'folie aux duex': This is a psychiatrically defined mental condition that clearly points towards a condition in which a couple share a united mind state.
Another name is 'induced psychosis'. I had no knowledge of those terms when this incident I'm going to relate happened. The main point to notice and then keep in mind is that I became aware myself of being enmeshed in a 'folie aux duex' without knowing it existed. The way I described my situation was not in psychiatric terms because I didn't know them and what I said was not premeditated, the words came out during a therapy session, automatically. I heard myself say them, but had not thought about what I said. The diagnosis points towards and reveals that in virtually any binary relationship there is an unconscious level of mind at work.
This event really happened, and it happened in the beginning of a very great change, a change that really was the result of this condition!. I have to be direct and forthright because the facts are personal but they are required information that is necessary to understand what I have to write about.
I went into therapy in 1983 when I was in a strange, new to me, kind of misery that seemed to have no physical causes. I had many new to me symptoms which I could not describe because there was no physical cause other than that I'd been told I was having 'post menopausal syndrome' after a complete hysterectomy.
I had seen Dr. Phillip Rehngren a couple of times when this incident happened in his office. My husband had been with me in the previous visits, because he wanted to know what was the cause of the problems I'd been having. He was not there when this happened.
During a session I suddenly said something that I had not thought about at all: . I heard myself say: "I think I'm seeing the world through XXX's (my husbands') eyes. Its like his viewpoint is on top of mine and I'm looking up through it, and out of it, seeing everything the way it looks and sounds to him."
After I said the words the telephone rang. He excused himself and answered it. After a minute or so I picked up a book laying near me on his desk and riffled through it. The book was a dictionary but not a typical dictionary. At some point in my browsing I paused to read the definition of a term that arrested my attention. but the definition didn't make sense. When Dr. Rehngren returned to me, I asked him what the definition meant:
folie aux duex: the same disease shared by two people.
He read the definition aloud, then threw back his head and laughed. "Say, I'll bet that's what you and XXX have."
Think of this and realize what happened: The telephone interrupted what we were talking about. While he answered it I picked up a book laying on the desk near me. I have a deeply entrenched habit of reading in every spare moment and at that point I had a book with me all the time when I had to wait in line or wait anywhere. I riffled through the book, noticing it was some kind of dictionary, not of words but containing phrases. One term caught my attention. After he returned his attention to me I asked him what the term meant. He read the definition then he slapped his knee as he threw back his head and laughed: "Say! I'll bet that's what you and your husband have."
That was not the first 'event' in which a professionally educated individual told me something that ought to have made me ask for more information.
This had already happened about two years prior to that incident I just described: . I had attempted to end myself prior to seeking psychiatric help because I'd begun to feel like I had no right to be alive. That was a feeling so painful it cannot be described and it was almost a constant feeling. One night I had decided to end myself and as a result I was taken to Cabrini Hospital where I spent a week or so. It was the first time I'd been in any kind of psychiatric care situation and I knew nothing about psychiatry then except that it takes a long time. It's not like going to a doctor and getting a diagnosis, but I had not thought about why such a long time would be required.
When we left the hospital, it was to go directly to a therapist, Charles Landis. I remember that he asked me to tell him what was going on but apparently what I said made no sense to him so he asked my husband to tell him what he thought my problem was.
I remember that my husband leaned back, put his hands behind his head and began to talk easily, fluently and even enthusiastically."Betty has a problem, she's had a problem ever since we married. I have been a perfect husband, done everything a perfect husband would do, but Betty cannot let other people live their own life; she cannot let other people, 'spend their own nickel'. She is a domineering person, always interfering, is never happy about anything, is never content in her heart about anything, etc, etc, etc."
I remember thinking at that point that he was not describing me, he was describing himself. He was describing himself perfectly, for the first time in his life but he believed he was describing me! I said nothing and it did not occur to me until years later that for the first time I had observed him at peace, relaxed and able to say what he really was believing. His normal conversation was halting, stilted and usually quite brief. I didn't name anything non-physical at that point. (For reasons that took several years to become aware of, that only what is 'physical' was real to the person I was most intimately associated to.)
The point is: HE HAD NEVER SAID THIS BEFORE, NOR HAD HE EVER SAID ANYTHING SIMILAR. NOTHING IN THE PAST HAD BEEN SAID ABOUT BEING A 'PERFECT HUSBAND' .This was the first time we had seen this man, so the psychologist had no way of knowing this was a 'first time' event. It was several years before I realized the implications of what the therapist said to me later.
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Induced psychosis or another name for the same thing is: folie aux duex and yet another name is participation mystique: The basic idea in this condition is that one person is influenced by another person's 'unconscious' and this effect is experienced without awareness.
From experiences of my own, I know there is a new way to understand it, because it formed at a certain point a kind of 'cloned mind', where one person's viewpoint really began to overlay and actually govern another person's mind. It was literally a kind of replication, but the most important details cannot be told at this point without quite a digression. A change in my thought as well as my body had barely begun to become evident the day I chanced to read the definition of 'folie aux duex'. My mind was quite different, I had begun to experience a new kind of 'mental event', which was not familiar and which made no sense to me.
However much I was aware of it consciously, I had begun to 'see the world the way my husband saw it' but I had also begun to experience in my body, the same body condition that 'contained' him. It was several years later that I understood this 'contained' sense was one that has a name, 'being up tight', experiencing 'tunnel vision', and beginning to be driven by a terrible curiosity that was focused on small details that I'd not noticed previously. My 'focus' had been quite different, rather skimming along the surface of everything in a superficial glance. One of our children actually described this one day, that my husband and I 'complemented' each other, what I could do easily , he could not, and the reverse.
I had acquired 'tunnel vision' and become somewhat similar to a microscope focused on minute details. This is a process that can only be a 'replication of self', in another person.
I had also acquired something that had 'driven' my husband, something that he'd experienced privately without speaking directly about it. It was about that point in Time that the change in my hearing caused me to realize, to recognize that he was making comments that actually described what was going on between us!
There had been remarks in the past that he'd said occasionally, but repetitiously, that really made no sense to me , and they were about what he 'saw' within, they were about his 'inner world', they described quite literally the psychological processes he was 'using'. "Don't bat it back to me, you have to 'eat' it'. This was quite strange to me, but I didn't question it.
It was a particular kind of mindset that I acquired, and it was recognizable to me because habits that I had never had but which I'd observed in him, suddenly replaced the content, of my 'normal' habits! I saw myself do things I'd never done but which he had always done , and over a period of time a most amazing thing happened: I began to become aware of 'knowing' where the habit had it's origin. It was usually in a childish relationship to his mother. Wanting to 'help', wanting to save her from having to work so hard, his habit was to reach for a dirty cup rather than a clean one to make coffee, when he was a man in his late forties! Tucking me against his shoulders at night, arranging the covers in the dark, I noticed that the result of this was that half my nose was always sealed of in some way so that I could not breath freely, nor could I remain tucked snuggly close to him. I wondered how he could see to cover one part of my nose in the dark in such a variety of ways. It was years later that I remembered that when we were first dating he wanted to 'breathe' into me, actually wanting me to let him give me breathe! I had not cared for that, and eventually he gave it up.
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1986 I was feeling extremely confused all the time, having to make continual great effort to keep some kind of normal life activity going. By then I had become focused on trying to explain something that was happening to me, to the psychiatrist I was seeing.
Until 1983 I'd never come into contact with psychiatrists or 'psychiatric' terms beyond what I'd read in books or heard in movies.
This 'new thing' was very compellingly interesting to me. I didn't know the words to use to try to describe what was happening, so I used the only words available to me then, actually creating some words in my own normal language. This 'compellingly interesting thing' was extremely vague and I couldn't pinpoint what it was because it was everywhere, in every moment of my life by 1986.
I was hearing differently by then, all the time. I was seeing something but it had no tangibility. Somehow I felt driven by a motor were within me and I couldn't turn it off although I could certainly feel it as an authority that had taken over my life. There was a distinct change in how everything looked and sounded but I realized it was the 'motor' that was obviously powering me to do many things that ordinarily I would never have done, and saying things I had not thought about, that I was not curious about until several years later. I could see after a time that what I was doing in my home in particular was not actually what I wanted to do, and in the situation at home, what I really intended to do was avoid the terrible scenes that had begun to happen every day.
I became aware of being 'sidetracked' from my own purposes and intents continually by this new thing, between 1984 and 1989.
I felt the presence in my body of something alien to me, some thing that assumed control of my speech, my habits, my activities and more than anything my passivities. I heard myself in a new way, new kinds of thought was occurring into my mind and I wondered if was generating it. I could not say anything about this to the psychiatrist however, I was talking about the accident, the blow on my head, the effects of the operation wanting help with the miseries that made my body extremely uncomfortable. Eventually it became obvious this 'new presence' was what had governed my husband, and he had become quite unworried about everything, or anything. This was a real role reversal. He even mentioned it one day himself, and this happened at least 3 or even more years before I could articulate it myself.
I felt bottled up, literally. That is how I began to grasp that certain 'odd' terms really describe body conditions! 'Bottled up' means 'contained, restrained, prohibited, confined, limited' but I would not have understood this could re-align activities and passivities, so painfully and so drastically. "Tunnel vision" means narrowed down vision, limited and focused precisely onto whatever small detail is important at that moment. Another way to consider it, now that I understand it, is that a laser-like focus of attention has been 'installed', without any warning, except that it happened by increments. Having a good memory of one's own past is what makes it possible to trace the rather slow installation process.
I had not heard of Occam's Razor or the general theory derived from it: that everything extraneous has been deleted from the moment, and only whatever is significant is 'perceived'. Trying to define this new change, I had no language of my own to use although I'd been an almost voracious reader....of any kind of fiction, mostly masculine oriented fictions. I read Zane Grey, The Hardy Boys and every pulp fiction magazine my father bought. He bought them all but a dime was a lot of money then.
The drive seemed to insist that I try to describe what I saw, to name what I saw and that I try to write about my life.
I believed that a terrible blow on my head had caused this change, although I'd been told by the surgeon that did the operation, that I was having 'severe menopausal syndrome' symptoms after having had a total hysterectomy.
(This came as a surprise to me, because I was supposed to have one ovary removed. He believed that he was saving me from having cancer of the cervix, which it was his understanding would follow the removal of one ovary, within six years. He told me a small percentage of women would have 'severe menopausal syndrome', but that it was impossible to know exactly who would or would not have this problem.)
I'd had that operation late in 1979, we'd had a terrible uninsured fire a few days after I got out of the hospital. This had caused a real problem financially. The accident happened early in 1981 so the only way I thought about my problems was that the surgery, the financial problems and the accident were what had caused the many changes I was trying to deal with by 1986 when the incident happened in which I heard my self blurt out that I was seeing the world through XXX's eyes and hearing the world the way he did. Another very unusual situation had caused me to become aware of a certain 'literalness' in his way of hearing: Dr. Rehngren had told me that he knew another psychiatrist that XXX might be able to relate to because this man had the same personality that my husband had!!! When I made an appointment with that psychiatrist I noticed immediately he had no help in his office, he did everything himself. We had a few sessions with him together, and to my amazement I saw a very different relationship between my husband and this man. He was a short Oriental man, whereas Dr. Rehngren was tall, quite good looking for his age and my husband had been polite, deferring to him. That did not happen from the first moment, in the new 'therapist's office. This new therapist took mercy on me one day when he mentioned that I seemed to be confused, and that I was seeking validation. He said: "While you may have some problems they are not a extensive as your husband's problems." I did not ask for more information. He made a remark that somewhat took root later, but which I didn't understand at that point: "He means exactly what he says." My husband had asked him what he thought my problem was, and the psychiatrist said a fairly short sentence, (which I didn't understand myself) then said: "Can you repeat back what I just said?" My husband looked somewhat blank for a few seconds then said something that was not a response to the question. It was NOT: "Can you repeat what you said? I didn't get it."
By the time this all happened I'd had several unusual incidents happen in connection to the two square dance groups we belonged to, and they were connected to what the psychiatrist intended to convey to me when he said: "He meant exactly what he says." More than a decade passed and many experiences happened (of the strange kind) before I realized he could have told me that my husband had a 'literal sense, that he was a 'concrete thinker', that he had no ability to 'metaphorize' or to 'symbolize' or to use 'joking remarks'. I felt outraged when I began to realize this psychiatrist could have bluntly given me information rather then 'clues', that meant nothing at the time, and would never have meant anything if there had not been a process at work in my life that was making every event turn towards me, as a kind of instruction, and that this process was what had governed my husband.
I'd gotten a job at Boeing in 1985 and was really having to work harder than I'd ever done in my life. I was unable to sleep at night, so working full time without being able to sleep seemed impossible but somehow I had to keep doing it.
When I went into therapy. I remember that the psychiatrist asked questions sometimes about my marriage but I know these questions seemed strange to me until finally I realized he was trying to make some kind of 'point'. What the point was I could not see but because he persisted I finally began to realize his focus was not on what I was saying to him, not on what I was trying to talk about, and in fact that what I was saying was being completely disregarded! This realization did not hit me quickly, it took about 6 years between 1982 and 1988 for me to realize that what I was saying was being totally ignored! The psychiatrist was focusing me onto his 'idea', which I did not realize was that I did not know or understand the man I was married to, and I did not realize that the 'effects' I was trying to describe were being associated to my marital situation, by this psychiatrist, Dr. Philip Rehngren whose office was in Renton, Washington then.
I was talking to him about how I could not sleep at night because of continual 'non-stop thinking' that went on all the time. Being unable to sleep was only one of my problems. I couldn't remember anything I read, words seemed to fall into a black hole of some kind. I was getting lost when I went to familiar places, I seemed to find Dead End streets as though I was trying to find them, which was extremely frustrating to me because I had not had that problem myself, before. I could not learn a simple dance routine even after months of trying to do it.
We were in a session one day and I was talking to Dr. Rehngren about a book I'd read recently that had caused me to feel very strange while I read, The Imagined World by June Goodfield. There had been certain words on the jacket that I'd read before I borrowed the book that had impressed me strangely. As soon as I read them I decided to read the book. What I read was this: '...she caught a sudden glimmer of possibility; she observed a pattern that had hitherto been unnoticed or ignored and she began to think of explanations for what she'd seen......thanks not only to tenacity but to inexperience---a mind uncluttered by preconceptions...."She saw something that had become invisible because it has always been ever-present" ' The last words were not on the jacket, they followed in my mind as though they were on the jacket! It took several years to be able to relate to this 'added content', when it happened, and not much later. This kind of 'added content' was distinct to me, but somehow the location in mind where all this was taking place, it's depth in mind, it's lack of connection (it seems to me now) to speech, where ever speech and articulation becomes possible could be 'seen/heard' but not related to in the 'now' when it actually happened. This added content on the jacket of a book was only somewhat new to me, it had happened before but I'd not been able to identify it.
I couldn't tell him what I'm writing now because I didn't know myself why a few sentences on the jacket of a book had caused me to read a book that ordinarily I wouldn't have read. I was trying to describe something about this experience to him then I heard myself say something I'd not thought about previously. The words came out of my mouth spontaneously: "I think I'm seeing the world through Jan's eyes. It's like his viewpoint is sitting on top of mind and I'm looking up through it, out at the world."
That's when the phone rang. He excused himself to answer it. While he was on the phone I reached for something to read while I waited, a book laying nearby. I riffled through it and saw that it was some kind of dictionary but it was not like Webster's dictionary.
I read a few terms but as I riffled through the book a term in italic, bold print French caught my attention. I read the definition which didn't explain anything to me: folie aux deux, the same disease shared by two people.
When he got off the phone I asked him what it meant. He read the definition then did a strange thing: He slapped his knee and laughed in a peculiar way as he said to me: "Say, I'll bet that's what you and Jan have." Apparently what I'd said before the telephone rang linked to the very odd term. What could 'the same disease shared by two people' have to do with that I had said to him before the phone rang.
He did not mention that this was a very unusual thing to happen to an individual that knew nothing about psychiatric terms. The word 'coincidence' did not occur to me, then or later. It was one definition in a rather large book and it had caught my attention because it mentioned a 'disease' a 'disease' shared by two people. That ' mindset could be a disease was unknown to me. So I asked him no questions, I did not ask him to explain anything, but later I remembered how strange it was to have that one term register so strongly that I asked about it, but did not ask him why he thought my husband and I had that 'disease'.
I did not ask him why he laughed, nor did I ask him what 'the same disease shared by two people' meant. The reason I didn't ask for more information was very simple: I knew nothing about the kind of disease this term defined. I knew absolutely nothing about psychiatric ideas or terms. Primarily however, it would never have occurred to me that my husband could have a communicable 'disease' and the definition indicated a communicable disease. Later, years later I realized there was another reason I could not ask for more information, and why none was volunteered to me. According to traditional psychiatric thinking the PSYCHIATRIST THAT I WAS SEEING AT THAT TIME, did not 'want' to know or talk about the issue of 'a disease shared by two people'. The word 'want' as I've used it implies another psychiatric term, 'denial'. I don't believe either term is a legitimate way to describe information that exists in the 'unconscious mind', but not in the conscious mind. The implication that a mental state can be shared is obvious. How is it possible to 'deny' something you don't know is there whether it's individual 'denial' or collective denial?
I remember asking him one day if he had been divorced when he was in his late forties and if he had remarried soon after. He giggled slightly as he asked me if I was a mind reader. The ''denial' was actually due to a collective lack of knowledge about 'male menopause'. I had never heard the two words 'male' and 'menopause' linked together until the day I chanced to read a chapter titled, Male Menopause, in a book, a recent event. After reading the first two pages in the book I asked my husband to read them, because I recognized that one day he had said to me, basically word for word what I read on those two pages! He told me to not believe what I read in books, to think for myself, and walked away.
This remark: "Don't believe what you read in books, think for yourself." was not new to me, it was one I heard frequently, particularly when I mentioned something I'd read somewhere.
It did not occur to me that the 'disease' was really a shared mindset and that it was particularly unique in this case because of his nationality (Newtonian/European/Dutch); his gender which was quite different from mine.
There was no discussion from him about this 'disease', or its effects on me or on my family, it was a topic that came up but it was not explored in any way. Except in my mind, as I began to accumulate experiences, of hearing myself say something unplanned, spontaneous, then I remembered what I'd said later. All of the 'spontaneous' activity began to make a kind of sense, but it was so spontaneous I felt controlled, manipulated, maneuvered, and actually governed by this new authority, which I realized was actually an authority that had governed him, in the same way it was now governing both of us. It was particularly discernable whenever I tried to talk to my husband, I always was sidetracked from what I wanted and intended to say onto line of experience that was not mine at all but which was pre-assumed to be, me. It that became agonizingly frustrating to me. Helplessly I noticed myself repeat the last words he said to me many, many times until he got angry and insisted I stop it.
I could and did seethe with frustration and knowing its cause, feeling myself being continually sidetracked away from my intents to get help with my situation, then becoming aware of being prevented from saying what I needed to say...on levels and in situations with the legal (??) process where I expected the truth would come out.
From his speech there were indications he was also able to see the situation we were in, in a particular way, because he described to me, what I couldn't have put into words myself: what was happening at times; "Your mind is playing tricks on you." he said. "You don't understand. There hass been a role reversal."
It did not occur to me that the psychiatric mindset and the knowledges in psychiatry were well known in the unconsciousness of 'man', especially European man and that thru this 'shared mindset', it was also installed into mine. It had not been there prior to 1984. It was new to me, but fairly rapidly many habits that had not been 'normal' for me but which I began to notice had been somehow 'installed' in my body made it quite distinct to me that a kind of replication of 'self in another person' had occurred.
It was several years before I realized from experiences with several psychiatrists that the same sense of being actually prevented from saying my own words happened. I would plan what to talk about then leave the session having been 'side tracked' very efficiently.
There is much more about this that needs to be written, but a distinct new kind of replication had obviously occurred, Dr. Rehngren ought to have recognized that I had noticed its effects in my body myself, without any 'diagnosis' from him or anyone else. Even though all I could say was: "I think I'm seeing the world through Jan's eyes. It's like his viewpoint is sitting on top of mine and I'm looking up through it, out at the world." there was an implication this 'condition' was visible in a way and that I was describing how it altered everything, putting distance between me and what was outside of my body.
The 'collective unconscious' is about the past and the experiences of 'others'. This is not a simple thing to understand that I became aware quite slowly of being 'gripped' by something, owned by something that had begun to 'drive' me and it had been active in the life of my husband before it 'gripped me'. This was not distinct for several years and I had many very unusual experiences during that span of Time, but it became evident the 'shared mindset' included a pattern that was already at work in his life. Eventually I felt that a kind of 'motor' was focusing my attention, and that something other than my own 'wishes' had assumed authority over my body, all of it.
I heard myself say what I said about 'seeing the world through some one else's eyes', without ever having thought about what was implied by what I said. It was several years later that I really began to notice what I'd said in such isolated events at this one which happened in the beginning.
(There is a factor about spontaneous speech, that I have only begun to be aware of, in relation to finding myself saying what I'd not thought about, and didn't have a reason to say: It had begun and I'd not noticed the few events when it happened until much later. I believed that noticing 'loss of control' of my speech began in the early 1980's because I had begun to notice that I could not initiate a conversation with my husband on any topic. At that point there was much that we needed to discuss. I would try to initiate a discussion about issues, money issues mostly, and I could not get beyond the first sentence. The sense of being 'sidetracked' or 'shunted away' onto a 'track' that did not address what I wanted to began to make me feel extremely helpless and anguished...and voiceless.
One day I remember thinking: "There must be someone I can talk to." As the thought occurred into my mind a memory of his face and his voice saying exactly those words came into my mind. I remembered that he'd said the same words one day several years in the past. We were on vacation. The children and I had been playing a game, he seemed to be off in his own world, uninterested enough to join us, but this was not unusual. He'd blurted out the words: "There must be someone I can TALK TO!" I'd looked at his face and saw a very rare expression of intense emotions, anguish was in his voice and on his face. I wondered if he had felt the same way I felt when the thought words occurred into my mind.) At a point I remember he said to me: "I wish someone else could hear what you just said, I wish I had a tape recorder so someone else could hear this." What I did was get a tape recorder and try to get a communication going, then after that I began to try to type a letter that put everything on paper. That's when I found out I could not type even one word on our manual typewriter and the frustration from this puzzling new situation. It is also relevant to this topic to write that he had often listened to me after he'd asked me something, and his response was: "I cannot believe what I am hearing you say. This is Chaos itself, that I am hearing you say." Oddest of all circumstances is that the thing he heard me say was not what I had said, because of his particular way of relating to me and speech that seemed to be my speech. I became aware that it was impossible to say anything that was not a response to what he said to me. That condition has not changed.:
The change added 'me' to what I could see. The sense I had then of being both audience and 'actor' , of being 'on stage' in a peculiar new way took several years to really be certain about. Later (over a period of about 9 years) the sense of being 'witness' to what my body was doing changed. The first phase
That kind of replication of 'self' requires some kind of explanation of chemistries between individuals that science has not yet studied, but anything individually experienced is not scientifically verifiable. I did not know anything about scientific paradigms, or any kind of paradigm at all, until I'd observed my self, heard myself and other people within the configurations of this particular complex. I believe it's important to identify it as an other intelligence, a third party in this case that was related to throughout h is life, instead of relating to me and perhaps to any woman at all. It made me feel invisible until I read about Cassandra, whom nobody believed. And about Athena, born fully grown from a man's head.
It makes sense that a man's 'head' is history itself, all of it and that in becoming aware of the effects of this 'historically active' Other, on myself, after I acquired it in the way I did, I lived not only Cassandra's life but Athena's. There are ideas about women that I had not read about, I didn't realize were installed within the mind of 'man'. I suggest that anyone that is interested enough to want to find out a few of them, read Francis Schiller's book, The Moebius Strip. It's about fin de siecle neuropsychiatry at the beginning of the 1900's. That's when many men, including Paul Moebius were writing the 'new' sense they were experiencing themselves. Different versions came from Freud, Jung, Ouspensky, Gurdjieff but it seems to me there is a hierarchy in those versions, according to their particular ability to assimilate what they experienced and convert it into words.
The thing itself is not easy to deal with, but at least I am aware that it comes through other people, many, many other people who could if they remembered more of what they say and do, also become aware of their activities when they are 'in the flow' of this hidden vein of human endeavor. It seems to me it brings out of the darkness, what needs to be seen, then named and described.