existential-alienation

Julie's profound sense of unreality and invisibility, expressing a struggle to become a person and the experience of an invisible barrier separating her from others.

2 chapters across 2 books

The Divided Self (1960)R. D. Laing

CHAPTER XI The ghost of the weed garden: a study of a chronic schizophrenic \ . .for the Truth is past all commiseration.’ MAXIM GORKY Julie, at the time I knew her, had been a patient in a ward of a mental hospital since the age of seventeen, that is, for nine years. In these years, she had become a typical ‘inaccessible and with¬ drawn’ chronic schizophrenic. She was hallucinated, given to posturing, to stereotyped, bizarre, incomprehensible actions; she was mostly mute and when she did speak it was in the most ‘deteriorated’ ‘schizophrenese’. On admission, she had been diag¬ nosed as a hebephrenic and given a course of insulin, without improvement, and no other specific attempts had been made to recall her to sanity. Left to herself, there is little doubt she would quickly have become physically entirely ‘dilapidated’, but her outward appearance was maintained by the almost daily atten¬ tions of her mother, in addition to the work of the nursing staff. On account of various odd and somewhat alarming things she said and did at the time, her parents had taken her to see a psychia¬ trist when she was seventeen. In her interview with the psychia¬ trist, he recorded that there was nothing particularly unusual about her non-verbal behaviour in itself but that the things she said were enough to establish the diagnosis of schizophrenia. In 193

This chapter presents a detailed clinical biography of Julie, a chronic schizophrenic hospitalized since age seventeen, illustrating her progression from a 'good' child to 'bad' behavior and finally to full psychosis. It emphasizes the existential and interpersonal dimensions of her illness, highlighting her feelings of unreality, alienation, and destructive impulses, as well as the family's evolving perception of her condition. The chapter critiques standard psychiatric approaches and stresses the importance of understanding the patient's interpersonal microcosm over broader sociological factors.

The Fall (1956)Albert Camus

Chapter 4

In this opening chapter of The Fall, the narrator Jean-Baptiste Clamence introduces himself and sets the scene in an Amsterdam bar named Mexico City. Through his observations and reflections, he reveals his complex character as a former lawyer turned 'judge-penitent,' expressing distrust in society, nostalgia for primitivism, and a critical view of modern European life. The chapter blends personal confession with social critique, exploring themes of hypocrisy, judgment, and existential alienation.