I wonder whether the common expression ‘to be beside oneself’, denoting some kind of overwhelming emotion, attests to the near ubiquity of depersonalisation? And the Greek word ἔκστασις (ekstasis), meaning literally ‘to stand outside oneself’, from which we derive ‘ecstasy’, indicates the long history of the positive side of the experience: the attainment of that sought-after Archimedean point, or God's-eye view, from which objective truths can be perfectly perceived and poetry inspired. But it's in the nature of a psychiatrist's work to encounter troubled people.
Matthew Francis, a celebrated British poet and Professor of Creative Writing, was an awkward, intellectual, sex-starved young man, knocked back at the age of 19 by his father's death. Later on, as a generally alienated, cannabis-smoking postgraduate student at Sussex University, he was suddenly struck, ‘as if a switch had been flicked’, by a sense of profound remoteness from the world, accompanied by acute anxiety. He suffered repeated pathological episodes of depersonalisation, for which he received helpful psychiatric treatment. His book is dedicated to the memory of Dr Anthony Ryle.
Since not everybody is a talented wordsmith, we sometimes struggle to ‘elicit’ the history of a patient's state of mind. Francis's memoir, which forms the first part of this book, is therefore salutary reading since it conveys the profundity of his youthful mental disturbance. The second part gives us a wide-ranging, scholarly review of both the psychological literature on depersonalisation and depersonalisation as it appears in literature. It also shows how the concept can be found, even advocated, in the work of literary theorists from different traditions, such as T.S. Eliot, Victor Shklovsky and Roland Barthes.
Finally, Francis addresses technique in both poetry and prose for writers:
‘I had thought, influenced by the romantic myth of the suffering artist, that it might be necessary for me to be ill in order to write, and decided that that was too high a price to pay. What I found, on the contrary, was that recovery from illness made writing possible: I needed both.’
Does this mean that Francis recommends a breakdown for aspiring writers? Emphatically not. ‘One of the advantages of studying’, Francis says, ‘is that you can learn from the experiences of your teachers instead of having to have them yourself’!
It's a pity that the exorbitant price of this slim volume is likely to restrict its readership.
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