Courting Calamity: The Concept of the True and False Self
By Joanne Docherty
Diploma Student, Centre For Training In Psychotherapy, Toronto
June 2010
“If some jagged fragment of truth has set him free from the
shell of a false self, no human soul will ever know.”
These words give summation to the tragic death by suicide of James FitzGerald’s
grandfather in FitzGerald’s newest book What Disturbs Our Blood. The book is his quest to
trace the pathology of his paternal family legacy. He traces his family history beginning in 1824
with the “torturous emigration” from Ireland to “the inhospitable British colony of Upper
Canada”of his great-great- grandfather John FitzGerald (pg. 128). Newly arrived at the age of
thirteen John Fitzgerald like other Irish immigrants of the time toiled “in the ceaseless struggle
to carve out a happy haven in a heartless world, to conquer the natural world even as they
conquered their own natural feelings, an intangible price was paid” (pg. 131). John FitzGerald
in his forty-fifth year died. It was 1856. John’s seventh and last child, William FitzGerald, was
born in that same year, less than one full month before the death of his father. William grew
up fatherless and would become James FitzGerald’s great-grandfather. The year 1856 was also,
as James FitzGerald notes, significant for the birth of the Jewish Viennese boy Sigmund Freud,
“whose subversive ideas about fathers and sons would eventually roll westward across the
Atlantic not unlike, in his own ironic words, the plague” (pg. 131-132).
William FitzGerald would apprentice as a druggist in an apothecary shop in rural
Millbrook, Ontario and take in 1879 at the age of twenty-two his licensing exam with the newly
formed Ontario College of Pharmacy . James FitzGerald writes, “I sensed that facts, books, and
education filled, for a time, the vacuum left by his dead father” (pg. 132). James reflects: “All in
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all, it was fastidious work. In a land where illness flourished and only the fittest survived, he
carved out a living making a pill for every ill; like the young country itself, a full quarter of it
peopled with Irish-born, Will FitzGerald’s future was cut out for him” (pg. 133). Will died in
1917 just months after his grandson Jack was born. Will’s off-spring, two generations of
FitzGerald sons, would become men of great accomplishment, achievement, innovation and
vision within the field of medicine attaining both national and international acclaim.
The book details their history and presents other prestigious Edwardian men of science
within the fledgling medical fields of bacteriology, immunology, pathology, and particularly
public health, and the rise of Canadian institutions including in academia The University of
Toronto, in research the Banting Institute, and in mental health 999 Queen Street West and the
Clarke Institute of Psychiatry.
In 1933 James FitzGerald’s grandfather, a driven, eminent doctor and Canada’s leading
medical educator, uttered the following words in a radio talk on preventive medicine to a
general audience in Toronto: “In no other group of men and women is character and integrity
more essential than in those who are to practise the healing arts of medicine” (pg. 330). His
Depression era ideal of doctors and the healing arts of medicine proved far from the truth.
Both Dr. Gerald FitzGerald and his son Dr. Jack FitzGerald paid heavily for having this ideal.
James FitzGerald represents the third generation. His is “the third story, as yet untold” but he
knows how much the first two stories have shaped his: “But now I had to admit that my
father’s fall, and the fathers before him, had marked me more than I cared to know” (pg. 127).
Hence the book is a multi-generational story of sons trying mightily to fill their fathers’
extraordinary shoes. As James writes, “”life, it seemed, involved a lonely, grievous contest
between fathers and sons – a contest about which no one dared breathe a word” (pg. 39). The
FitzGerald women – Alice, Hazel, Edna, Molly, Janet and Shelagh – live in the domestic
background. Their stories are not the central narratives of the book. Yet the impact of the
mother on the son is never lost on James FitzGerald who paradoxically introduces the reader to
his mother, Janet, “a thwarted artist turned reluctant housewife” as the first character in his
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story. He writes: “My charismatic, witty mother was a shape-shifter; I was an emotional
weatherman, my head tilted like a radar dish, hyperattuned to her moods” (Prologue).
But in his inner life, James FitzGerald is compelled to focus on his grandfather and his
own father who dominate the scene in the family and in the larger society. Indeed, they came
to have what British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott has described as “something that can be
called world-citizenship” (Home Is Where We Start From, 1986, pg. 60). Most importantly, they
came to have profoundly disturbing significance within James’ own psyche.
Stoically bearing deep distress while pushing on to achieve more, Gerald FitzGerald and
then his son Jack gradually breakdown, become incapacitated, utterly collapse and enter the
seeming shelter of private sanatoriums. Their breakdowns lead each man to a regression to
absolute dependence. Neither man is met in a helpful way. Tragically, years of what were
then cutting-edge psychiatric interventions, insulin shock and electroshock treatments to name
two dangerous and painful methods, offer no real relief from suffering but only harm the body
and destroy mind and soul. James FitzGerald describes the effects of insulin injections this way:
For four or five hours, the patients’ pulse and heartbeat
race at high speed; they sweat and drool, toss and turn,
moan and weep; they vomit and lose control of their
bowels; they twitch with violent tremors and muscle
spasms. Those given the highest doses fall into violent
convulsions, biting their tongues and breaking their
teeth. Some fracture a femur, arm, jaw, or spine; others
tear hip bones out of their sockets.
pg. 329
As early as 1947, Winnicott in his seminal paper “Hate in the Countertransference” wrote:
“From time to time I have made acutely critical remarks about the modern trends in psychiatry,
with the too easy electric shocks and the too drastic leucotomies” (pg. 194). Unfortunately the
psychoanalytic movement and Winnicott’s influence had not yet penetrated the shores of
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Canada (Winnicott would make three tours of the United States from 1962 to 1967 and his
writings entered into wide circulation in North America).
A tragic hero, FitzGerald’s grandfather, as well as a lgreat-uncle, take their own lives in
middle age. Repeating the pattern, his 53 year old father makes two suicide attempts by
morphine injection and only by chance escapes death when he is rescued by James’ older sister.
In an effort to avoid the same demise, James enters psychotherapy in the 1980s determined to
face his own daunting family history riddled with the shame and stigma of depression,
addiction, mental breakdown, and ultimately suicide. Chapter five entitled “I’m My Own
Grandpa” tells of James’ travel to his ancestral home in Ireland. While still in the airplane
crossing the Atlantic Ocean, he contemplates his father’s “inexorable spiral into madness” and
the “memory of his terrifying plunges into suicidal psychosis – and the subsequent loss of his
house, career, and marriage” (pg. 127). Accounting for the five FitzGerald’s in two generations
who had suffered mental breakdowns and were institutionalized, James asks “What else but a
tainted heredity, an Irish madness, could explain it? What else but bad blood? What else?” (pg.
426). James is resolved “to crack the psychological DNA code” his father had guarded “as if his
very life was at stake” (pg. 138).
James points us in the direction of Winnicott’s seminal idea of the False Self concept to
explain the mid-life tortured existence and premature deaths at their own hands of the fatherson relationship of the two great men in his family. His grandmother upon the suicidal death of
her husband is quoted as saying, “I was married to an idea, not a man.” Her son Jack at fifteen
would begin stealing her “sodium amytal tablets to sedate his own anxieties and tensions”
according to his psychiatric file procured by her grandson James from the Clarke Institute of
Psychiatry archives in the 1990s. James writes: “In the summer of 1971, my father crossed the
threshold of the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry at 250 College Street; in a moment, he exchanged
the trim white coat of the highly reputable doctor for the baggy white gown of the vaguely
disreputable patient. Whatever he was before, he was now officially branded ‘mentally ill’” (pg.
91).
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In the clinical application of his concept of the False Self, Winnicott speaks of “the
importance of a recognition of the False Self personality when a diagnosis is being made for the
purposes of the assessment of a case for treatment, or the assessment of a candidate for
psychiatric or social psychiatric work” (1960, “Ego Distortion”, pg. 150). This paper is about
Winnicott’s concept of the True and False Self. FitzGerald’s book is used to illuminate the
negative impact on the individual of living a False Self and how ultimately for the FitzGerald
men it was not sustainable. Their stories provide disturbing evidence that in living from the
False Self, there will be an awful reckoning. The book vividly portrays Winnicott’s theory of the
ways in which the developing self from the earliest age of infancy interacts with the family and
the larger society. In Home Is Where We Start From, Winnicott warns that “society is easily
taken in by the false-self organization, and has to pay heavily for this” (pg. 33). The price paid is
passed from generation to generation as an inheritance. This inheritance plagues James
FitzGerald who begins his book with an old photo, “an image of my three-year-old self” he says.
He continues: “Decades passed before I began to plumb the meaning of the worried yet
curious expression of the boy in the photograph, haunted by what he knows and is coming to
know . . . What was I trying to figure out?” (Prologue).
For James only psychotherapy, long-term healing talk, offers the hope of working
through a family legacy of pathology to restore his health and to set himself free. Eulogizing at
a family funeral he writes, “I felt the need to speak openly of our legacy of melancholia and
madness, suicide and silence” (pg. 139). Like Freud whom he admires, James believes “that
cultivating a lifelong habit of rigorous self-reflection remains the worthy and ethical aim of a
civilized man” (pg. 357). As Jan Abrams (1996) suggests, “Winnicott defines psychotherapy as
the search for the self, meaning the search for the sense of feeling real inside” (1996, pg. 310).
James FitzGerald echoes Winnicott when he says: “My inability to feel like anything other than
a spectator in my own life finally pushed me at the age of thirty-three into the hands of a
psychotherapist” (Prologue). James tries to ward off being “doomed to re-enact the buried
generational drama that was already undercutting [his] natural passions with an invisible hand”
(Prologue).
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In his 1971 paper “Playing: Creative activity and the search for the self” Winnicott
writes:
. . . I am concerned with the search for the self and the
restatement of the fact that certain conditions are
necessary if success is to be achieved in this search.
These conditions are associated with what is usually
called creativity. It is in playing and only in playing
that the individual child or adult is able to be creative
and to use the whole personality, and it is only in
being creative that the individual discovers the self.
(pg. 54)
Only in “being” is the self really present. This being must precede doing for the healthy ability
to live creatively and for life to have purpose. In his 1967 paper “The Concept of a Healthy
Individual” Winnicott asks, “what is life about?” (pg. 34) He responds: “I do not need to know
the answer, but we can agree that it is more nearly about BEING than about sex” (pg. 34-35).
The essential question therefore is what is the being state? Winnicott explains:
Being and feeling real belong essentially to health,
and it is only if we can take being for granted that
we can get on to the more positive things. I contend
that this is not just a value judgement, but that there
is a link between individual emotional health and a
sense of feeling real. No doubt the vast majority
of people take feeling real for granted, but at what
cost? To what extent are they denying a fact,
namely, that there could be a danger for them
of feeling unreal, of feeling possessed, of
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feeling they are not themselves, of falling for
ever, of having no orientation, of being detached
from their bodies, of being annihilated, of being
nothing, nowhere? Health is not associated with
denial of anything.
(pg. 35)
Here are mentioned the unthinkable psychotic anxieties postulated by Winnicott’s theory,
namely, going to pieces, falling for ever, having no relationship to the body, and having no
orientation (Rodman, pg. 270). In the same paper Winnicott argues that “the self is not really
to be found in what is made out of products of body or mind . . . the finished creation never
heals the underlying lack of sense of self” (pg. 54). This offers an explanation for the distress
and the fate of James FitzGerald’s forefathers who despite staggering professional success
disintegrate and commit suicide or live a death-in-life existence.
The questions of how the False Self arises and what is its function are concerns of
psycho-analysis as Winnicott states in his 1960 paper “Ego distortion in terms of True and False
Self.” These questions will be explored here using as case studies the lives of the FitzGerald
father and son both of whom would have benefitted from Winnicott’s brilliant clinical
experience in adult psychiatry. In addition to the scientific talent of the FitzGerald father and
son, What Disturbs Our Blood presents a cast of real-life extraordinary men of scientific genius
hungering for medical excellence. The cast includes recipients of the Nobel Prize in Medicine
and a recipient of the Order of Canada: Dr. Fred Banting, Charles Best, Dr. C.K. Clarke, Robert
Defries, Dr. Clarence B. Farrar, Professor Donald Fraser, Clarence Hincks, and Dr. William Welch
and others. Individually, let alone collectively, their brilliance and achievements are staggering.
Historically speaking, some are intellectual giants of our modern time. What is most
astonishing, however, is the private and sometimes not so private anguish suffered by so many
of them. Some, addicted to the narcotic morphine, nembutol or wigraine, were able to cope,
while others after being institutionalized finally ended their suffering by suicide. As one man’s
surviving widow astutely remarked, “save us from brilliance.”
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Winnicott’s first mention of his concept of the True and False Self, as biographer F.
Robert Rodman asserts, occurred in a 1949 paper “Mind and Its Relation to the Psyche-Soma”
(2003, pg. 264). It is not until 1960, however, in his paper “Ego Distortion” that Winnicott’s
thinking on the subject is brought together and crystallized (Rodman, pg. 265): The goodenough mother facilitates “the baby’s omnipotence in her state of identification with the
infant” and “out of this comes the spontaneous gesture” (Rodman, pg. 265). As an essential
part of his theory, Winnicott postulates “that the True Self does not become a living reality
except as a result of the mother’s repeated success in meeting the infant’s spontaneous gesture
or sensory hallucination” (Rodman, pg. 265). The spontaneous gesture “is the True Self in
action” and if “the not-good-enough mother fails to meet the gesture and substitutes her own,
with which the infant complies, [there is] the beginning of a False Self” (Rodman, pg. 265).
Not much can be known about the details of the kind of mothering received by the
FitzGerald boys, Gerald and then Jack. James FitzGerald describes his great-grandmother’s life
this way: Like countless pre-feminist Victorian women of energy and intelligence, Alice’s place
is inescapably in the home, stoically pining for the high culture of her Hertfordshire youth” and
he adds “the birth of four children in five-and-a-half years is exacting an insidious toll on her
health” (pg. 155). She became “a chronic invalid in her later years” and died at fifty-one in 1907.
Almost one hundred years later the memory of being “quarantined in the Siberian steppes of
the nursery” haunts her great-grandson James FitzGerald. He writes:
No memories survive of my parents visiting the
nursery to tuck us in or read us stories, although
I suppose they must have. I do recall my perfumed,
mink-stoled mother standing at the doorway before
a night on the town, stretching an imaginary kiss
from her lipsticked mouth, like a piece of taffy;
using her fingers as imaginary scissors, she’d cut
it off, roll it up into an invisible ball, then throw
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it at us. Then she’d turn off the lights and close
the door.
pg. 18
By the time of “Ego Distortion” the False Self is in Winnicott’s thinking “a real clinical
state” (Ego Distortion, pg. 140). In his 1967 paper “The Concept of a Healthy Individual,” he
argues that the False Self has a defensive nature. He refers to “those people who have
unconsciously needed to organize a false-self front to cope with the world, this false front being
a defence designed to protect the true self” (pg. 33). He further states that “the true self has
been traumatized and it must never be found and wounded again” (pg. 33). Winnicott seven
years earlier had argued, “its defensive function is to hide and protect the True Self, whatever
that may be.” (1960, pg. 142). The true self, whatever that may be?
Christopher Bollas in “A theory for the true self” writes that Winnicott’s term “true self”
stood for “an inherited potential that found its expression in spontaneous action” (2007, pg. 9).
He quotes Winnicott when he defines the true self as “the inherited potential which is
experiencing a continuity of being, and acquiring in its own way and at its own speed a personal
psychic reality and a personal body scheme” (pg. 9). True self was inherent, as previously
stated, in “the spontaneous gesture” with “its earliest manifestations in the muscle eroticism of
the foetus” according to Winnicott (pg. 9).
As Bollas states, the true self “depends upon
maternal care for its evolution” (pg. 10). He writes:
In the long evolution of the foetus, from its pre-organic
history (in the genetic make-up of the parents) to its
birth, and then in the dramatically progressive evolution
of the infant in those first two years prior to speech,
the human being lives a profoundly dependent life,
at first literally inside the mother, then inside the
postnatal interrelation – and all of this before speech.
(pg. 21)
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Bollas puts it simply: “The true self was aliveness itself, and although [Winnicott] saw it as an
inherited potential, he did little to extend this understanding of the concept” (pg. 9-10).
Indeed, as Peter Dales suggests “the true self of Winnicott’s language is poetic insofar as it can
be taken as metaphor” (seminar notes). This agrees with Bollas who argues, “the true self
cannot be easily isolated as an object of study” (pg. 16). The false self by contrast is a manmade concept that is analyzable and thus can be broken down and observed. As a poetic idea
the true self is “ambiguous and fluid” and “fundamentally alone” approximating “the person
who is me” (seminar notes). Bollas explains it this way:
. . . this core self is the unique presence of being that
each of us is; the idiom of our personality. We are
singular complexities of human being – as different in
the make-up of our characters as in our physiognomies;
our person design finds its expression in the discrete
living villages (composed of all those objects we select
to cultivate our needs, wishes and interests) that we
create during our lifetime.
pg. 10
As Bollas points out, “no human being, however, is only true self” and “the life of the true self is
to be found in the person’s experiencing of the world” (pg. 10). The true self “only a potential . .
. comes into being only through experience” (pg. 16).
To hide the True Self, the False Self functions in “compliance with environmental
demands” (pg. 147). The healthy False Self of Winnicott’s theory “mediates between the
personal private self and the external world at large (Abram, pg. 309). In this regard, “the ability
to compromise is a sign of health in the appreciation of a shared reality; it is the positive and
healthy component of the ‘normal equivalent of the False Self’” (Abram, pg. 308). Hence “the
ability to compromise is an achievement” (“Ego distortion”, pg. 149). Winnicott speaks of the
“social manner” being a compromise, a healthy adaptation to the external environment. But he
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writes: “. . . in health, the compromise ceases to become allowable when the issues become
crucial. When this happens the True Self is able to override the compliant self” (“Ego
distortion”, pg. 149).
Winnicott thus wrote of the “False Self defense” (1960, pg. 142). Examining the
defensive style of individuals is a way of understanding personality. As Judy Dales states,
“defensive style, the habitual use of defences, defines the individual’s character type, such as:
schizoid, depressive, hysterical, paranoid etc.” (CTP 2010-2011). As all “normal” people have
elements of all character/personality types, health or pathology is a matter of degree. Parental
influences, genetic contributions (temperament, adaptive processes) and traumatic experiences
all shape the developmental organization of personality. “Developmental organization,”
suggests Judy Dales, “is described on a continuum from ‘normal’, neurotic, borderline, to
psychotic” (CTP 2010-2011).
Similarly there are degrees of False Self from benign to severe – the healthy False Self
and the pathological False Self. Winnicott found it possible to classify False Self organizations.
In his clinical work, he saw “the existence of a low or a high degree of the False Self defence,
ranging from the healthy polite aspect of the self to the truly split-off compliant False Self” (pg.
150). Individuals could essentially be False Personalities and be diagnosed as such – the
organized False Self. In his clinical description the extreme occurs when “the False Self sets up
as real” and “the True Self is hidden” (1960, pg. 142-143). The True Self, according to
Winnicott, “is so well hidden that spontaneity is not a feature” but rather compliance is the
“main feature, with imitation as a speciality” (pg. 147). Compliance here “is connected with
despair rather than hope” (Abram, 1996, pg. 308). Less extreme on the spectrum, the True Self
is “acknowledged as a potential and is allowed a secret life” (pg. 143). Although clinically ill as
an organization, there is a positive aim at work that is “the preservation of the individual in
spite of abnormal environmental conditions” (pg. 143). It is the function of the False Self to find
“a way of enabling the True Self to start to live” (pg. 148). Winnicott speaks of “more toward
health” on the spectrum in terms of the False Self searching “for conditions which will make it
possible for the True Self to come into its own” but “if conditions cannot be found then there
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must be reorganized a new defence against exploitation of the True Self, and if there be doubt
then the clinical result is suicide” (pg. 143).
Theoretically Winnicott postulates more than one kind of suicide:
Suicide in this context is the destruction of the total self
in avoidance of annihilation of the True Self. When suicide
is the only defence left against betrayal of the True Self,
then it becomes the lot of the False Self to organize the
suicide. This, of course, involves its own destruction, but
at the same time eliminates the need for its continued
existence, since its function is the protection of the True
Self from insult.
pg. 143
For Winnicott the psychological suicide of the True Self as an option is worse than the physical
death of the body. Hence the False Self defence is “against that which is unthinkable, the
exploitation of the True Self, which would result in its annihilation” (pg. 147). Gerald and Jack
FitzGerald each have by middle-age a highly successful False Self. They demonstrate “the
amazing achievements” of what Winnicott called the split-off intellect (HWWSF, pg. 59). The
ultimate fate of father and then son, however, is to be destroyed by a severe False Self
pathology.
Winnicott makes a direct connection between “the intellectual approach and the False
Self” (1960, pg. 144). He suggests:
When a False Self becomes organized in an individual who
has a high intellectual potential there is a very strong tendency
for the mind to become the location of the False Self, and in
this case there develops a dissociation between intellectual
activity and psychosomatic existence.
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Pg. 144
Winnicott continues to explain the split-off intellect of the False-Self personality, which aptly
applies to the FitzGerald father and son:
When there has taken place this double abnormality, (i) the
False Self organized to hide the True Self, and (ii) an attempt
on the part of the individual to solve the personal problem
by the use of a fine intellect, a clinical picture results which
is peculiar in that it very easily deceives. The world may
observe academic success of a high degree, and may
find it hard to believe in the very real distress of the
individual concerned, who feels “phoney” the more he
or she is successful. When such individuals destroy
themselves in one way or another, instead of fulfilling
promise, this invariably produces a sense of shock in
those who have developed high hopes of the individual.
Pg. 305
Winnicott in his 1965 paper “New light on children’s thinking” locates the aetiology of the splitoff intellect in early infancy within the mother-infant relationship when “the mother’s failure to
adapt is too rapid” and “the baby survives by means of the mind” (Abram, 1996, pg. 305).
Winnicott argues:
This results in the uneasy intelligence of some whose good
brains have become exploited. The intelligence is hiding
a degree of deprivation. In other words, there is always
for those with exploited brains a threat of a breakdown
from intelligence and understanding to mental chaos or
to disintegration of the personality.
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Abram, pg. 305
In his 1968 paper “Sum, I Am” Winnicott speaks of “the poorly endowed baby” who “is more at
the mercy of the mother’s capacity for adaptation,” and who must if born to a not-goodenough mother learn to tolerate frustration (HWSF, pg. 59). He explains:
Can you see from this that the intellect helps in the
toleration of frustration? From this one can go on
to see that a mother can exploit a baby’s intellectual
functions in order to get free from the tie that comes
from the baby’s dependence. All this is quite normal,
but if you give the baby an intellectual equipment that
is well above average, the baby and the mother may
collude in exploitation of the intellect which becomes
split off – split off, that is from the psyche of pscychosomatic existence and living.
(pg. 59)
The baby, especially if there is “an element of difficulty in the psychosomatic field,” as
Winnicott argues, “begins to develop a false self in terms of a life in the split-off mind, the true
self being psychosomatic, hidden, and perhaps lost” (pg. 59).
For Winnicott “the existence of a False Self results in a feeling of unreal or a sense of
futility” (pg. 148). In his 1970 paper “Living Creatively,” Winnicott writes: “The symptom of
uncreative living is the feeling that nothing means anything, of futility, I couldn’t care less”
(HWWSF, pg. 50). In chapter four of the book entitled “Dr. FitzGerald Must Learn to Cover Up
His Feelings,” James Fitzgerald comes across his father’s account of his own history upon being
assessed by the admitting psychiatrist at the Clarke Institute. His father’s account painfully
reveals an exhausted False Self personality:
He had to work extremely hard to succeed, applying
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himself completely to medicine and dropping other
fields of interest. He felt an intense need to prove
himself and gain the approval of others. He struggled
to earn his medical fellowship to prove he ‘could get
on the faculty without the help of my father’s name or
any of his cronies. I was under constant stress to beat
the gun, but I liked it.’ He took on an extended workload,
doing a great deal of teaching; he did it rather well,
although he found it an increasing strain . . . ‘The old
Fitz people knew – the conversationalist, the comedy
man, the happy Irishman who got the party off the ground –
was a boozed Fitz. It made me forget my worries.’ He
admitted that he was often shabby, unable to take care
of himself, and that he cried repeatedly. Panicked by
thoughts of suicide, he resorted to taking pills. It seemed
to him only a matter of time before his father’s fate
would overtake him.
(pg. 92-93)
Jack FitzGerald is diagnosed manic-depressive, a label his son says “that concealed as much as it
revealed.” (pg. 93). He was given ten electro-shock treatments. They did no good. His son
writes: “In fact, his condition was now worse than on admission. A crisis is a terrible thing to
waste; and wasted this one surely was” (pg. 93). Ultimately, his son concludes, “diagnosing and
treating Jack FitzGerald was like nailing Jell-O to a passing ambulance” (pg. 95). “The Clarke
had done its best and its worst,” writes James, “but the big-shot doctor proved stubbornly
‘treatment-resistant.’” (pg. 97). The prognosis there and then at the public hospital the
Donwood Institute and the private sanitarium Homewood was poor. “The revolving door of
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ineffectual shrinks,” as James’ mother considered them, could not help poor Jack (pg. 98).
James writes:
The doctors’ punishing treatments were that and only
that – punishing. After all, what did medical science
have to do with nurturing relationships between
human beings? What masqueraded as a helping
hand he could only experience as the final insult
in a lifelong line of insults. If my father was mad,
doctors had everything to do with it.
(pg. 103)
Jack “had been treated by a succession of sixteen different psychiatrists,” and as his son
sardonically remarks “like a bar of Irish Spring, [his] ever-elusive father kept slipping through
the doctors’ fingers” (pg. 104-105). Becoming an outpatient at the mental hospital at 999
Queen Street West, his father ended up isolated and alone, a recluse in a small apartment.
Trying suicide on two previous occasions, drug-addled Jack finally succumbed to a stroke in
1992.
One could argue that John Desmond Leonard FitzGerald, (“Jack”), never wanted to be a
doctor. His true passion was jazz. He became doctor at his father’s behest. His son James
begins What Disturbs Our Blood with a poem by Cecil Day Lewis entitled Almost Human. It
portrays the deep suffering of a man, not fully alive, living a False Self:
The man you know, assured and kind,
Wearing fame like an old tweed suit –
You would not think he has an incurable
Sickness upon his mind.
Finely that tongue, for the listening people,
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Articulates love, enlivens clay;
While under his valued skin there crawls
An outlaw and a cripple.
Unenviable the renown he bears
When all’s awry within? But a soul
Divinely sick may be immunized
From the scourge of common cares.
The poem’s last stanza is a plea for empathy: “Before you condemn this eminent freak/As an
outrage upon mankind,/Reflect . . .” Reflecting on the lives of Gerald and Jack FitzGerald one is
left with a profound sense of tragedy. Hope is renewed by the third story contained in the book
-- that of the author James FitzGerald. In his quest to redeem the past, he painstakingly
uncovers the truth about “the shell of a false self” --- the story of his grandfather and father.
Bibliography
Abram, Jan. The Language of Winnicott: a dictionary of Winnicott’s use of words. 2nd ed.
London: Karnac Books, 2007.
Bollas, Christopher. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
Caldwell, Lesley, Ed. Winnicott and the Psychoanalytic Tradition. London: Karnac Books, 2007.
FitzGerald, James. What Disturbs Our Blood: A Son’s Quest To Redeem The Past. Toronto:
Random House, 2010.
Rodman, Robert F. Winnicott life and work. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2003.
Winnicott, D. W. Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst. New York: Norton,
1990.
Winnicott, D.W. Playing and Reality. New York: Routledge Classics, 2005.
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Winnicott, D.W. The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. New York:
Karnac Books, 2006.
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