Lalita D. Drepaul FIQWS Content 10008  

The Neglection of Mental Illness

While reading Freud’s “Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis” in Lecture I, and Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” you come to see Freud’s ideas represented in her short story. Freud talks of a physician, Josef Breuer’s treatments and cures for his hysterical and neurotic female patients. In Gilman’s short story, the narrator is being treated by her husband who is also her physician who has no understanding of what she is going through. These two literatures relate in a sense that the doctors were dealing with a new category of illness and disorders that yet haven’t been treated for. “The Yellow Wallpaper” illustrates Freud’s criticism of doctors because they lack knowledge and are not qualified to be treating mentally ill patients. 

In the “Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis”, Freud gives his lectures at Clark University in Boston, Massachusetts in 1909. He tells ideas of hysteria and neurosis, and doctors only understood organic diseases not mental ones. Freud tells the story of Viennese physician, Josef Breuer’s who was treating woman, who was suffering from hysteria. Freud comes to the realization that Breuer and other physicians don’t have the knowledge or comprehension to be “curing” their patients. As Freud states in Lecture I, “He cannot understand hysteria, and in the face of it he is himself a layman.” The effect of Breuer not fully understanding his patient’s conditions leads to these women being neglected and subjected to more despair and pain. Breuer treats his female patients as if they were impotent. In Lecture I, Freud states, “Dr. Breuer’s attitude towards his patient deserved no such reproach. He gave her both sympathy and interest, even though, to begin with, he did not know how to help her.”  

In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Gilman writes the story of a unwell woman who is being suppressed into the nursery room in her home by her physician husband, John. By which he thinks she will get better by being unable to release her thoughts and emotions and being hidden from society. The narrator states, “John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.” Blocking her from expressing her feelings, leads her to a more agitated and distressed persona. The treatment of the narrator led her to more distress and loneliness. Gilman also wrote “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper”, where she tells us about her suffering from nervous breakdowns to which a physician recommended she live a solemn life and contain her artistic and emotional releases, as they were the cause of her breakdowns. Not being able to communicate her emotions wrecked her mental state even worse than it was before.  

Freud’s statements of doctors being unknowledgeable of their patient’s afflictions is illustrated in Gilman’s story. Both literatures represent a disconnect of doctors to patients, in a time where mental disorders had just become recognized. Mental disorders in the time of Freud’s ideas were minor inconveniences to doctors and physician, leading patients to be neglected and treated unproperly, which caused severe mental delirium and progressed symptoms. Both Breuer and John treat their patients condescendingly. By being sweet and kind to them but in a patronizing way, almost as a way of belittlement. They act knowledgeable of the individual’s case but have no understanding whatsoever.   

The neglect of patients with mental illnesses and disorders were because of unaware doctors. Since these cases of mental distress were a newly recognized thing, doctors did what they thought would help better their patients. Though they were wrong with their ideas of treatment, which led to more pain and suffering of these women. This Freudian idea is shown throughout “The Yellow Wallpaper”.