You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Lara Jefferson is a pseudonym. It is sad that we can not know and carry about with us, as I would like to do, the real name of the real human being who produced this remarkable work. Other books have been written about the experience of psychosis by participants and observers alike, but this work clearly distinguishes itself. “A journal from the inside of insanity,” it was written not after the event and not as a record, but as the therapeutic work itself.
What we are told about the writer is that she lived in the Midwest and is dead. What she tells us about herself is that she became an inmate in a state mental hospital where she saw looming before her the threat of her own complete psychic dissolution and the possibility that she might become destructive to others as well as to herself. She recognized that “It is just up to me - the power of life within me. There is nothing another can do to help me. The job is mine.” She faced that overwhelming pain that necessitates expression and requires being listened to. She could thus understand and, from her record of it, attend to the ravings of her fellow inmates in the basement ward to which they had “sunk,” but for herself she chose the discipline of listening to and writing down the experience within her and around her. The keeping of this journal was thus the therapy itself, a therapy that she pursued in the midst of chaos and commotion with the stub of a pencil, writing at first on the backs of envelopes. When what she was doing was questioned, she suggested with humor and conscious awareness the “delusion” of being Shakespeare and was justly rewarded and aided with a whole supply of paper. She wrote of her effort:
The flood that was swirling about me was sucking me under — and the pencil I had in my hand was a straw to be caught. It was just a straw — but I caught it — and now I have kept my head above water for awhile — even if what I have written does not make sense to anyone — at least it has helped me a little. I