UPDATE: Years later, I'm still angry about Ellen's mistreatment, hence my longwinded ranting:
'In great and unrecognised, or ignored, irony the psychiatrist and his colleagues became guilty of the very things 'insane' women were accused of: in his hands the invention he retitled 'Ellen West' was transformed from a troubled person into an exciting, poetic subject, a canvas upon which Ludwig Binswanger and his accomplices rushed to turn into art duly graced with their signatures. As is the case with numerous dabblers and dilettantes, even those clutching professional credentials, their overheated and scattershot interpretations passed from the valid to the vain. In accord with their Romantic theories - containing everything from the shaky interpretation of Ellen's dreams to the supposed 'death-wish at the heart of every human's secret life' (the theory itself cribbed from fiction: myth and drama - this is telling, of course) - consciously or not the men-as-artists created and forced a narrative for Ellen. They even used her own poetry, her private letters and such like, against her, as if it was a given that such things are indisputably credible indicators of states of mind. A means to her end was composed, a convenient solving of the problem she caused the emblems of society in the guise of ending her problems by the ending of her life. The untrustworthy narrative and unreliable narrators demanded that as Ellen became a kind of story lacking a satisfactory conclusion, one if not pleasing then at least finished to her 'readers'' present and future, her drama cease before it became all too tedious for their care and attention. After all, life must go on and time is money, there are new wives to be found etc etc. For modern readers: 'move on' is, I believe, the contemporary expression of such shameless self-interest.
Virtually every one of Binswanger's diagnoses related to the case is challenged or discredited today (almost inevitably, his stellar reputation remains intact) but at the time this hot-breathed scrabbling around, hugger-mugger with consulted peers and students in the quest to categorise his patient and so her condition, was assumed to confirm his pioneering thought and professional standing. But I insist, in turning Ellen into a canvas artfully assuming reality if not flesh by virtue of their before-the-fact Abstract Expressionist daubings rooted in questionable Surrealist theorising and replete with dreamy Freudian conclusions, these men weighted with the historical baggage of sexist thinking also became guilty of a clinical cardinal sin: 'a priori' is the appropriate term - the practice of deduction via theory rather than established scientific principles. Even the very terminology - all those endless qualifiers, the 'special' meaning given to ordinary words, couching, the enclosing parentheses, the Latin phrasing etc etc - is a language which deliberately excludes. A priesthood of science demands that the dumbed-down, ignorant flock doesn't understand the alien language of analysis, as this might lead the sheep to cry out about all manner of questionable actions against them. As with a standard priesthood, the flock has to make do with interpreters officially and dubiously sanctioned by 'God' or whatever male authority the controllers make in their own image.
Because of their fascinated passion for the sheer interest of the 'project', the opportunity to make one's name with a celebrated and wrapped-up literary definition no less because of an exasperation stemming from their sheer inability to positively help Ellen, she was lost, rendered helpless in the hands of strangers. Even her husband, in full agreement with Binswanger, bought into the BS - he purchased the poison with which Ellen ended her torment three days after release from 'care'. Ellen longed for death, it is true, because she felt unable to meet the expectations of father and husband, of peers and glamour magazine editors, of the pressures women and girls face virtually every day of their scrutinised lives. But the 'successful' ending of that tormented existence and the trials of the time before she left the stage society built for her should give us pause, I think.
In closing, please consider another closing: Binswanger's case note, and also the words of a famous philosopher who admired Binswanger, one trained in truly scientific disciplines, who deigned to sum up Ellen's life and death in an appallingly stylised, soft, elegiac and poetic manner. And then, I hope, you feel the kind of discomfort I do on reading the following utterly self-indulgent nonsense - in writing of Ellen West he is really writing an autobiography that celebrates his own (supposed) cleverness and very personal obsessions. There's a glee, or at least an impatience, in their writing; they are clearly waiting for Ellen to 'close her chapter'. In the bloodless hands of men such as these, is it any wonder that people like 'Ellen West' are sometimes crafted into whatever they choose to make of them? ~
'January 21. The patient has been reading Goethe's Faust again. In her diary, writes that art is the “mutual permeation” of the “world of the body” and the “world of the spirit” Says that her own poems are “hospital poems ... weak - without skill or perseverance; only managing to beat their wings softly."'
'In the depths of his dream', philosopher Michel Foucault wrote, 'what mankind encounters is his death, a death which in its most inauthentic form is but the brutal and bloody interruption of life; yet, in its most authentic form, it is the fulfilment of their very existence. Suicide is the ultimate myth, the Last Judgement of the imagination, as the dream is its genesis and absolute origin.
In the dream, the soul freed of its body plunges into the Kosmos, becomes immersed in it, and mingles with its motions in a sort of aquatic union. Caught between the wish to fly, to float in an ethereal jubilation and the obsessive fear of being trapped in a muddy earth that paralysed her, she flew towards that distant and lofty space of light where love is totalised in the eternity of an instant.'
Her final words, in a letter to a friend, written on the brink of Ellen's suicide:
'Will you greet with anger, or happiness, the news which might well reach you before this letter?'
