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    Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl: Reality Lost and Regained
    Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl: Reality Lost and Regained
    Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl: Reality Lost and Regained
    Ebook143 pages2 hours

    Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl: Reality Lost and Regained

    By Marguerite Sechehaye

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    Marguerite Sechehaye, a Swiss psychotherapist, followed the work of Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget closely, believing there was a link between psychosis and trauma experienced as a child. One of her most notable cases was undertaken with a psychotic patient referred to as “Renée”, a pseudonym used for Louisa Düss, whom she and her husband Albert Sechehaye eventually adopted.

    Over the course of their work together, Dr. Sechehaye took the unique approach of chronicling “Renee’s” journal entries and personal reflections in tandem with her own clinical commentary. The approach significantly influenced mental illness research by introducing an antipsychiatry framework that positioned the patient’s experiences as a valid means of establishing their case histories.

    As a result of this work, Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl: Reality Lost and Regained was first published in 1951, highlighting the most memorable aspects of the disease. The book remarkably reveals to the “normal” mind the emotional shadings, perceptions, confusions, and tortures of a mind at the brink of dissolution. It is at once a harrowing experience and a magnificently moving testimonial to the capacity of a human being to survive and triumph.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMuriwai Books
    Release dateDec 1, 2018
    ISBN9781789124989
    Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl: Reality Lost and Regained
    Author

    Marguerite Sechehaye

    MARGUERITE ALBERT SECHEHAYE (1887-1964) was a Swiss psychotherapist and pioneer in the psychoanalytic treatment of people with schizophrenia. She developed the symbolic realization method for treating psychotic patients, with an approach rooted in psychoanalytic and existential theory. Born Marguerite Burdet on September 27, 1887 in Switzerland, she was raised in a Protestant family. She studied at the University of Geneva, where she attended lectures by Ferdinand de Saussure on linguistics. Between 1906 and 1911, her notes from these lectures assisted Charles Bally and her husband, Albert Sechehaye, to develop Course in General Linguistics, published in 1916, three years after Saussure’s death. The book is generally regarded as the starting point of structural linguistics, an approach to linguistics that flourished in Europe and the United States in the first half of the 20th century. After graduating, Sechehaye studied at the Rousseau Institute, where she worked as the assistant of Édouard Claparède, and later went on to establish her own practice based on the encouragement of Raymond de Saussure. Sechehaye’s other published works are Symbolic Realization; A New Method of Psychotherapy Applied to a Case of Schizophrenia (1951) and A New Psychotherapy in Schizophrenia; Relief of Frustrations by Symbolic Realization (1956). She died in Geneva on June 1, 1964, aged 76. DR. GRACE RUBIN-RABSON (1903-1981) was an American psychologist, pianist, translator and author. She conducted a consulting practice, lectured in psychology at Indiana University, and specialized in experimental work in relation to piano memorizing. She was the author of The Influence of Analytical Pre-Study in Memorizing Piano Music (1937), which was also her thesis submitted for her degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Columbia University.

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    Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl - Marguerite Sechehaye

    This edition is published by Muriwai Books – www.pp-publishing.com

    To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books – muriwaibooks@gmail.com

    Or on Facebook

    Text originally published in 1951 under the same title.

    © Muriwai Books 2018, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

    Publisher’s Note

    Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

    We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

    AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SCHIZOPHRENIC GIRL

    REALITY LOST AND REGAINED

    BY

    MARGUERITE SECHEHAYE

    Translated by Grace Rubin-Rabson

    TABLE OF CONTENTS

    Contents

    TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

    TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE 4

    INTRODUCTION 5

    PART 1: THE STORY 7

    I. Appearance of the First Feelings of Unreality 7

    II. The Struggle Against Unreality Begins 9

    III. Riquette 13

    IV. I Go into Psychoanalysis and Find a Mama 15

    V. I Enter the System 16

    VI. The System Gives Me Orders and Things Begin to Come to Life 19

    VII. I Am Hospitalized; the System Persists and I Risk Losing Mama 21

    VIII. Sink into Unreality 28

    IX. After a Beneficial Trip an Acute Crisis Confounds Me 30

    X. My First Double: The Little Monkey 33

    XI. The Miracle of the Apples 34

    XII. I Learn to Know My Body 38

    XIII. Mama’s Other Patients; All My Self-Destructive Energies Are Unleashed 39

    XIV. Mama is Busy with Baby Ezekiel 43

    XV. I Enter Mama’s Body and Am Reborn in Ezekiel 43

    XVI. I Become Firmly Established in Wonderful Reality 45

    PART II: THE INTERPRETATION 49

    I. Stages in Ego Disintegration 49

    Development of the Pathological Perception of Reality 49

    Defense Mechanisms of the Psychotic Ego 51

    Oral Sources of the Feeling of Reality 53

    New Trauma and Massive Regression of the Ego to the Fetal Phase 54

    II. Stages in Ego Reconstruction 56

    Symbolic Realization of the Fetal Phase as the Beginning of Ego Reconstruction 56

    Creation of the New Imago 57

    Imitative Process in the Service of Ego Formation 58

    Construction of the Body Ego 61

    Affective Bases in the Structuration of the Real 61

    III. Conclusions 64

    Value of Symbolic Realization in Formative Mechanism of the Ego 64

    A Dynamic Conception of the Process of Disintegration in Schizophrenia 67

    BIBLIOGRAPHY 69

    REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 70

    TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

    Personal retrospections of mental illness during periods of remission or recovery are not rare in either popular or psychiatric literature. Too often the rampant overdramatization, the search for appealing literary devices, the defects in recall and the confusion in sequence rob the reporting of scientific value.

    In the present instance the retrospections were under control; the analyst was able not only to verify the manifest behavior but to discover the patient’s specific reactions to her own progress and to the therapist’s procedural errors. The recognition of such errors would alone be a significant contribution to therapeutic technique.

    Mme. Sechehaye’s comparison of childhood and schizophrenic thinking is clarifying, as is her review of the dynamics of regression, of ego destruction based on earliest frustrations and of ego reconstruction through the assuagement of primal needs. But transcending these in clinical importance as a practical approach to the therapy of schizophrenia is her outline of a workable system of symbolic therapy capable of returning the patient to the desired level of regression for the achievement of those satisfactions vital to further ego development.

    The narrator of the story experienced a particularly early and severe form of dementia praecox, in which prognosis is usually unfavorable. Yet, without drastic physiological intervention, she seemingly recovered to normal mature adulthood. How this was accomplished will prove useful and interesting to anyone engaged in therapy.

    So much has been written about schizophrenia; so little is known. From the point of view both of interpretation and effective methods, this book has much to offer.

    GRACE RUBIN-RABSON

    Fort Wayne, Indiana

    May, 1951

    INTRODUCTION

    This study might be considered the reverse or negative of a previous work, Le réalisation symbolique,{1} in which the case of a young girl classified medically as a schizophrenic was reviewed from the purely therapeutic point of view. The description of her schizophrenic symptoms and their disappearance demonstrated the technique effecting recovery. Formal as was the investigation, the thoughts and feelings pervading Renee’s soul were readily discerned. The method of symbolic realization traced the changes brought about in her affective life; the ensuing course dependent on the therapy outlined the evolution of a psyche from its regression to complete infantilism back to independent adulthood.

    In La réalisation symbolique, however, the writer remained an observer of external manifestations, scarcely penetrating the patient’s inner life. For even when the schizophrenic is in a state of physical and mental collapse suggesting dementia, he nonetheless remains in possession of his mental life and intelligence, often experiencing vivid sensations which he is unable to exteriorize.

    In periods of utter lethargy or in stupor when nothing is felt, an impersonal lucidity still persists, allowing him to note not only what goes on around him but his own affective state as well. Often the extreme inertia itself prevents speech and response. The observation of what passes about him will later permit a retracing of the steps in his illness and, if necessary, a recounting of them, making possible the discovery of his life’s contents, its struggles, its ineffable suffering, its pitiful pleasures, in short, a richly reactive existence belied by appearances.

    Such memories must inevitably prove highly instructive for the psychologist. As Freud observed in New Lectures in Psychoanalysis, These patients have turned away from outer reality; it is for this reason that they are more aware than we of inner reality and can reveal to us things which without them would remain impenetrable.

    It has always been remarked that the present work may be seen as the negative of the work on symbolic realization, the exposure of what lies behind schizophrenic signs and symptoms. As the photographic negative transposes color and space values, the patient’s introspections can be compared with the observer’s impressions of his behavior. This juxtaposition furnishes information preventing a false estimation of the patient and the degree of his indisposition. The verbal content at times lends an impression of graver illness than does his outward appearance, and the reverse is equally true. It is always amazing to discover that the patient who seems demented is actually clear and aware of what goes on about him. There is then a tendency to blame him for his symptoms as though he could control them, forgetting that he is indeed truly powerless and irresponsible.

    This renders clearer the intrinsic nature of schizophrenia, which consists in a dissociation of an affectivity deeply disturbed by the loss of contact with life from an intelligence remaining intact and acting as a motion picture camera to record whatever comes within range of the lens.

    It goes without saying that Renee could hardly recount all the impressions experienced during the course of her illness. Actually there were long periods of hebephrenic catatonia when her confusion made it impossible to register what went on either around or within her. During periods of aggravated stupor no memory traces of perceptive impressions remained. For this reason, in narrating Renee’s intimate introspections, introspections which seem to bear witness to an astonishing lucidity, it is not to be forgotten that they represent only certain periods of her illness, fortunately, those most interesting from the psychological angle.

    MARGUERITE SECHEHAYE

    PART 1: THE STORY

    I. Appearance of the First Feelings of Unreality

    [This is Renee’s intimate story as she recounted it shortly after her recovery. It begins with her first feelings of unreality when she was five years old.]

    I remember very well the day it happened. We were staying in the country and I had gone for a walk alone as I did now and then. Suddenly, as I was passing the school, I heard a German song; the children were having a singing lesson. I stopped to listen, and at that instant a strange feeling came over me, a feeling hard to analyze but akin to something I was to know too well later—a disturbing sense of unreality. It seemed to me that I no longer recognized the school, it had become as large as a barracks; the singing children were prisoners, compelled to sing. It was as though the school and the children’s song were set apart from the rest of the world. At the same time my eye encountered a field of wheat whose limits I could not see. The song of the children imprisoned in the smooth stone school-barracks filled me with such anxiety that I broke into sobs. I ran home to our garden and began to play to make things seem as they usually were, that is, to return to reality. It was the first appearance of those elements which were always present in later sensations and unreality: illimitable vastness, brilliant light, and the gloss and smoothness of material things. I have no explanation for what happened, or why. But it was during this same period that I learned my father had a mistress and that he made my mother cry. This revelation bowled me over because I had heard my mother say that if my father left her, she would kill herself.

    [In the years that followed until she was about twelve, Renee experienced unreal feelings many times. From then on, the sensations became more and more intense, more and more frequent. She remembers that the most striking of these was related to school, the school she had attended for two years.]

    One day we were jumping rope at recess. Two little girls were turning a long rope while two others jumped in from either side to meet and cross over. When it came my turn and I saw my partner jump toward me where we were to meet and cross over, I was seized with panic; I did not recognize her. Though I

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