In the dark her room was luminous with Yri personages. We never hated you, Lactamaeon said, shining on his hard-ridden horse. The cruelty was for protection! Anterrabae said in antiphon, waving a sheaf of sparks in his hand.
We came in the era of dryness and the death of hope, called Lactamaeon.
We came with gifts, said Anterrabae. When you were laughing nowhere else, you were laughing with us. [p. 162]
I first read this in my teens and was vastly moved by it. Deborah, the protagonist, is diagnosed with schizophrenia, and is treated by psychoanalyst Dr Fried. Deborah's mental illness involves a complex fantasy world she calls Yr, which is inhabited by gods and goddesses, and haunted by the Collect -- a chorus representing criticism -- and the Censor, who prevents her speaking of Yr in the 'real' world. Deborah was once a queen in Yr, but now is a prisoner. It's a place with its own language, rich with metaphor and imagery, though Deborah accepts that there's nothing in Yr which is not the product of her own knowledge.
Dr Fried helps Deborah to make sense of early memories (did she really try to kill her little sister? was she really behind bars? what about the operation that they told her wouldn't hurt?) and her own responses to the world. And because this novel is set in the 1940s, the medical care that Deborah receives seems cruel and primitive to me. (I think it might have contributed to my terror of mental health 'treatments' and facilities.)
I was also (and am still) appalled and angered by the way that most of the medical profession attempts to 'explain away' Deborah's illness. "He worked hard to convince her that Yri was a language formulated by herself and not sent with the gods as a gift. .. He analyzed the structure of the sentences and demanded that she see that they were, with very few exceptions, patterned on the English structure." [p. 121]. As though explaining the symptom to Deborah would mend the cause. As though being told she was, literally, imagining things would make those things go away.
I remembered a great deal about Yr, and a little about Deborah's family. I did not remember very much at all about Deborah's Jewish identity, or Dr Fried's German roots and her remark that some of her earlier patients died in Nazi camps. And this, of course, entwines with Deborah's illness, and perhaps with the gods that she chooses to inhabit her imaginary domain.
This is a fictionalised autobiography: Joanne Greenberg was treated by psychoanalyst Frieda Fromm-Reichmann in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Apparently there's controversy regarding Greenberg's illness, her creativity, and the success of the treatment: but that doesn't make this a less effective work.
Greenberg: "I wrote [I Never Promised You a Rose Garden] as a way of describing mental illness without the romanticisation that it underwent in the sixties and seventies when people were taking LSD to simulate what they thought was a liberating experience. During those days, people often confused creativity with insanity. There is no creativity in madness; madness is the opposite of creativity, although people may be creative in spite of being mentally ill." source).
I still have my old paperback of this, but it's not yet been made available as an ebook: preferring to read on a device, I borrowed a scanned copy from the Internet Library, which had a few forgiveable OCR-style typos.
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