Gracefully Insane Read online

  Thayer remained in Vienna for more than two years, savoring the cultural high life. He befriended the writer Arthur Schnitzler and seemed to spend almost every evening at the opera or symphony and added to his astonishing art collection. It is unclear why he ended his analysis, and even his comments on Freud are maddeningly inconsistent. “When I leave Vienna, I shall, after two years forced compression, be chock full of the Great Man,” he wrote to Gregory, his lifelong friend with whom he constantly flirted in his letters. (After his analysis, he tried to lure her to Europe to spend the summer with him, “having in view the possibility of surveying the Unconscious.”) Thayer knew that his slavish deference to Freud muddled his own efforts at self-understanding. “I follow Freud’s gestures seeking dreams as does a dog who, when his master throws, leaps forward and away for the stone,” he wrote in a note to himself. “And in this case (as often with the dog) one does not know but that the hand was empty.”

  Thayer started to break down in the summer of 1925, which he spent at his Edgartown home on Martha’s Vineyard. He was cultivating a bizarre feud with Philadelphia’s renowned art collector Dr. Albert Barnes, who was competing with Scofield for the masterpieces flowing from the brushes of Picasso, Georges Braque, Matisse, and Fernand Léger. Thayer asked his friend Watson to send him a gun from New York so he could defend himself from his “enemies.”13 Although he clearly had doubts about his experiences with Freud, whom he privately derided as a “privateer,” he was also angling to become a patient again. But it was not to be. Freud’s worries about the recurrence of his cancer caused him to cut his patient roster down to just six. Thayer offered to buy out another patient’s slot, but Freud would not hear of it. A few months later, Scofield resigned as editor of The Dial and took up residence at Upham Memorial Hall on the grounds of McLean.

  Thayer stayed at McLean twice but became better known as an occasional visitor. He was so rich that he did not need to stay in a mental hospital or sanitarium for very long. For almost sixty years Thayer and his two male nurses became familiar figures at Butler Hospital in Worcester, at the Craig House sanitarium in Beacon, New York, as well as the St. Regis and Biltmore hotels in New York City, the Hotel Beau Rivage at Ouchy-Lausanne (where Stanley and Katharine McCormick had their wedding reception), or the Grand in Venice. McLean doctors remember Thayer dropping by Proctor Hall, one the hospital’s geriatric units, for occasional work-ups and suggestions of new approaches for dealing with his dementia. After a consultation involving a promising new drug or the therapeutic regimen of the moment, the trio would disappear back to Florida or to Edgartown or to a luxury hotel.

  By way of life commentary, Thayer left thousands of short, undated notes narrating virtually all aspects of his life. They are articulate and occasionally insightful but suffused with the terrible random anger that presumably dragged Thayer’s “normal” behavior into madness. He wrote detailed descriptions of his wife’s sex organs and devoted several hundred scraps of paper to what reads like a homoerotic fixation on a friend in Bermuda. In one notebook, he jotted down the following entries, in order: He who has known masturbation can never be satisfied with marriage.

  When the penis enter the vagina—note the position of said vagina—to the girl it’s all dark meat.

  Publish edited Gibbon.

  The Latin ablative absolute is alone worth the whole Greek language.

  When Thayer died in 1982, neither the New York Times nor the Boston Globe published an obituary of the man who had shepherded so many crucial European and American artists and writers into the literary canon. For public consumption, Thayer had been out of circulation since 1926. An only child whose daughter Nancy had been legally adopted by Cummings, he had no living relatives at the time of his death. His fabulous art collection went to New York’s Metropolitan Museum—a stinging blow to the Worcester Art Museum, where it had “temporarily” resided for almost fifty years. (Thayer’s will dated back to the 1920s, when the relative positions of the Worcester and New York museums were not so disparate as in 1982.) His writing, letters, and notes ended up at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Library, where I found this tiny, penciled memorandum among his effects:I have not loved the world

  Nor the world me.

  Until the late 1960s, McLean had a celebrity patient named Carl Liebman. Unlike other celebrity patients such as Robert Lowell or Ray Charles, Liebman was a psychiatric celebrity. Over the span of a half-century, he had been attended by almost every major figure in European and American psychiatry—Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Eugen Bleuler, Ruth Mack Brunswick, Manfred Sakel, Abraham Brill—and received every form of treatment known to homo psychiatricus: psychoanalysis, insulin shock, electroshock, hydrotherapy, and a topectomy—a sort of minilobotomy. In the 1960s, Liebman developed a small following at McLean because he was one of the few surviving analysands from Freud’s Vienna years. Young residents concocted pretexts to drift by Upham Memorial, the lavishly appointed “Harvard Club,” where Liebman spent his waning years. Tall, gaunt, intermittently erudite and noncommunicative, he was a genuine museum piece, as close as many of the young trainees would ever come to the headwaters of Continental psychoanalysis. “I knew him on Upham, and he used to talk about his time with Freud, and how they would argue about philosophers and so forth,” says Dr. Harold Williams. “The lobotomy didn’t interfere with his thinking processes; it was visible, but it wasn’t one of those ice-pick jobs.” It goes without saying that Liebman’s case file, with original letters from Freud and a catalogue raisonné of therapeutic gambits, was required reading for historically minded young doctors. (Indeed, it was after several original letters from Freud went missing from Liebman’s file in the mid-1960s that McLean restricted staffers’ access to its record room.) Longtime McLean neuropathologist Dr. Alfred Pope remembers the date of Liebman’s death in 1969 quite precisely because Pope was among those who were hoping for a clinical pathology conference on the deceased patient. In the end, there was neither a conference nor an autopsy. Pope in particular had been hoping to get (another) piece of Liebman’s brain for his experiments on the chemical architecture of the schizophrenic cortex. He had managed to scrounge some cerebral tissue from Liebman’s 1950 topectomy at the hospital. “It was kind of a bonanza,” he recalled. A postmortem tissue sample would have added to the coup. Liebman’s brain was arguably the most worked-over cerebral cortex in psychiatric history. The details of Liebman’s treatment still bring a bemused smile to Harold Williams’s face. “Here’s a guy who suffered through all the horrible stuff psychiatry could throw at him, and still managed to survive.”

  Born at the turn of the century, Liebman was the only son of a wealthy New York beer magnate, Julius Liebman, one of the Brooklyn-based brewers of the Rheingold label. “His personality was always, already as a boy, different from that of most children,” according to his Park Avenue physician Dr. Leopold Stieglitz, who added: “He did not readily take part in sports and athletic exercises, was if anything, afraid of doing things such as climbing trees. His mother at times tried to overcome this disinclination on his part by twitting him and then the boy would give in rather reluctantly.”

  In 1918, Carl Liebman went off to Yale, where he ran track, was a private in the precursor of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, and lived in a single room for three out of four years. Stieglitz reported that his New Haven stay was not a happy one. “He was called a ‘fairy’ by the boys and acknowledged to me that he enjoyed seeing the nude bodies of the boys in the swimming pool and occasionally had dreams of an erotic nature in connection with these boys,” he wrote. “He particularly enjoyed wearing a jock strap and seeing the boys when they wore a jock strap.” In later analyses, Liebman would report that he experienced sexual excitement at the sight of a jockstrap as early as age twelve. During adolescence, he developed obsessional fears about the safety of his sperm, which he called “spermanimalcules,” worrying that by ejaculating them, he was committing genocide. After Liebman graduated, Stieglitz referred him to hi
s Upper East Side colleague, Dr. Pierce Clark—Scofield Thayer’s doctor—who contributed a preliminary diagnosis of fetishism. Clark proved to be the first stop in Carl Liebman’s Grand Tour of world psychiatry.

  After a brief analysis with Clark, Liebman took off for Europe, supposedly to pursue his career as an artist. In Zurich, he quickly came under the influence of Oskar Pfister, a Swiss Protestant minister, lay analyst, and close friend of Freud. Pfister in turn handed him off to Dr. Eugen Bleuler, head of Zurich’s prestigious Burgholzli Psychiatric Clinic and a celebrity headshrinker favored by transatlantic Yanks. (“A great imbecile,” his patient Zelda Fitzgerald called him.) Bleuler spent forty-five minutes with Liebman in 1924, during which time the patient fidgeted constantly and showed early signs of what would later become deep compulsions. Liebman talked about his urge to constantly wash his hands and his fears of the way people seemed to stare at him on the street. “It was how he talked about this that seemed schizophrenic,” Bleuler reported. From Pfister and Bleuler, Liebman moved on to the Big Show: Sigmund Freud accepted him as a patient in 1925.

  “Do not worry about your young American,” Freud wrote to Pfister, “the man can be helped.” Freud met with Liebman’s parents, Julius and Marie, and fretted about their role in their son’s analysis: “They seem very willing to make sacrifices, which generally points to a bad prognosis.” The analysis itself proceeded in fits and starts. In August 1925, Freud wrote to Pfister, “As for your young hopeful, I think you should let him go to his ruin.” But just two months later, he changed his mind. “I began feeling sorry for the poor lad,” he wrote to Pfister. “I had a change of heart.” Freud confided to the parents that there were two good reasons for not continuing his sessions with their son. For one thing, Carl needed years of work, and Freud, who feared he was experiencing a recurrence of his oral cancer, worried that he might not live to finish the case. Also, he was concerned that Liebman’s condition might worsen. “My third and last motive, that I wanted to spare myself a terrible amount of trouble, I kept to myself,” Freud wrote.

  Freud continued to see Carl Liebman for five more years while his patient was pursuing graduate work at the University of Vienna. He chronicled his relationship with the wealthy young American in letters to Pfister:With our lad ... things are going very strangely.... I was again very near the point of giving him up, but there is something touching about him which deters me from doing so; the threat of breaking off the treatment has made him gentle and amenable again, with the result that at present a good understanding prevails between us. ... What weighs on me in his case is my belief that, unless the outcome is very good indeed, it will be very bad indeed; what I mean is that he would commit suicide without any hesitation. (January 3, 1926)

  Tomorrow I am sending [Liebman], who has been here since August 1, on holiday until October 1. I must tell you about him, there have been many changes in his case. His intolerableness has been successfully overcome, I have actually grown fond of him, and he seems to reciprocate this. After dreadful difficulties, some pieces of the secret history of his development have been laid bare, and the effect, as was corroborated by relatives who saw him during the holidays, has been very favorable.... On the other hand it is undeniable that there is a great deal about him that is alarming, as if he were on the way to passing from obsessional neurosis to paranoia.... I propose to leave aside the academic question of diagnosis and go on working with the living material. (September 14, 1926)

  [Liebman] has not yet given up his childish reactions to the influence of authority, and it is that that makes him so difficult to treat. I am not wasting time on the question of correct diagnosis; he certainly has plenty of schizophrenic traits.... the lad is a severe ordeal. I am trying hard to get him to deliberately resist his fetishistic masturbation to enable him to corroborate for himself all that I have discerned about the nature of the fetish, but he will not believe that such abstinence will lead to this and is essential for the progress of the treatment. On the other hand I feel a great deal of sympathy for him, and cannot make up my mind to send him away and risk a disastrous outcome. (April 11, 1927)

  In 1928, in a letter to Marie Liebman, Freud ventured a diagnosis: “I have no right to keep from you that the diagnosis in your son’s case is Paranoid Schizophrenia.” He admitted that “such a diagnosis means little and does not help penetrate the uncertainty about his future. Even [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau was such a case, not less abnormal. Whenever I examine the analysis I tell myself that one couldn’t do anything for him but to give him much out of which he himself can make something.” Marie would later remark that her son understood that Freud had given him permission to embark on a “self-analysis,” which in his case meant holing up in a hotel room and shunning the outside world. In 1930, Freud gave up on Liebman and shunted him off to his own analysand and “adoptive daughter,” the American Ruth Mack Brunswick, apparently hoping that a female analyst might help Carl overcome his sexual fetishes. According to psychiatrist David Lynn, who reviewed Liebman’s case file at McLean, the patient got nowhere with Brunswick. He “withdrew into his psychosis, declared an end to his relations with his parents, and saw Freud one last time, in 1931.”

  By interviewing Liebman’s doctors at McLean, Lynn culled many droll tidbits about the five-year-long, failed analysis. (Observing McLean guidelines, Lynn identified Liebman with the pseudonymic initials “A.B.”) During his meetings with Freud, Liebman remembered the great doctor’s chow dog seated quietly at his master’s feet. Freud generally smoked a cigar, waving it in the air to punctuate his speech. (Other patients reported that Freud lit cigars to celebrate diagnostic insights.) Freud never offered Liebman a cigar, which the patient interpreted as a rejection of his manhood. In sum, a bad experience for all concerned.

  Like Thayer and Frink, Liebman was not a successful patient of Dr. Freud. After his brief acquaintance with Dr. Brunswick, Liebman journeyed to Paris for a few sessions with the celebrated Dr. Otto Rank, who first hypothesized on “birth trauma.” Soon afterwards he returned to New York City, traveling steerage and arriving with $150 in his pocket. He lived alone in the Mills Hotel and sent occasional postcards to his family. Seeking financial independence from his parents, he took driving lessons in order to become a cabdriver and washed cars at night to pay his way. But he soon ended up back in the parental ambit, accepting a small allowance from his father plus the use of a car. He started driving his father to and from the Brooklyn brewery, but he proved to be a less-than-ideal chauffeur. While driving, “he was possessed with the fear of running over a child” and continually looked back over his shoulder to see if he had hit anyone. In 1933, in his parents’ bathroom, Liebman stripped to the waist and drove a bowie knife into his rib cage, beneath the left nipple. Even though the knife tip missed Carl’s heart by just a half-inch, the phlegmatic family doctor Stieglitz characterized the “performance” as “rather theatrical,” a classic suicide “gesture.” Immediately afterwards, Liebman was sent to yet another distinguished analyst, the increasingly famous Abraham Brill. After Frink’s breakdown, Brill had assumed the mantle of America’s Number One Freudian; he was chief of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and translator of Freud’s early works into English, Brill’s second language. It was Brill who recommended what would prove to be a lifetime stay at McLean. Noting that Liebman had been seen by no fewer than six psychiatrists in his brief lifetime—Dr. Hermann Nunberg, a Viennese disciple of Freud who had emigrated to Philadelphia had been added to the mix—Brill concluded that “analysis gave [Liebman] considerable insight, but has not at all changed his delusional trend.” As an example of such a delusion, Brill noted that Liebman “imagined that he was followed by detectives.” In a letter written at almost the same time, Liebman’s sister Kitty explained to McLean officials that the family knew of their son’s various New York adventures because “we had him followed by detectives from the time he left Vienna. He knows nothing of this.” It is true; even paranoids have enemies.

 
; Upon admission to McLean, Liebman and his family joined in a ghoulish debate over whether he should reenter analysis inside the hospital. In 1935, McLean was pushing a precursor of milieu therapy, placing their patients in a salubrious, comfortable, nonthreatening environment and hoping for the best. Carl wanted more psychoanalysis, but his mother argued no. “If Drs. Pfister, Freud, Ruth Mack Brunswick, Brill and Nunberg have not helped you by analysis, it is pretty well proven that analysis will not help you,” she wrote to her son’s McLean doctor. She added, “Freud had given him up, saying: ‘I have given you all of which analysis is capable, now you must try to get along by yourself’ (which I fear Carl Liebman has construed as his own written self analysis of which even Freud told him, I could not cure).”

  But in a ten-page, handwritten cri de coeur addressed to his parents from the hospital, Liebman protested his forced incarceration (“a police arrest”) and his inability to engage in “self-analysis,” or any kind of analysis, at McLean:Practically, I am under constant surveillance. The door must be ajar, and always constantly there are people in the corridor.... In the morning I do a few exercises in the gym, then I go to the clay-modelling room, by way of occupational therapy. At 11 o’clock a shower with pulse-taking and other hokum under guard (with a nurse). I am permitted to walk about a dozen times around the yard. In the afternoon I am permitted to return to the pottery or play billiards with my usually amiable nurse. None of this is difficult; it is not even compulsory, but it is inane. It is what my doctors are pleased to call an ordered existence. I am living in a vacuum.