Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl

Marguerite Sechehaye

3 ideas

1. Renée and the Apples From Mama

   Renée, a severely regressed Swiss girl, refused food because she felt guilty for existing and wanting. She craved apples, which she associated with the mother's milk she felt denied as an infant, yet apples bought from shops meant nothing to her. When her analyst cut an apple, held a slice to her own breast and offered it saying it was time to drink the good milk from Mama's apples, Renée ate it, and she reported that for the first time in years her surroundings became real and alive.

2. The Land of Light: Perception of Unreality

   Renée describes the onset of psychosis as a change in perception, not first as a change in belief. Objects become enormous, flat, and cut off from their meaning and use. People look like puppets or statues under a pitiless electric glare, and the only emotion left is boundless anxiety. Her delusions came later, as attempts to explain this derealized world, which she called the 'Land of Light' or 'Enlightenment'.

3. Symptoms as Coded Needs and Self-Punishment

   Read the psychotic's bizarre commands and refusals, such as 'the System' ordering her to burn her hand or to starve, as a language rather than as noise. In Renée's case they encoded an unmet oral need together with guilt for having that need, so the symptom both expressed the desire and punished it. Decoding which need is being forbidden tells the therapist what must be given, and that it must be given without a price attached.

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