McGrath, Patrick. Asylum. London: Penguin Books, 1997. Pg.1-2
“The catastrophic love affair characterized by sexual obsession has been a professional
interest of mine for many years now. Such relationships vary widely in duration and intensity
but tend to pass through the same stages. Recognition. Identification. Assignation. Structure.
Complication. And so on. Stella Raphael's story is one of the saddest I know. A deeply
frustrated woman, she suffered the predictable consequences of a long denial collapsing in the
face of sudden overwhelming temptation. And she was a romantic. She translated her
experience with Edgar into the stuff of melodrama; she made of it a tale of outcast lovers
braving the world’s contempt for the sake of a great passion. Four lives were destroyed in the
process, but whatever remorse she may have felt she clung to her illusion to the end. I tried to
help but she deflected me from the truth until it was too late. She had to. She couldn’t afford
to let me see it clearly, it would have been the ruin of the few flimsy psychic structures she
had left.
Stella was married to a forensic psychiatrist called Max Raphael and they had a son, Charlie,
aged ten when all this happened. She was the daughter of a diplomat who’d been disgraced in
a scandal years before. Both her parents were dead now. She was barely out of her teens when
he married Max. He was a reserved rather melancholy man, a competent administrator, but
weak; and he lacked imagination. It was obvious when I met them that he wasn’t the type to
satisfy a woman like Stella. They were living in London when he applied for the position of
deputy superintendent. He came down for an interview impressed the board, and more
importantly impressed the superintendent, Jack Straffen. Against my advice, Jack offered him
the job, and a few weeks later the Raphaels arrived at the hospital. It was the summer of 1959
and the Mental Health Act had just been passed into law.
This is a desolate sort of place, though god knows it’s had the best years of my life. It is
maximum security, a walled city that rises from a high ridge to dominate the surrounding
country: dense pine forest to the north and west, low lying marshland to the south. It is built
on the standard Victorian linear model with wings radiating of the main blocks so all the
wards have an unobstructed view across the terraces to the open country beyond the Wall.
This is moral architecture, it embodies regularity, discipline and organization. All doors open
outwards to make them impossible to barricade. All windows are barred. Only the terraces,
descending by flights of stone steps to the perimeter wall at the foot of the hill, and planted
with trees, grassy banks and flower gardens, soften and civilize the grim carceral architecture
standing over them”
McGrath, Patrick. Spider. New York, NY: Poseidon, 1990 pg 187
“„Mr Cleg, let me see if I can sum up your career here. When you first came to Ganderhill
you were a very sick boy; in fact you were displaying most of the classic symptoms of
schizophrenia. You were hallucinating floridly in the visual, auditory and olfactory spheres;
your affective reactions were bizarrely inappropriate; you suffered marked body delusions,
you were regressed, you had ideas of persecution and thought injection.” He glanced at the
file. “You were aggressive on the ward and frequently had to be isolated in a safe room, in
restraints. You showed no awareness of your environment, nor any awareness of why you’d
been brought to Ganderhill in the first place. My point is,” he said, closing the file “that all
that has changed”.
