Ilse
168 Ilse Lara Jefferson dedicates her account of her madness, These Are My Sisters : A Journal from the Inside of Insanity, to her “Shakespearian Salvation .” Prior to Lara’s birth, all five siblings had died on her mother. Even as she succeeds in overturning her mother’s creation so that she can be reborn as herself, she takes comfort in her newborn strength, which will prove a match for “the ghost of the person” whom she succeeded (18). Her mother drove her into the wordless abyss of suffering without the witness protection of understanding. But then one day she tells the nurse that she is Shakespeare. The nurse comes back with the supplies: “Go to it, Shakespeare.” Verily, verily, Shakespeare, I had no idea you could be called from your quiet English grave with so little effort. . . . Perhaps this is a penance—an expiation—an atonement you must make for filling so many pages of drama in your former existence with madmen. (23) When she first sought hospitalization (her mother sent her to a convent ) the doctor said she should stop psychoanalyzing herself. The outright madness came with the release or admission of her hatred of her mother. She becomes the spokesperson and poster girl for sterilization (108). Early in her narrative she declares she was born “at least two thousand years too late”: her “Amazonian proportions” are “out of vogue” (11), certainly not on the wavelength of the “wasting disease” (15) that claimed each of her siblings. What a waist! A birth, I mean girth supersized five times what’s in vogue. Her birth answered her mother’s prayers. This child was to be too good for this world. In the course of writing, Lara identifies the madness that Ilse 169 pursues her with Satan (160). Does the dramatic neurosis escape the psychosis her mother laid on her as the atonement for five dead children? The asylum that gives her the proscenium for coming alive as “Shakespeare” is, for her dead siblings, home. “My mother had, in her younger years, been an attendant at an asylum. . . . Her suckling children were brought to her at intervals for nursing by a patient who had only to walk across the grounds” (15). The nurse breaks ranks with supervision (or Christianity ) and entrusts writing supplies to the patient. “Shakespeare” inhabits the secular world is a stage before curtains for mother’s babies, who are brought across the grounds (for living on) in intervals reconstituted as the writing sessions that allow “egotism” to transgress itself and make contact. P. K. Dick read Binswanger’s “The Case of Ellen West” in the collection Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology, which also includes Binswanger’s method essay, “The Existential Analysis School of Thought,” and another case study, “Insanity as Life-Historical Phenomenon and as Mental Disease: The Case of Ilse.” Ilse’s symptomatic deed, which Binswanger is hard-pressed to identify, tout court, as the onset of her schizophrenia, is Binswanger’s repeated point of reference or demo that implies and folds out the frame of his approach to mental illness. “One day, when her father had once again reproached her, she told him she knew of a way of saving him, and in front of her father she put her right hand up to her forearm into the burning stove, then held out her hands toward him with these words: ‘Look, this is to show you how much I love you!’” (215). The case study begins by striking up that balancing act between Shakespeare and Goethe that Dick would maintain—following the lead of the culture of psychoanalysis—beginning with Time out of Joint. “Following a performance of Hamlet, the idea came to her mind to persuade her father through some decisive act to treat her mother more considerately” (214). Ilse was inspired by the scene in which Hamlet plans to murder the King at prayer but then hesitates and withdraws. “If at that particular time Hamlet had not missed his chance, he could have been saved, Ilse felt.” Hamlet would thus have carried out the command of his father’s ghost, who would then have left—him and his mother alone. It is Hamlet’s concern over where his uncle would end up on the other side if dispatched while praying that stays his hand. The cross-section of Shakespeare’s tragedy that speaks to Ilse’s contemplation of her desire to act is skewered exclusively by the theme of haunting...
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