review: Operators and Things by Barbara O’Brien - 4/5

[jesse_the_k]

wild_irises mentioned this book as a relevant to my interests.

Operators and Things—Barbara O’Brien print, ebook

The pseudonymous author presents this as a memoir of her six-month psychotic break into paranoid schizophrenia. She describes the mob of Operators who inhabit her life, in visual and aural hallucinations. To them, she’s a Thing, to be controlled, experimented with, traded, discarded. At their urging, she travels around the US via Greyhound, and manages not to be institutionalized while receiving emergency treatment for two infections. Towards the end of the six months, she feels impelled by Something to seek treatment. She spends a week with a psychoanalyst and realizes that she’s sane again.

Her detailed descriptions of the arguments among her Operators are unsettling, to say the least. She details her confusion and terror as three or five or more argue over her as if she were carrion.

What really hooked me is how she structures the book. She begins by analyzing how “Hook Operators” control others. These are not psychotic figments, but the people she works with. Her disquisition on office politics is brilliant; at the end she believes that this insight was so painful that it caused her psychotic break.

Operators and Things was originally published in 1958, and reprinted several times over the 20th century. It was mentioned in the Whole Earth (later Co-Evolution) Quarterly in the mid–70s.

It's now available for free as an ebook via Smashwords
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/13476

Read if ... You're intrigued by what's "going on inside" the mind of psychotic people

Avoid if ... Require iron-clad veracity; dislike scenes of emotional torture