenic illness which has bedeviled him, and consequently through his irrational actions the Cuban nation, his entire post-pubertal life. For in attacking another man's supposed effeminacy so violently, he is in actuality attacking his own deeply hated and feared effeminate tendencies. Again, in another letter to Luis Conte Aguero, Castro states that "The minister of Governance has behaved just as he is, a perfect pansy."

Furthermore, not only does Castro demonstrate the typical paranoid's "false reasoning" and his convictions of being persecuted, he also demonstrates the typical paranoid's grandiose sense of self-importance, just one example of which is illustrated in another letter to a colleague, Melba Herandez, wherein he compares himself to the illustrious Cuban hero Jose Marti.

All Castro's letters written at this time to his revolutionary colleagues are textbook examples of the typical paranoid mind at work. Similarly Castro's later rule over Cuba has been that of a paranoid dictator at work. His megalomanic, paranoid sense of self-importance has led him to believe that only he knows what is best for the millions of his fellow-citizens. Consequently it appears that only his death will free the Cuban people from the yoke of his madness.
Finally, it was Castro's twisted, paranoid mind which caused him to urge the Russian leader Nikita Krushchev, during the Cuban "missile crisis" in 1962, to launch an all-out atomic war against the United States in the event the latter dared to invade Cuba in order to destroy the missiles aimed at it. Fortunately the Russian leader was not similarly afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia and thus brushed aside Castro's insane pleadings. The fact that Castro was perfectly agreeable to having untold millions of innocent people incinerated in an all-out atomic holocaust demonstrates the depth of his madness, madness which is invariably the result of the afflicted individual's severe unconscious bisexual conflict and gender confusion.

702

Alice Lakwena,Ugandan Rebel

GARISSA, Kenya, Jan 18 (AP) - Alice Lakwena, a Ugandan warrior priestess who led an insurgency in the 1980s and claimed to have spiritual powers to protect her fighters from bullets by anointing them with oil, died Wednesday at a Kenyan refugee camp. She was in her 40s. She died after being sick for about a week with an unknown illness at the Ifo refugee camp in the eastern Garissa district, said Dennis Ogola, a local administrator.

She was born Alice Auma, the daughter of a clergyman from the Acholi people, a small ethnic group in northern Uganda. Ms. Lakwena, whose name means messiah in Acholi, mesmerized followers with claims that spirits spoke through her.

She led the Holy Spirit Movement, which combined Christianity with traditional Acholi beliefs, in a year-long insurgency aimed at toppling President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda. Army troops defeated the movement in late 1987.

Ms. Lakwena became a major embarrassment to the Ugandan government because the foreign news media reported so extensively on her bizarre exploits.

Known as Mama Alice, Ms. Lakwena raised a battalion of as many as 15,000 followers, armed with only sticks and stones. Thousands of her followers died as Mr. Museveni's army crushed her campaign.

[ News article, The New York Times, January 19, 2007. ]

Mama Alice, a k a Alice Lakwena, Uganda's "warrior priestess", was obviously suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, the "bearded Lady disease."

Indisputable evidence of this illness is provided by her delusions of grandeur and by her insane belief that she was a messiah, thus her adoption of the Acholi name for that concept, Lakwena. Proof of her underlying severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion is demonstrated by the fact that she behaved in a manner precisely mimicking the ways of a powerful male figure, or fierce "warrior."

Her paranoid schizophrenic delusion that she could protect her followers from the lethal effects of bullets fired at them by soldiers of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni's army by "anointing them with oil", resulted inexorably and tragically in the senseless slaughter of thousands of the approximately 15,000 followers of her "Holy Spirit Movement", armed only with sticks and stones, whom, in the throes of her madness, she had raised to help topple the Ugandan government and empower her to assume dictatorial control over her benighted nation.

Mama Alice, born Alice Auma, daughter of a clergyman, had obviously identified at a basic psychological level as a male religious figure like her father, while also partly identifying with her mother, thus her use of of the name "Mama Alice" as her "nom de guerre". This fact illustrates her severe bisexual, schizophrenic split as being part male, part female. She was indeed a "bearded lady", and it was on account of this severe bisexual conflict/gender confusion that her madness eventually arose, as it inevitably does in all such cases, and which in far too many the end result is the insane commission of untold horrors, crimes and tragedies, as in her particular case.

Finally, it should be mentioned here that Uganda has been victimized by more than its fair share of paranoid schizophrenic "leaders" within the last several decades. Foremost among them was the notorious and homicidal maniac, Idi Amin, who was for many years Uganda's iron-fisted ruler. Thousands of innocent Ugandan citizens met grisly death at the hands of his henchmen, as he slowly descended into insanity as the consequence of his severe "bearded lady" paranoid affliction. [See Quotation 638 in Schizophrenia, The Bearded Lady Disease.] Then along came the insane Mama Alice and Her Holy Spirit Movement, and thousands more bewildered Ugandans met their untimely doom. Presently Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord's Resistance Army, has been battling President Museveni for many years, and once again thousands more innocent persons - men, women and children - have been destroyed wantonly and savagely.

Thus once more we can clearly observe the heartbreaking, indiscriminate destruction that schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease, has wrought upon the world in times past and continues to wreak today, and undoubtedly will keep on doing so far into the future. Mankind's only hope is speedily to recognize the subtle signs of developing mental illness in individuals so afflicted and then somehow to neutralize them before they can gain enough power to unleash unspeakable suffering and destruction on others while living out, relentlessly and remorselessly, their insane, schizophrenic visions.

701

But that night George Merrett never reached his destination. As he passed the entrance to Tennison Street, between where the south side of the Lambeth Lead Works abutted onto the north wall of the brewery, there came a sudden cry. A man shouted at him, appeared to be chasing him, was yelling furiously. Merrett was frightened; this was something more than a mere footpad - that silent and menacing figure who lurked in the dark carrying a lead-tipped cosh and wearing a mask; this was something quite out of the ordinary, and Merrett began to run in terror, slipping and sliding on the frost-slick cobbles. He looked back: the man was still there, still chasing after him, still shouting angrily. Then, quite incredibly, he stopped and raised a gun, took aim, and fired.

The shot missed, whistling past him and striking the brewery wall. George Merrett tried to run faster. He cried out for help. There was another shot. Perhaps another. And then a final shot that struck the unfortunate Merrett in the neck. He fell heavily onto the cobbled pavement, his face down, a pool of blood spreading around him.

....His landlady, Mrs. Fisher, said that he had been a perfectly good tenant, but odd. He used to go away for several days at a time, and on returning, rather ostentatiously left his hotel bills - the Charing Cross Hotel was one she remembered, the Crytstal Palace Hotel another - lying around for all to see. He seemed, she said, a very anxious man. Often he demanded that the furniture in his room be moved. He also seemed afraid that people might break in. He had one particular worry, Mrs. Fisher told the police: Doctor Minor was apparently formidably afraid of the Irish. He would ask interminably whether or not she had any Irish servants working in the house - and if so, demanded that they be sacked. Did she have Irish visitors, any Irish lodgers? He was always to be kept informed - of a possibility that in Lambeth (which had a large population of casual Irish laborers, working on the legions of London construction sites) was in fact all too real.

.... The London police, for a start, admitted that they were already somewhat acquainted with him, and that for some time before the murder had known that they had a troubled man living in their midst. A Scotland Yard detective named Williamson testified that Minor had come to the Yard three months earlier, complaining that there were men coming to his rooms at night, trying to poison him. He thought that they were members of the Fenian Brotherhood - militant Irish nationalists - and they were bent on breaking into his lodgings, hiding in the roof rafters, slipping through the windows.

....The witness, whose name was William Dennis, was a member of a profession that has long since receded from modern memory. He was what was called a "Bethlem watcher." Usually he was employed at London's Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane - such a dreadful place that the name has given us the word bedlam - where his duties included watching the prisoner-patients through the night to make sure that they behaved themselves and did not try to cheat justice by committing suicide. He had been seconded to the Horsemonger Lane Jail in mid-February, he said, to watch the nocturnal activities of the strange visitor. He had watched him, he testified, for twenty-four nights.

It was a most curious and disturbing experience, Dennis told the jury. Each morning Doctor Minor would awake and immediately accuse him of having been paid by someone specifically to molest him while he slept. Then he would spit, dozens of times, as though trying to remove something that had been put in his mouth. He would next leap from his bed and scrabble about underneath it, looking for people who, he insisted, had hidden there and were planning to annoy him. Dennis told his superior, the prison surgeon, that he was quite certain William Minor was mad.

From the police interrogation notes came the evidence of an imagined motive for the crime - and with them a further indication of Dr. Minor's patent instability. Each night, Minor had told his questioners, unknown men - often lower class, often Irish - would come to his room while he was sleeping. They would maltreat him; they would violate him in ways he could not possibly describe. For months, ever since these nocturnal visitors had begun to torment him, he had taken to sleeping with his Colt service revolver, loaded with five cartridges, beneath his pillow.

On the night in question he awoke with a start, certain that a man was standing in the shadows at the foot of his bed. He reached under the pillow for his gun; the man saw him and took to his heels, running down the stairs and out of the house. Minor followed him as fast as he could, saw a man running down into Belvedere Road, was certain that this was the intruder, shouted at him, then fired four times, until he had hit him and the man lay still, unable to harm him further. The court listened in silence. The landlady shook her head. No one could get into her house at night without a key, she had said. Everyone slept very lightly; there could not have been an intruder.

And as final confirmation the court then heard from the prisoner's stepbrother, George Minor. It had been a nightmare, said George, having brother William staying in the family house in New Haven. Every morning he would accuse people of trying to break into his room the night before, trying to molest him. He was being persecuted. Evil men were trying to insert metallic biscuits, coated with poison, in his mouth. They were in league with others who hid in the attic, came down at night while he was asleep, and treated him foully. Everything was punishment, he said, for an act he had been forced to commit while in the American army. Only by going to Europe, he said, could he escape his demons. He would travel and paint and live the life of a respected gentleman of art and culture - and the persecutors might melt away into the night.

The court listened in melancholy silence while Doctor Minor sat in the dock, morose, shamed. The lawyer the American consul-general had procured for him said only that it was clear that his client was insane, and that the jury should treat him as such.

....Dr. William C. Minor, surgeon-captain, U.S. Army, a forlornly proud figure from one of the oldest and best-regarded families of New England, was henceforward to be formally designated in Britain by Broadmoor File Number 742, and to be held in permanent custody as a "certified criminal lunatic."

[ The Professor and the Madman - A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Simon Winchester, Harpercollins Publishers, New York, 1998, pp. 10-11, 16-21. ]

This is a classic tale of a man driven insane, or paranoid schizophrenic, by his repressed homosexual cravings. That these powerful, unacknowledged homosexual desires drove him to the senseless murder of a totally innocent man who was on his way to work in the early hours of the morning, only adds a higher element of tragedy to this already very sad story.

It would appear that the most powerful of Dr. Minor's repressed homosexual desires was an intense craving to orally copulate another man. This is demonstrated by his paranoid delusion that some unknown male intruders were attempting to insert some kind of "poison" into his mouth. Replace the word "semen" for "poison" and it becomes obvious what this oral craving was all about. Also, as the witness Dennis told the court, "Then he would spit dozens of times, as though trying to remove something that had been put into his mouth." In Dr. Minor's deranged mind that "something" undoubtedly was a penis.

Later on in Broadmoor, The English Asylum for the Criminally Insane to which he had been sentenced, it was reported [June 1875] that he was "convinced that intruders manage to get in - from under the floor, or through the windows - and that they pour poison into his mouth through a funnel." Here again his paranoid delusions take on a distinctly oral erotic hue, the poison once more representing semen and the funnel the penis.

Dr. Minor explained to the court that he was being punished for an "act he had been forced to commit" while serving as a medical doctor in the U.S. Army. In reality this act could very well have been an act of oral copulation performed by the Doctor on a male patient (perhaps a bed-ridden, uneducated soldier of Irish descent, hence his projected paranoid obsession about being "molested" by men of that ancestry), and the memory of which act was then totally repressed but later broke free from his unconscious mind (see Freud's "return of the repressed") and became an overwhelmingly powerful craving to repeat it. He was thus driven insane due to his complete, conscious repudiation of this intense ego-dystonic homosexual longing, which, if he had consciously admitted to or succumbed to would have placed him in that very unwelcome category of men known disparagingly in common parlance at that time as "cocksuckers." For a proud military officer from a well-known and highly-respected New England family, this denouement would have been intolerable to him. Historically, many a similarly proud man has committed suicide upon being consciously confronted with such a horrific sexual dilemma. This is what gives true meaning to the term, "I would rather die than admit it." In place of actually dying, the great majority of people confronted with such a severe bisexual conflict "escape" into insanity, or paranoid schizophrenia, rather than face these powerful homosexual cravings which are total anathema to their conscious self-image of themselves.

The fact of Dr. Minor being driven insane specifically by repressed homosexual oral cravings is, of course, conjecture, but there can be not the slightest doubt, from a careful reading of the testimony presented to the court, that there was obviously a very powerful element of some type of homosexual orality mixed in with all his many paranoid delusions.

From a careful reading of the all evidence presented in this case it would not be at all surprising to learn that the key role of the homosexual factor would have been surmised by all involved in it, though never actually stated, based upon the common knowledge of the evidence presented about the general content Dr. Minor's paranoid delusions. For everything in them points to some kind of a homosexual conflict.

Thus we have here one more example of the tragedy which schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease, can wreak upon an unsuspecting world. Dr. Minor spent the remainder of his life in either prison or mental hospital solely due to the murder he was driven to commit as the direct result of his paranoid schizophrenic delusions, caused, as they invariably are, by repressed homosexuality.

Most fortunately, however, he was able put his high intellectual abilities to excellent use during his long years of incarceration by greatly aiding in the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, as the subtitle of Simon Winchester's magnificent book about his case alerts us to.

Again we see the inescapable truth in the saying that "Schreber's name is legion." Thus Dr. William Minor's name must be added to that huge "legion" of paranoid schizophrenic persons, of both sexes, who would rather suffer the "death" of insanity rather than consciously admit to their homosexual cravings.