The movie The Professor and the Madman - starring Mel Gibson and Sean Penn was recommended to
me by a reluctant colleague who is an experimental psychologist. She thought that the scenes with antiquated
treatment of mental illness might be of interest to my history of psychology and/or
clinical psychology students. I think
she also thought the portrayal of madness by the film and enacted by Sean Penn in the role of the
madman, Captain
William Chester Minor, a U.S. Military Officer and surgeon who had run to
Britain in order to escape a man he believed were
chasing him and, in a fit of madness, shot and killed another man he assumed to
be his tormentor, would be of interest to me personally and perhaps also my students. And here she hit the bull’s eye. I think Penn sympathetically portrays a
complicated bit of madness and, though the narrative strays quite widely from
the historical facts, I think the production is a telling study of the human
condition.
In the real world, Minor was found not guilty of the murder
by reason of insanity and institutionalized at Broadmoor Hospital
from 1872-1910. He had served as a
surgeon in the Civil War, and he is imagined in this film as being haunted
first by the memory of having branded a man with the letter D on his face after
the man was caught deserting. It was
this man that Minor feared was chasing him – both to England and on the night
when he shot and killed an innocent man, George Merritt, who, together with his
wife Eliza, had six children and a seventh on its way. The movie imagines a relationship between
Minor and Eliza being central to Minor’s rehabilitation, but also to his
subsequent relapse into madness – which provides one central and
psychoanalytically interesting narrative in the film, though apparently a fictional one. The other – one that is clearly at least somewhat historical - is
the relationship between Minor and Sir James
Murray, the man who was responsible for compiling the Oxford English
Dictionary (O.E.D., as it is known).
For those who have not had the pleasure of perusing the
O.E.D., let me recommend that you spend some time with it. In its original version, it runs to 26 thick
volumes, and, while it defines over 414,000 words, the really neat part of it
is that it traces the use of each of the words through history – so that you
can see the development of a word from its use by Chaucer, through Shakespeare,
to its use by Dickens. In total, there are 1,800,000 plus citations. In the 1980s,
when I was in graduate school, a two volume version of the O.E.D. was offered
as an incentive for joining some book club.
They squeezed the 26 volumes into 2 by reducing the pages into miniscule
form, and they included a magnifying glass with the dictionary. I was tremendously envious of my friends who
had them – though not envious enough to sign up for the book club. I suppose I was only slightly more envious of
my friends who had a complete set of Freud (which I have since secured – maybe
someday I will have an O.E.D. as well).
 |
| Murray in front of the slips |
The irony is, that if you have never held a volume of the
O.E.D. in your hands it may be because you no longer need to. Every single one of the links in the first
two paragraphs is to a Wikipedia link – and the facts about the O.E.D. are taken from one of those links. Wikipedia a tremendous tool – and there are many on-line Wiki- and regular dictionaries. The idea
behind the Wiki projects is that they are open sourced – that people – people like
you and me – can create or edit entries.
And the first Wiki project was…. the
O.E.D. This book, with its almost 2
million citations, is not the work of a single author – or even of a small team
of authors. James Murray, a brilliant
philologist and autodidact, was given the task, by Oxford University, of
creating the encyclopedia – and he made the task even more mammoth by deciding
not just to define every word, but trace its lineage. He realized that he could not do this alone,
so he asked people all over to help him with the project. He provided slips of paper to book dealers and coffee shop owners throughout the United Kingdom and asked them to distribute them to readers. The slips asked the readers, when they
found a word written somewhere – anywhere – they were to write on the slip the
word, how it was used, the meaning, and the source of the word and to mail it
to Murray. The postal system ended up building a special mailbox to deposit the mails to Murray in.
Minor, effectively imprisoned, but given a great deal of
free rein by the superintendent of the asylum who recognized the Yale educated
man as a kindred spirit, discovered one of the slips that Murray had sent out
in a book that he read, one that a bookseller had likely slipped in there. As
dramatized in the film, this was a book that the guards had given him in
appreciation for saving one of their fellow guards by amputating the guard's leg when
it was trapped under a spiked gate (If you have not seen the film, this is a
particularly gruesome scene and involves flashbacks to amputations during the
war – I don’t actually know how gruesome it is as the reluctant wife and I
looked away during the worst of it). His
discovery of the request for volunteer help became an organizing factor for him and benefited the dictionary. He ended up being on its most prolific volunteer contributors, with over 10,000 of the citations being authored by him.
Again, as dramatized in the film (we don’t, I don’t think,
have detailed historical notes about what actually took place), Minor was
suffering from a paranoid reaction to traumatic events in his life. In paranoia, the individual is convinced that
something that other’s don’t believe to be the case is actually happening. In this case, Minor is convinced that the
defector and his henchman is pursuing him.
In fact, Minor feels terribly badly about what he has done – he who has
pledged to heal people has harmed one.
Minor’s guilt becomes projected outside of himself – relieving him of
the pain of guilt, which he can’t bear, but creating an entity that contains it
– the imagined deserter that pursues him.
Of course, killing George Merritt only compounds things – as he now
becomes chased by the “ghosts” of both men – Merritt and the defector - who together personify the guilt that he has
projected onto them. All of this comes
in the context, as the brilliant but still reluctant wife pointed out, of the
overwhelming trauma of tending to thousands of mangled men – cutting off their
legs while they literally bit on bullets – flattening them out – to manage the
pain. To save men’s lives he had to
inflict pain – as he did with asylum guard.
Obsessing over the task of providing the needed histories of
words (and having the time to do the research in an institution where he wasn’t
allowed to do much else) helped Minor organize himself – and led to his
becoming incredibly productive – in the film, James Murray credits Minor with
having allowed the first volume to come to fruition. My guess is that Minor contributed to many
volumes – even those that were published even after He and Murray had both
died. I’m not sure, but I think that
they were reading works and tracing important usages of words as they emerged
so that he was not just working on the As, but on all the words that emerged in his
reading. In any case, both men had
reason to be thankful for the other.
Indeed, in the film, one of the story lines is an attempt to remove
Murray from the editorship and the politics surrounding this. Minor is portrayed as a liability – Murray is
employing murderers to get his dictionary published – but also as the key asset
that allows the book to move on. My
guess from the chronology is that the film compresses a longer period of time
into a smaller window, for which I don’t fault it – the film is engrossing enough–
and how often do you get to say that about a film that is about the writing of
a dictionary at the end of the 19th Century? Yes, there is critical concern about this film, including the chronology of it, but the central story is compelling and not getting distracted by the irrelevant details of a decent work of art is a skill that I am working to cultivate.
The other liberty that is taken is with the relationship
between Minor and the widow Eliza. As far as I can tell, this story line is entirely invented. In
the courtroom, she is portrayed as angry that Minor is not killed for killing
her husband. When Minor directs that his
civil war pension be directed to her, Eliza refuses it because she does not
want to give Minor the satisfaction of feeling that he has made compensation
for killing her husband. After she turns
to prostitution to support her children, and the kindly asylum guard intercedes
on Minor’s behalf, she grudgingly allows Minor to support the family, but then
also begins visiting with Minor. He
discovers that she is illiterate when she does not know the title of a book she
has brought as a present, and Minor proceeds to teach her to write. Their relationship brings him peace – he has
helped her and the family – but when she professes love, the guilt of having
killed her husband not just in cold blood, but also in her heart, propels him
back into madness. He castrates himself,
apparently as a means of preventing any kind of enactment of their love but
also perhaps as a sign of contrition and retribution (again, though not as
graphic as the first scene, this was very difficult to watch – or turn away
from).
The biographical Minor did castrate himself, but apparently
in response to fears that he was being abducted and taken to other lands where
he was sexually abusing children. I
think that this speaks to a schizophrenic – by which I mean a chaotic loosening
of thought – element in addition to the paranoia. The film portrays a touching and, I think,
very realistic secondary curative element beyond the obsession with words – love. It also presents some of the limits that love
affords – that we cannot essentially change aspects of others through
love. Though Eliza’s hatred of Minor was
softened by her love for him (her hatred was nicely preserved by her daughter,
but she works to help her daughter understand how she has developed – and, in
the process, I think helps herself understand this), Minor's sense of guilt is not soothed
– quite the contrary, it gets compounded by his feelings towards Eliza – or the
arousal of feelings towards him that he feels that he has contributed to in
her.
The movie has both Eliza, but more centrally Murray,
intercede on Minor’s behalf to secure his release from the hospital. After his relapse, Minor is “treated” by the
superintendent in ways that I am not familiar with from my history of
psychiatric treatment. The treatments
seem barbaric and sadistic – and Minor’s agreement to undergo them seem to be a
signal of his continuing madness – specifically his inability to handle his guilt internally and the hope that others harming him will serve as a kind of sin easing punishment – and the efforts to
help him appear to us and to the kindly guards, but also to Minor (in a
gratifying way, I think) as painful ways of attacking him rather than true
efforts (borne out of love) to reach him, all despite the superintendent’s initial attachment
to him. It leads me to wonder whether
the superintendent, invested in his treatment in part through identification
(they are both well-educated physicians who love books and are members of the
upper class), feels betrayed or let down by Minor’s relapse – and, having as
strict and rigid a sense of justice as Minor, he became the perfect instrument
of Minor’s punishment – better even than imagined stalkers and ghosts.
The movie and history intersect again with Minor being released
from the asylum by none other than a young Winston Churchill, who, in true
political savvy mode, protects the British people by releasing him to: the
United States. Minor is deported and
then treated in a hospital in Washington DC.
As mentioned earlier, both he and Murray die before the completion of
the project, and some of the most endearing scenes in the film include the
affection between the two of them and their respect for each other’s roles in
the project – Murray as the definer – and Minor as the elucidator of the words –
of the language – that they both so madly love.
A quick note on my reading: This movie is based in historical facts, but it is a work of fiction. It is about the prescribed treatment of early 20th century psychiatry and about the organic improvements and relapses in the functioning of a patient that I have chosen, in line with the title and a long tradition, to call mad. I think that, though my "diagnosis" benefits from an additional 100 years of scientific work, it is still largely descriptive rather than causative. I think the treatments that are being described are most human. The first, finding meaning - and even obsessing over that meaning - could be described as a defense rather than a treatment. But that is why we have defenses - to ward off things that are even less adaptive. The second, love, in the form of the esteem and connection with Murray, but also with the (as far as I can tell) imagined relationship with Eliza, is an artistic description of the power of love to both relieve suffering, but also to create it. I find that story, while imaginary, compelling. I am reminded of a very paranoid patient that I treated long ago. I won't go into the details to avoid exposing him - and they also do not map directly onto Minor - but I find the parallels to fit - and the underlying premise to be supported by theory. The superintendent, especially at the end of treatment, again is, I think, a made up character. I am still analyzing him as if he were real because there is something about this part that holds together as well. I think that much psychiatric and psychological treatment is, in fact, the result of organic human contact, and I have worked to learn something about that from this film, which rings true for me.
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