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

Comments

[sovay]

Her disquisition on office politics is brilliant; at the end she believes that this insight was so painful that it caused her psychotic break.

This sounds fascinating.

Is the author's identity known and "Barbara O'Brien" the preferred way of referring to her, or is she still successfully pseudonymous?

[jesse_the_k]

As far as I can Google, her identity is unknown.

[capri0mni]

A point in her "Win" column! ... To get through all that, and keep her privacy, is a fine skill indeed.

[jesse_the_k]

Amen.

[wild_irises]

I am so glad you appreciated it. It's dated in many ways, but I still think it's one of the clearest insights into nonconsensus reality that I have ever run across.

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks for pointing me to her.

"Appreciated" may not be the right verb. I felt equally fascinating and disgusted--perhaps "compelled" would fit the bill--and horrified.

The psychic pain she describes is the daily landscape for so many humans, especially the ones I see on the street.

I was intrigued that her first and only stop in the mental-health trade was a psychoanalyst. Elyn Saks also believes psychoanalysis was key to helping her finish her lawyer training. I thought I'd reviewed her The Center Cannot Hold, seemed I imagined that. The tl;dr is READ IT NOW. She's a UC law professor who's schizophrenic: a good interview with insightful comments at io9:

https://io9.gizmodo.com/5983970/im-elyn-saks-and-this-is-what-its-like-to-live-with-schizophrenia

Sak's book also introduced me to the enormous theoretical gulf between US and UK understandings of schizophrenia. Here it's framed as "after your first break, you're broken." In the UK, it's seen as a relapsing-remitting illness, and the health workers expect folks to have productive and happy times between the psychoses.

[bibliofile]

Thanks for the recs. I already knew about Saks, but I don't recall hearing about Operators & Things before.