Tolstoy at the Opera

Bipolar Blast has recently featured a couple of posts describing the phenomena of depersonalisation and derealisation, symptoms that have been traditionally associated with panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, mood disorders... and withdrawal from psychiatric drugs. It's something I'm riding the waves of now as I plunge headlong into Zoloft withdrawal. I feel a bit like Marty McFly playing the guitar in Back to the Future, weakening as he watches himself fade from a family photograph as his existential inevitability appears more and more doubtful.

But as Bipolar Blast reader Michael points out, derealisation and depersonalisation can been seen as strategies as well as symptoms.

Sometimes I can (and do) even deliberately trigger such states at times when I'm feeling overwhelmed by despair in public places and just need to hold tight for a while instead of running home and locking myself in my bedroom.

Of course I can't know how other people experience such states and whether my own are really a match for what is pathologised as depersonalisation and derealisation, but if it is its not something I'm particularly eager to be cured of. For me its both a coping mechanism and an insight gaining form of detachment from my own mental/emotional states.

This positive use of derealisation has a literary and artistic manifestation in defamiliarization. This is a technique of forcing an audience to view everyday things and concepts in an unfamiliar or strange way, in order to "see through a child's eye" to an underlying reality, often for satirical purposes. The term was coined by the Russian Formalist Victor Shklovsky in the early 20th century, but the technique itself pre-dates its definition. One of the most frequently cited and humorous examples is that of Tolstoy's description of an opera from the perspective of Natasha in War and Peace. Not only is the opera rendered thoroughly nonsensical but Natasha herself experiences derealisation and depersonalisation as a result of the basic absurdity of the situation:

In the second act there was scenery representing tombstones, there was a round hole in the canvas to represent the moon, shades were raised over the footlights, and from horns and contrabass came deep notes while many people appeared from right and left wearing black cloaks and holding things like daggers in their hands. They began waving their arms. Then some other people ran in and began dragging away the maiden who had been in white and was now in light blue. They did not drag her away at once, but sang with her for a long time and then at last dragged her off, and behind the scenes something metallic was struck three times and everyone knelt down and sang a prayer. All these things were repeatedly interrupted by the enthusiastic shouts of the audience.

After her life in the country, and in her present serious mood, all this seemed grotesque and amazing to Natasha. She could not follow the opera nor even listen to the music; she saw only the painted cardboard and the queerly dressed men and women who moved, spoke, and sang so strangely in that brilliant light. She knew what it was all meant to represent, but it was so pretentiously false and unnatural that she first felt ashamed for the actors and then amused at them. She looked at the faces of the audience, seeking in them the same sense of ridicule and perplexity she herself experienced, but they all seemed attentive to what was happening on the stage, and expressed delight which to Natasha seemed feigned. "I suppose it has to be like this!" she thought... And feeling the bright light that flooded the whole place and the warm air heated by the crowd, Natasha little by little began to pass into a state of intoxication she had not experienced for a long while. She did not realize who and where she was, nor what was going on before her. As she looked and thought, the strangest fancies unexpectedly and disconnectedly passed through her mind: the idea occurred to her of jumping onto the edge of the box and singing the air the actress was singing, then she wished to touch with her fan an old gentleman sitting not far from her, then to lean over to Helene and tickle her.

Now, if you think about it, the technique of defamiliarisation could be applied almost endlessly to the logical and methodological maelstrom that is contemporary psychiatry. Think back to the first time you were hospitalised and the only thing the staff would ask you was who you were, what day it was, who the Prime Minister or President was, and you were thinking well, this is very strange, how is this supposed to help me? You were defamiliarising the situation without even knowing it. I suspect many of us have been soaking so long in the esoterica of the mental health system that its familiarity has rendered many of its standard practices beyond contempt. We're outraged when Seroquel is prescribed to four-year-olds with fatal consequences, and rightly so, but let's also try to "see through a child's eye" the less egregious abuses to which we are subjected, and to appreciate the historical continuity between parody and reality.

PRESCRIPTION, n. A physician's guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient.
- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary