Showing posts with label psychotherapy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label psychotherapy. Show all posts

Tuesday 19 February 2013

Freakout.

I’m just completing Sybille Bedford’s thoughtful biography of Aldous Huxley (volume two) in which she moralises on the question of Huxley’s advocacy of mescalin and other mind-rinsing psychedelic drugs.
Would it — and should it — have occurred to him that the contents of The Doors of Perception might trickle within the reaches of the half-baked, the under-educated, the unstable and indeed the pre-experienced young.
The last words Aldous Huxley wrote on his writing tablet were some hours before his death:
 
LSD – Try it
intermuscular
  100 mm*
 
*100 micrograms (μg)

He died peacefully with the doctor observing ‘a marked beneficial effect’ from two injections of LSD two hours apart. 


Well, Aldous Huxley without question belonged to the world’s intellectual elite and his own quest for self-transcendence, sometimes induced by psychedelic drugs under medical supervision, may be seen as a deliberately considered extension of the researches that support his vast corpus of writings on the philosophical, cultural, sociological and aesthetic concerns of the age. BUT, Ms Bedford makes clear her own reservations as to his moral soundness when assuming the responsibilities of an influential sage :
The extent to which his writings, and example, can be held to be causative factors in today’s drug scene is difficult, perhaps impossible to tell.
I agree. Yet, though she is certainly correct in pointing out the dangers that await the pre-experienced young when they dabble in psychedelics, I do not to this day regret the fecklessness — nor, indeed, the reckless half-bakedness — of my own youthful experiences of LSD, as I explain in my introduction to Sister Morphine:

The lyric, ‘Tell me, Sister Morphine, how long have I been lying here?’ by Marianne Faithfull, gave me the title of my book and Marianne, whose troubled life as a registered heroin addict is well documented (and whom I knew briefly when we were very young), inspired one of my case histories in which I trace the psychosis of a naïve young woman tempted to experience the hallucinatory visions induced by addictive drugs. In this case the drug is LSD; the place is the Swinging London of the Sixties ... and the temptress is the narrator’s elder twin sister.

‘ “Tonite let’s make love in London,” ’ Victoria quoted, speech slurred, on my return that evening. Those liquid eyes were again distilled to needlepoint droplets of narcosis, I noticed, and her flesh lacked skin tone. 
    Her mouth, I could see, was dry, with white flecks of spittle in the corners.
    Three years before, when I was fifteen, our mother had been shocked when she learned I had accompanied Victoria (at Vix’s insistence) to hear Ginsburg recite at the Royal Albert Hall. (‘Infantile scatology,’ was Mother’s verdict.)
    Now in the darkened drawing room Victoria beckoned to me and extended her palm.
    She held a small cube wrapped in metal foil.
    ‘A sugar lump to gild the pill,’ she said tenderly.
    I recoiled but she seized my arm and pressed the object firmly into my hand.
    ‘Know what this is?’
    ‘Havent the faintest,’ I whispered fearfully. But I knew.
    ‘A tab. A dot. For dropping acid, silly,’ she said.
    She unwrapped the cube and placed it on my tongue. I tried to spit it out but she sealed my lips with her fingertips. Involuntarily I swallowed.
    ‘Tune in, dearest heart,’ she soothed, ‘turn on. I will be your guide.’

    A great languor stole over me.
    Victoria took my hand in her hot, dry clasp and we began to dance.
    She led. I followed.
    (When I was no more than five years old she told me I must call her The Miss Victoria. Whether I cared for the fact or not, she asserted, I as the younger daughter was destined indefinitely to be merely a Miss. Even then, please understand, she had conferred on me a subordinate title.)
    Marianne began to sing from the radiogram: ‘I always needed you to look out for me ... oh, baby ...’
    At first, the rubberiness of my gums from the anaesthesia I found frightening.
    Soon, however, I began to sink into an hallucinatory reverie.
    It is true that during those psychedelic hours with Victoria I learned the meaning of Ginsberg’s ‘Blake-lit Mohammedan angels’ – because, for two eternities more ancient than Chaos, I stared at a milliard of those lucent homunculi in the reticular texture of the drawing room wallpaper. Yet ... I also stared into that purgatoried place where every monster has its own multitudes.
    By looking through the fissures of the old house, I seemed to see not only the stars but to penetrate upper chambers I had never fully explored.
    At an unknown hour I found myself floating some distance above Victoria’s bed gazing into upcast and darkly oracular eyes to contemplate a voluptuary pythoness wearing my face whose every sensuous uncoiling convulsion was suspended in an aphrodisiac prolongation I, also, shared.
    Over her seraphic nakedness a swarm of furry bees hovered which slowly resolved itself into a shock of tightly crinkled hair ... the frizzy Afro hair of ...
    Toby!
    Toby lay across her – a supersexual being of extraordinary radiance and beauty hewn from an heroic age.
    Colours intensified. Light diffracted. Objects distorted and shrank.
    Somehow, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the big wardrobe seemed to acquire an enormous significance.
    Time warped.  Joss sticks were lit.
    As from the edge of a great divide I observed a distant simulacrum of my being receive the tributes of the flesh ...  he-she and he-I and I-she, all interconnected by a glowing force field which seemed to strike sparks as lips touched, and melded into a totality of incorporeal sensation.
    The bed had dematerialised, as had those affirmers of mortality, our teeth and gums.
    I learned too late all trips are braved sans gritted jaw.
    The foundations of the house had dissolved into the infinite void and our flesh seemed to be tingling with electric static as we brushed the dark velvet of deep space ... a friction which seemed to transmute that insubstantial velvet into aurorean ripples of charged silk, billowing in waves, stimulating our senses with the glancing touch of a thousand quickening fingers, until we knew ourselves as one flesh, a single skin, slick with sweat, yearning like a fierce rolling tide to break together on a nearing shore.
    Then the wave receded and – beached – we lay together, struggling for breath as though we had just swum the infernal regions’ Hellespont.
    By unspoken agreement we avoided each other’s eyes, and before our temporal lives fully reasserted themselves, I remember, we three were next sitting cross-legged  – Victoria, Toby and I – watching in wonder the slow-motion, frame-by-frame, glittering parabola of a silver snuffbox we pitched from hand to hand.
    Drug-induced synaesthesia I mused, was like a problem in grammar, where the active and the passive voices become confused and there is a difficulty in distinguishing the moment of action from the resultant state and no one knows whether they are the object of the action or the subject performing it.
    A new word for my lexicon I learned that night was ‘freakout’.
    ‘Here, take it.’
    I groaned in protest. Toby stared down at me with eyes like live coals.
    ‘Fifty milligrams of Thorazine,’ Toby persisted, ‘itll bring her down.’
    His words cooled me better than cold water.
    ‘Precious, my poor precious,’ Victoria cooed, smoothing my brow.
    I have to tell you that, even adrift in a drug-induced nirvana, the deepest love can turn to deadliest hatred. I confess to you now that the not-so-beatific emotion I brought back from the Other Side was a revived green-eyed envy towards my elder sister, Victoria ... I, the last born, was ever mamma’s darling; she was daddy’s.


 


Flashback. The Wind of Time.

Note (November 9 2015): The weather is particularly mild just now and the fragrance last night of an Elaeagnus shrub clinging to a bank above the sea reminded me of an unnameable phenomenon I believe unremarked by trippers returning from their voyage to Inner Space . . . I speak of the Wind of Time. Certainly, LSD at its most revelatory reveals a dimension where a (Cosmic?) Wind, a rushing in the ears, is experienced expressive of Time’s racing passage . . . the flow of the strongly scented breath of the Elaeagnus flowers last night revived a memory and for a moment the experience was relived . . . and again the involuntary numbing of gums and teeth (sans gritted jaw).
 
 
  


My principal theme in Sister Morphine is the sheer unpredictability of womens behaviour when conditioned by prescription drugs. For this suite of interconnected womens narratives I have refashioned case histories as fictions to delineate the effects of drug administrations on clients observed in psychiatric nursing and psychotherapy ... particularly,  the more bizarre asocial psychoses – and sometimes criminal behaviour made manifest by the multifaceted side effects of prescription drugs such as antidepressants, tranquilizers and mood stabilizers.

In Sister Morphine, fifteen women Felícia, Charlotte, Zoë, Elenore, Eveline, Miriam, Grete, Esther, Marianne, Irina, Mary, Elspeth, Theresa, Isolde and Roberta will unveil their psychoses to you ... but not until the last page do they unlock the unsuspected secret that unites their destinies.
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html


Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremisCompulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, for extracts
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)

Tuesday 27 September 2011

Sister Morphine: ‘darkly comic and unputdownably brilliant’.



Sister Morphine

Women’s Narratives from the Case Notes of a Community Psychiatric Nurse

The principal theme of my 'Sister Morphine', published in 2008, is the sheer unpredictability of women's behaviour when conditioned by prescription drugs. For this suite of interconnected women's narratives I have refashioned case histories as fictions to delineate the effects of drug administrations on clients observed in psychiatric nursing and psychotherapy ... particularly,  the more bizarre asocial psychoses  – and sometimes criminal behaviour – made manifest by the multifaceted side effects of prescription drugs such as antidepressants, tranquilizers and mood stabilizers.

In ‘Sister Morphine', fifteen women - Felícia, Charlotte, Zoë, Elenore, Eveline, Miriam, Grete, Esther, Marianne, Irina, Mary, Elspeth, Theresa, Isolde and Roberta - will unveil their psychoses to you ... but not until the last page do they unlock the unsuspected secret that unites their destinies.

PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION: Masterful, darkly comic and unputdownably brilliant, this first novel by Catherine Eisner is an instant 21st-century classic. Sister Morphine tackles themes of suicidality, sibling murder, child abuse, morbid self-harm, guilt, jealousy, incest, drug addiction, infidelity, illegitimacy, obsessive compulsion, bereavement and a case of grand larceny in the second degree. All wrapped up in the confidential case notes of a Community Psychiatric Nurse exploring the multifaceted side effects of psychoactive drugs.



'Eisner has mastered the twist in the tale and her stories cascade vividly into derangement.'
Cameron Woodhead
THE AGE


'… a genuinely unsettling voice, at once comic, intelligent and slightly, scarily deranged … a true technical triumph.'
Kate Clanchy
MsLEXIA


'Erotic … enthralling … very pictorial … very original.'
Neville Marten
INK


http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sister-Morphine-Narratives-Community-Psychiatric/dp/1844712990


Extract : Dispossession (Patient ID CPN0312110842: Mary H.)


I can remember in every bright-etched detail the precise moment I first decided to murder my brother.
    I had returned to our family home, the day after my mother’s funeral, to discover he had changed the locks.
    I knocked on the bay window for several minutes before he emerged, obviously hungover, yawning lazily like a sated cat.
    He stretched his arms and barred the hallway.
    ‘Don't come anywhere near this property again!’ he shouted. ‘I don’t want even your damned shadow falling on this house! Understand?’
    He then slammed the door with his boot ...
    ... He had won that last bout, I conceded, but, I vowed, feather by feather this goose would be plucked.


Extract : Soft Skin (Patient ID EP0841060170: ‘Leisha’ Felícia F.)


Now, as she sat at her desk, an hour after the holdup, she marveled at the nerve with which she had outfaced her co-workers who had scrutinized her every move.
She busied herself by filing an interoffice memo entitled, Armed Robbery Prevention Strategies. She glanced at a sub-section which stated:
Unarmed ‘soft-skin’ operators, proportionate to armed security guards under special category instructions, should listen attentively to robbers, be calm, courteous, and patient, and treat the robber as you would a customer. Do not resist, but cooperate unhesitatingly with the robber, as this is the most reliable way to avoid injury.  Don’t try to be a hero.  Take no action that would jeopardize your safety or the safety of others. Activate alarms only if you can safely do so without detection.
Well. As a vulnerable ‘soft-skin target’ she had acted accordingly. She hadn’t resisted. On the contrary!
When Sonny had entered the bank lobby precisely at 4:00 pm, closing time, he was carrying a gray, nylon, carry-on flight bag from which he pulled a silver semi-automatic handgun. He was wearing black motorcycle-type gloves with red stripes running down the fingers. (They reminded Leisha of the burned out veins along Sonny’s pitted forearm.)
He was also wearing a beige hooded sweatshirt, a black baseball cap, camouflaged battle-dress-uniform pants, aviator sunglasses, and a black and yellow bandanna over his lower face.  
The senior police officer had demanded a description of the robber but all Leisha could say she remembered of the incident were ‘three eyes’.
She had rehearsed her statement and knew exactly what she intended to say.  Three eyes. I swear. That’s all I saw. Two eyes leveled at me and the eye of the gun!
She swallowed hard at the thought of those two eyes and that unwinking eye of the gun.
The descriptions of the unknown masked man given by the clerks at the neighboring desks had not been any more conclusive: ‘a hideous little guy with creepy eyes’ and ‘a spaced out drug-nut waving a pistol looking like a mad scientist.’
Leisha recalled Sonny’s sallow face, slick with sweat, and rapid tongue darting to wet his cracked lips. His repetitive demoniacal screaming of ‘Gimme all your money! Right now!’ had achieved its desired effect. Leisha had promptly obeyed.
Sickened, Leisha sat at her position and folded her hands tightly on the desktop to control their shaking.
Across the polished marble floor of the lobby, behind the brass teller cages, she saw the bank’s auditor was glaring at her. He weighed two hundred and eighty pounds and he now presented the appearance of a man who had been recently boiled in a bag.
    After all, the bank’s hard currency reserves had just been depleted by more than a quarter-million dollars.


Extract : A Stranger in Blood (Patient ID CPN0338200976: Elspeth P.)


‘A woman without a past has no future.’ I laughed without thought. ‘The question you should have asked is not where I’m going but where I’m from.’
I rapped my forehead with my knuckles.
‘A locked room mystery for you, look.’ I twisted my hands together.  ‘Locked inside my head the real me is! No way in or out! I know what I know, but no more, see. It’s hopeleth.’
In moments of extreme emotional disturbance I revert to the cadences and syntactical quirks that betray the speech of my Welsh childhood, and the pronounced lisp of my infancy again afflicts my tongue.
My therapist nodded encouragingly, then fingered her chignon to assure herself it had not strayed. She wore a false hairpiece. I did not trust her.
‘I own to being a bastard,’ I said. My lip did not tremble. ‘Satisfied?’
An ‘identity crisis’ had been glibly mooted when I’d earlier confessed to the confusion that bedevils the psyche of an adoptee, and to my reluctance to delve deeper into the mystery of my true parentage: a father unknown, and the identity of my birth-mother withheld by my adoptive parents, Mam and Da.
‘Self-knowledge requires more,’ she put in portentously.
She began to probe further into my past, alluding to childhood phobias.
At which point I clammed up. I’m perfectly aware that ‘basket’ is an English euphemism for ‘bastard’, of course, but I certainly will not openly admit to my compulsive avoidance in supermarkets of the ‘Baskets Only’ checkout line.
The Hospital Almoner handed me Da’s personal effects in a yellow plastic bag intended for the disposal of clinical waste. It contained three items: his dentures, his snuff box and a scrap of charred paper melded to a remnant of his candlewick dressing-gown, evidently cut from his grasp.
A blackened birth certificate . . . Truly, this page might just as well have been a Dead Sea scroll for all the evidence of anyone’s identity it proved because, by a perversity of fate, the essential details of my birthplace and the names of my biological parents, and all other handwritten entries penned by the registrar, had been scorched into oblivion.
It was as though some cosmic dramatist had sketched out an improbable plot with no shred of evidence to even hint as to how to resolve the dénouement of that inscrutable design.
My half-suppressed moan became the senseless giggle of one who laughs to prevent too deep an apprehension of spiritual distress.
I thought: How characteristic of my over-principled Da! Of all the cherished possessions he could have chosen to save from the burning building, he chose, at the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour, the birth certificate he’d never wished me to see!
For, in all the years of my childhood, I never once sought to learn the identity of my natural mother. The very thought of my demanding her name I knew would profoundly upset my adoptive parents, such a fear I had of bringing down on my head the confusion of further rejection.
Besides, my greater fear – more than filling in the blanks, and laying that ghost to rest – was my dread of disappointment, the complete devastation of my persona, should I learn who my biological parents truly were and fail to come to terms with unwelcome knowledge.
So the deed box remained unopened; and I promised myself I would never seriously trace my natural mother while Mam and Da were alive.
My mouth was dry, and I gulped water with an unsatisfied thirst.
The picture of my loss was now clear: my uprighteous God-fearing Da trapped in a burning outbuilding, the protagonist of a tragic morality play of his own contrivance, holding the key to my destiny in his unnaturally white hand.
For now I understood, with a terrible finality, my search for my lost past was, by far too many years, long overdue, and the last traces that could disclose the secrets of my doubtful parentage were crumbling to ashes in my belated grasp.
As I have repeated many times: ‘A woman without a past has no future.’ And an ‘identity crisis’ is too facile a prognosis to describe the dilemma of one whose lodestone is jettisoned before her quest for selfhood can begin. For how else can I regard a life built on falsehood? It may seem difficult for a non-adoptee to understand but it was like looking back on the day when I had first laid the foundation stone of an edifice whose ultimate design I’d never visualised. Now it was erected it was astonishing to see it had no recognisable shape. Yet with such scant clues, tell me, how was I then to rightly learn the answer to the question: Whose child am I?




EAN13:  9781844712991
ISBN:  9781844712991
Author:  Catherine Eisner
Title:  Sister Morphine
Series:  Salt Modern Fiction
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  FB
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  04-Jul-08
Extent:  496pp
Height:  234 mm
Width:  153 mm
Thickness:  39 mm
Weight:  744 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 18.99
Price:  USD 36.95
Rights:  World



Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. 
and Listen Close to Me (2011)