Everyone thinks they're Dumbo

 
Selin, the sparkling narrator of Elif Batuman's brilliant novel The Idiot, has a real knack of teasing out startling insights from unlikely sources. Here she is, trashing one of Walt Disney's ridiculous life-lessons and realising instead a universal truth about people:
 

*

I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo's tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they're you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn't know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo. Again and again I saw the phenomenon repeated.
 
The meanest girls, the ones who started secret clubs to ostracize the poorly dressed, delighted to see Cinderella triumph over her stepsisters. They rejoiced when the prince kissed her. Evidently, they not only saw themselves as noble and good, but also wanted to love and be loved. Maybe not by anyone and everyone, the way I wanted to be loved. But, for the right person, they were prepared to form a relation based on mutual kindness. This meant that the Disney portrayal of bullies wasn't accurate, because the Disney bullies realized they were evil, prided themselves on it, and loved nobody.

*

 

Of course, Disney is easily skewered, and is not going to lead to any kind of serious introspection about whether or not you are a truly good or bad person. But reading back Selin's kindergarten epiphany, something else struck me, something that sounded a more discordant note.

Bear with me for a moment and I'll eventually come back to the laboured rationale behind this little thought experiment. After looking at the following reproduction of a painting, what is your reaction? Which of the figures draw your sympathy? Do you identify with any of them?   

Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière André Brouillet (1887)

Keep that initial impression in mind, and let's see if it shifts. As with Dumbo, there's a strong chance that your sympathy attaches immediately to the woman being restrained, her head lolling lifelessly backwards. The rest of the room, be it the authoritative man to the woman's right, or the group of men gazing on at what is clearly some kind of medical demonstration, or the group, including two nurses assisting the spectacle - my language is becoming leading here - fill us with the uneasy and uncomfortable sense of a 'freak show' taking place. As with Dumbo, I think the majority of you are rooting for the woman being restrained; the woman who we immediately deem as different. 

 

I first came across this painting around twenty years ago when I was trying to make sense of, and indeed, to control a frightening and debilitating bout of hypochondria ('illness anxiety' is the more modern and correct term, but I always choose the Victorian label as it seems to place the condition at a greater and therefore more absurd distance). The woman being restrained and paraded in the painting is Marie 'Blanche' Wittman. She is, in contemporary interpretations, undergoing a 'hysteric fit whilst under hypnosis', the latter brought on by the figure to her right, the famous French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Looking at this painting now, and perhaps in line with many of you, I too am rooting for Wittman, but interestingly - and here's the point - I don't identify with Wittman. Yet, going back to my first exposure to the painting, thumbing through books on mental illness, and in the maelstrom of an hypochondriacal panic, I certainly did. The sense that I was Wittman, not in control of my body, hostage to the opinions and expertise and whims of doctors and the medical profession, utterly consumed me. It was not a pleasant place to be.     

Do I have a morbid fascination with great paintings that depict medicine and hospitals? I do, and this owes much to the fact that it is wise - or rather imperative - that I don't lose myself in medical dictionaries or go surfing the stormy seas of internet self-diagnosis sites. For me, paintings don't seem to trigger psychosomatic symptoms in the way that words do. Thus I can spend an age gazing on the Brouillet, or Jacques-Fabien Gautier D'Agoty's A Dissected Man or a masterpiece such as  Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. Of these two paintings, I'd vouch that almost all of us, unlike with the depiction of Wittman, struggle to imagine ourselves as the dissected corpse. I wonder why that is?

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, Rembrandt (1632)

Cause to revisit, or rather to be reminded of these paintings, particularly the Brouillet, came from me taking an overdue and understandably cautious plunge into Suzanne O'Sullivan's It's All In Your Head. Through it, I was given, not only a thorough reminder of how common 'imaginary illnesses' are - and just how real its symptoms are: indeed, my mantra, learned and accepted over decades is 'psychosomatic symptoms are real' - but also a wonderful potted history of illnesses of the mind.  

Above all, the lesson seems to be that mental illnesses are still ridiculously stigmatised. In fact, in almost all of the case studies in her book, the diagnosis is incredibly difficult for the patient to accept. They rage against it, and in some cases flee from it. They don't always accept the help that is available. They don't want to identify with the likes of Wittman. And as O'Sullivan says, they would, perversely, often rather be told that their symptoms have a much more life-threatening, even terminal diagnosis, than something that is 'merely' psychosomatic.  

O'Sullivan is brilliant on both the simplicity and complexity of the psychosomatic. For example, how many of us realise that tears brought on by an emotional film or piece of music are a psychosomatic response? Or panicking at an interview, blood flushing to our face because of sudden embarrassment? And also, just how far we have come since the days of the Brouillet painting, yet we still have so much to learn about the power that the mind exerts over the body. O'Sullivan ends her book with a plea to rid ourselves of that dichotomy: 

*  

 

It has taken over twenty years for me to feel I am even close to an understanding of these disorders. Personally I find a strange sort of comfort in the knowledge that my body can react in this way to stress. And if my body wants to tell me something, I intend to listen. 

 

For us to consider a psychological cause for serious illness it is vital that we believe that such a thing is possible, and how extreme psychosomatic illness can sometimes be. For people to accept the reality of psychosomatic illness they must accept the power of the mind over the body. We seem to be happy to accept reports of people using hypnosis in place of anaesthesia, the placebo effect, the use of sports psychologists, homeopathy and alternative medicines, the effect of meditation and cancer diets and any number of other examples of how the mind can influence the body. Why is the idea of the mind reproducing physical symptoms any harder to credit? For all the positive effects the mind can have, there can just as easily be negative ones. There is no point resisting: disability for psychological reasons is all around us, it can exist and does. It is a common problem that could affect anybody - ourselves, as well as the people we know and love. 

*

 

I return to the painting and will myself back into the position that Wittman occupies. It is difficult, not least because you feel a kind of opposition to Charcot and his students, who to our modern minds seem ham-handed proponents of ridiculous notions such as hysteria being caused by the womb literally wandering around the body. Indeed, as O'Sullivan points out, citing her own experience, even now supposedly expert doctors will still insist that psychosomatic and psychogenic conditions are gendered:

I once made a firm diagnosis of dissociative seizures in a middle-aged man and, in reply, the male consultant who had asked for my opinion in the first instance made it clear that I could not possibly be correct. 'Men don't get psychogenic seizures,' he stated, reflecting almost exactly, I thought, the words of the French physician Jean-Baptise Louyer-Villermay in 1819: 'A man cannot be hysterical; he has no uterus.'

And, of course, there's the freak show element of the painting, Wittman the Dumbo figure, put on display to illustrate the brilliance of others. But from a position of balance and lucidity, I just about imagine it. The power of the mind to over-ride your desire for wellness, and the empathy kicking in, that all of us have this debilitating and frightening capacity within us. Deep down, we're all able to see ourselves as Dumbo; we also need to be able to see ourselves as Wittman.