Panic Diaries A Genealogy of Panic Disorder

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contents

Acknowledgments ix

Prologue 1

one History, Memory, Story:

Openings 3

two The Martian in the Machine:

Panic Theory and Theaters of War 33

three ‘‘Keep Calm!’’ for the Cold War:

Diary of a Mental Patient 79

four Performing Methods: Cybernetics, Psycho-

pharmacology, and Postwar Psychiatry 165

five Panic Xanax:

A Patient Diary 211

Epilogue 275

Notes 281

Bibliography 323

Index 347
acknowledgments

The social webs of knowledge, challenge, love, money, labor, and friend-
ship that have made this book possible are a pleasure to try to name.
In Boston, Stephen Pfohl and the Parasite Cafe introduced me to the
radical arts and science of a sociology cut by surrealism. With Vic-
toria Burke, Mark Driscoll, Cristina Favretto, Avery Gordon, Jeremy
Grainger, Andrew Herman, Sandra Joshel, Pelle Lowe, Josef Mendoza,
Diane Nelson, and Sit-Com International, I learned tons about the col-
lective powers of creative dis-ease. In Berkeley, the friendship of Eliza-
beth Bernstein, Shana Cohen, LuAnne Codella, Robert Glick, Teresa
Gowan, Maren Klawiter, Natasha Kirsten Kraus, Mary Peelen, Pamela
Perry, the Pushy Bottoms, Will Rountree, Leslie Salzinger, Laurie Schaff-
ner, Noga Shalev, and Françoise Vergès gave me intellectual comradeship
that I continue to cherish today. In Syracuse, Monisha Das Gupta, Marj
DeVault, Mary Ellen Kavanaugh, Claudia Klaver, Andrew London, and
Julia Loughlin have kept me warm. To Dóvar Chen, my love and deepest
thanks.
Troy Duster graciously took on my ‘‘case’’ when I was a dissertation
student, and guided me with sweet assurances that I was never really
lost. Adele Clarke, Patricia Clough, Joan Fujimura, Caren Kaplan, Maren
Klawiter, Emily Martin, Roddey Reid, Molly Rhodes, and Jennifer Terry
have all read pieces of the manuscript at different stages. I am indebted
to their engaged criticisms and encouragements. Donna Haraway and
the late Kathy Acker have been transformative teachers, though I have
never sat in their classrooms. I learned from reading their work how to
experiment with thinking and language; this book would not have been
thought, or written, without their fierce intelligence.
Much of the research and writing of the book was generously sup-
ported by the Institute for the Study of Social Change, the Department of
Sociology, and the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at the
University of California, Berkeley; and the Humanities Research Insti-
tute (hri) at the University of California, Irvine. My time as an hri resi-
dent fellow with the Postdisciplinary Approaches to the Technosciences
research group, organized by Sharon Traweek and Roddey Reid, had a
profound influence on my thinking. The Institute for the Study of So-
cial Change also provided financial support for a set of interviews with
key figures in the history of psychiatric classification and panic disorder
research. My thanks to those I interviewed, Jim Ballenger, Jean Endi-
cott, Donald F. Klein, Mark Pollack, Jerrold Rosenbaum, David Shee-
han, Robert Spitzer, and Myrna Weissman, for sharing their historical
memories with me. The healing and martial arts of Karina Epperlein and
Carol Joyce have kept my body strong and my breathing steady during
long stretches of writing. At Duke University Press, thanks to my editors
Raphael Allen and Reynolds Smith for their care, and wit, and patience.
Performing my work helps to keep it—and me—alive. I owe a spe-
cial debt of gratitude to those who over the years have organized per-
formance events, making it possible for the work to meet a lively audi-
ence in real time: Craig Baldwin, Patricia Clough, Lauren Crux, Carolyn
Dinshaw, Dwight Fee, Nancy Fisher, Patricia Geist, Lynne Haney, Valerie
Hartouni, Andrew Herman, Bill Hoynes, Laura Mamo, Shannon May,
Stephen Pfohl, Chris Robbins, Jennifer Terry, and Nina Wakeford.

x acknowled gments
prologue

I’m a sick woman who studies history, looking for cures, searching for
more potent forms of dis-ease.
Knowledge is ‘‘made for cutting,’’ 1 writes Michel Foucault, a historian
and son of a surgeon, who attempts to carve out the voluminous histori-
cal silence constituting the relation between modern reason and its irre-
ducible ‘‘other’’—the figure of madness. In Madness and Civilization: A
History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Foucault suggests that once upon
a time, before the truth of madness was established in the medicalized
realm of sickness and disease, human ‘‘unreason’’ flourished in multiple,
meaningful exchanges with a reason from which it had not yet been deci-
sively severed. Before the historical act of scission that founded madness
in its modern form—isolated on one side of an abyss across which reason
(while taking careful notes) observed its alien figure—unreason spoke in
many tongues, none of them yet dead languages.
The transformation of a prolific, knowing speech of unreason into the
compulsive, hallucinatory, senseless stammerings of madness takes place,
Foucault tells us, at a particular historical moment: when the emerg-
ing techniques of modern reason become a foundation of modern po-
litical power. Unreason is rendered speechless at the moment when that
other form of madness becomes dominant, that ‘‘other form of madness
by which men, in an act of sovereign reason, confine their neighbors, and
communicate . . . [with] each other through the merciless language of
non-madness.’’ 2
It is the workings of this mad reason and its relations to contempo-
rary power with which I am somewhat compulsively concerned here, in
the stammered hallucinations that follow. In a society of unspeakable
madness, how does a mad woman tell a history of what has come to be
called a ‘‘mental disorder’’? And, immersed in a merciless language of
non-madness, how will we ever hear her?
1
History, Memory, Story:
Openings
True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been
and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had
sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. . . .
Hearken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell
you the whole story.—edgar allan poe 1

The point is to reconfigure what counts as knowledge.

—donna haraway 2
the first cut

Perhaps it was a clear, cold, blue-sky afternoon when the Iroquois The-
ater burned. Certainly it was a Wednesday; the archives will tell you that.
Sixteen chorus girls stood onstage singing ‘‘Pearly Moonlight’’ while the
Queen of the Aerial Ballet and her troupe of eleven dancers, tied to in-
visible wires and hanging high above the stage, waited for their cue. In
the audience, a crowd of nearly two thousand sat watching the matinee
performance of Mr. Bluebeard.3 Then a line of flame shot up the muslin
curtain. The chorus girls kept on singing, but you could see their eyes
go wild.
Nearly six hundred people died in the Iroquois Theater fire one win-
ter afternoon, December 30, 1903. ‘‘Panic Balks Escape: Maddened Audi-
ence Unable to Reach the Exits,’’ ‘‘Panic in the Iroquois Causes Frightful
Loss—Women and Children Trampled in the Wild Rush,’’ read the head-
lines the next day. The exact cause of the extraordinary loss of life ap-
peared uncertain. Some reported that a short circuit in an electric light
sparked the first flame. Others noted the failure of the asbestos curtain
to fall, held in place by the wire on which the Queen of the Aerial Ballet,
in a spectacular special effect, flew out over the audience.
But the owners of the newly opened Iroquois Theater, a palatial build-
ing in downtown Chicago, quickly declared: ‘‘The panic, as everybody
says, was the chief cause of the large number of deaths.’’ 4 (Whatever the
facts of the matter, several stagehands and the chief electrician of the Iro-
quois were arrested and charged with manslaughter, while fifteen chorus
girls were jailed on a $5,000 bond as the sixteenth girl, one Miss Romaine,
continued to elude detectives.)5
At the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘‘panic’’ often plays a lead-
ing role in popular stories of catastrophe and in theoretical stagings of the
collective psychology of crowds. Jamming the exits and inflaming fatali-
ties, panic also permits those who preside over industrial-size disasters
to account differently for the loss of life—and to render more obscure its
financial and legal accounting—by offering a deadly psychological sub-
text to the malfunctions of increasingly massive, complex technosocial
machineries.6 The Iroquois Theater, built at a cost of over $1 million and
designed according to ‘‘the most modern plans,’’ 7 boasted two thousand
electric lights illuminating its giant interior staircases where corpses piled
as much as ten feet high as surging crowds struggled to flee the flames.
The panicky flight of the audience, the theater’s owners had more than
reason to believe, was at least as fatal as the fire itself.
‘‘The panic is the crudest and simplest example of collective men-
tal life,’’ writes William McDougall in 1920.8 Conceiving of panic as a
form of ‘‘primitive sympathy’’ communicated via emotional contagion
and collective imitation or mimesis, several late-nineteenth- and early-
twentieth-century social theorists view such instances of contagious com-
munication as the very nature of the ‘‘social.’’ 9 ‘‘Suggestion’’ and ‘‘emo-
tional contagion’’ are concepts used to name the elusive force constituting
the sociality of the modern collective, as well as the frenzied spread of
panic. Emile Durkheim, writing in 1912 with the accumulated confidence
of an imperial ethnography, finds the most elementary form of modern
social life in the contagious communicative power of the totemic image.10
Embodying the suggestive, binding power of the very idea of a society,
the totem image is uncovered by this founder of modern sociology as an
original imprint of a specifically social force. Where does this social force
come from? From the energetic traces of effervescent rituals of mimesis
and contagious emotion, explains Durkheim, reading the ethnographic
stories of nineteenth-century gentlemen and ladies observing the lives
of the indigenous Iroquois in the United States.11 What burns in the Iro-
quois theaters, suggest the early messengers of a modern social science,
may be nothing other than the social itself.
What social is that? Is it communicating right now? Are you listen-
ing? Could you stop if you tried? The theater of panic opens out onto the
stage of the social. This book is written in the space of that opening.
Making openings is perhaps the task of any effective theory, and any
affecting theater (with which theory shares an etymological tie in the
Latin thea, the act of seeing). Antonin Artaud, theorist of an experimental
‘‘theater of cruelty’’ in the 1930s, paid relentless attention to the open-

6 history, memory, story

ing ‘‘cut or inscription that makes mise-en-scène of the empty stage in
the first place,’’ in Patricia Clough’s words.12 This cut or opening tear into
the empty stage operates as a kind of ‘‘originary technicity,’’ a technique
for producing (carving, inscribing) an opening, for framing an origin.13
Out of the void of possibilities, an incision toward meaning, toward a
particular mise-en-scène, is made. Every opening of a story, every ges-
ture toward staging an origin, becomes, then, ‘‘a repetition of that which
cannot be repeated: the first cut.’’ 14
Remember as best you can, always, the first cut into this story is re-
peatedly performed in the dark, in a theater I want to call the social, by
something you could call terror.
Once upon a time one April night, a viceroy in eighteenth-century
Sardinia has a terrifying dream of the plague infecting himself and the
whole tiny island. The next day, he refuses to allow a ship to dock in the
harbor, suspecting it carries the deadly contagion. The ship sails on, land-
ing twenty days later in the port of Marseilles, where its arrival coincides
with the worst outbreak of the plague in that city’s history. Artaud dis-
covers this ‘‘astonishing historical fact’’ in the archives of the tiny town
of Cagliari and opens his influential 1938 essay ‘‘The Theater and the
Plague’’ by recounting the strange tale.15 Between the plague and the vice-
roy, Artaud observes, ‘‘a palpable communication, however subtle, was
established.’’ It would be foolish, the theorist argues, to limit our notion
of how disease communicates to ‘‘contagion by simple contact.’’ 16 More
foolish still to fail to create a theater that can become, like the plague that
is profoundly its kin, a site of delirious communication, an epidemic of
fatal meanings and the physical matter of dreams.
Actor, playwright, schizophrenic, surrealist, essayist, and inmate for
nine years in several asylums for the insane, Artaud may seem like an
unlikely supplement to the professionalizing ranks of early-twentieth-
century theorists of panic and the ‘‘suggestible’’ social. But let me suggest
that Artaud’s ‘‘theater of cruelty’’ sought to achieve—through the inten-
sity of ritual and the experimental hieroglyphics of embodied forms—
something on the same order as the conflagration at the Iroquois The-
ater. What modern social science tried to make intelligible, Artaud tried
to make real: the contagion of gesture, the communicative power of a
scream, a mimetic theater of collective seizure and frenzied emotion.

history, memory, story 7

Artaud’s intent was not to start a panic but to experiment through per-
formance with the features of the social—never far from the alchemy of
theater—that collective terror also opens toward. The ‘‘mind’s capacity
for receiving suggestion,’’ which Artaud identifies as one source of the-
ater’s transformative power, is precisely the capacity that modern social
science locates as one source of the social itself.17 One method by which
the social communicates its self. Are you still listening?

psychopower and the social

Power does not bear a constant shape nor redound to a single source.
It does not follow causal—linear or dialectical—routes; it is not
calculable in all of its effects; it does not remain material in
substance.—wendy brown 18

Underneath all reason lies delirium.—gilles deleuze 19

This is a story about panic, and about the techniques developed—in

the entangled fields of social science and psychiatry, the U.S. govern-
ment and the military, the mass media and the transnational drug in-
dustry—to make panicked bodies speak, and to manage what they can
be heard to say. Stretching across the last century of U.S. history, this is
a selective chronicle of the sanctioned communications between a so-
cial ‘‘disorder’’ and that which would govern it in the name of a de-
sired order, in the interests of a more effective administration. Survey re-
search, public opinion polls, laboratory experiments, research on mental
patients, self-tests in popular magazines, atom bomb tests in the desert,
cybernetic models, psychiatric interviews, electric shocks, clinical drug
trials, tv talk shows, computerized diagnostics, and genetic research
compose one partial, compulsive inventory of the arsenal of techniques
aimed at producing potentially useful speech from the tremulous mouth
of terror.
This is a story about what panic has been made to say and how such
historically specific speech has been produced. ‘‘The body is a historical
situation,’’ writes Judith Butler.20 The panicked body’s situated history is
the embodied, wildly beating heart of this book.

8 history, memory, story

 Once upon a time one spring night as I was turning over to sleep I sud-
denly became terrified that I was about to die. I started trembling, and my
heart beat so fast in my chest I was sure it would just stop. The next day at
work I panicked again while sitting in front of the computer, then while
walking down the sunlit street. My life became a strung-together bunch
of attacks of total terror. I didn’t know what to do. I went to a doctor. She
listened to my heart and decided I was okay and should probably take a
vacation. I couldn’t afford to take a vacation. I went to a psychiatrist. She
listened to me talk and decided I probably had something called ‘‘panic
disorder.’’ She wrote me a prescription for a drug called Xanax, which I
thought was quite nice of her, since I couldn’t afford to see a psychiatrist
again. After I took the Xanax, the attacks of panic eased. The pill knew
how to talk to my terror. That pill communicated with my panic while I
remained for some time quite tongue-tied, without story or history for
the situation in which my body seized.
Does terror have its own archive? Is panic indexed in the annals of his-
tory? Are those of us who symptomatically share heart-racing attacks of
floating terror—what ‘‘normality,’’ in a stunning dispossession of its own
fears, will call our ‘‘pathology’’—documented in those densely stocked
shelves? If, as performer Laurie Anderson writes, ‘‘history is stories that
we half-remember, and most of them never even get written down,’’ then
what kind of panic stories could be written out of the selective textual
memories of the archival brain? 21 If the archive is, in Michel Foucault’s
words, the ‘‘law of what can be said,’’ if the archive is an actively present,
productive ‘‘system of . . . enunciability’’ ensuring that what is spoken
today is ‘‘born in accordance with specific regularities,’’ then out of such
closely governed speech what history of panic could possibly be told? 22
Certainly not a history that would try to give panic a true voice but,
rather, a historicized story of the voices given to panic by a knowledge
compelled to make panic truthfully speak. Certainly not a history that
would try to contribute to a science of panic but, instead, a story of the
historical formation of a science that claims knowledge of panic as one
of its significant contributions. The archive, Foucault warns, does not af-
ford the genealogist a confident empirical grasp of real historical objects,
or the positivist pleasures of original discovery. What a genealogy ‘‘really
does,’’ Foucault writes, is ‘‘entertain the claims to attention of local, dis-

history, memory, story 9

continuous, disqualified, illegitimate knowledges against the claims of
a unitary body of theory which would . . . order them in the name of
some true knowledge and some arbitrary idea of what constitutes a sci-
ence and its objects. Genealogies are therefore not positivistic returns to
a more careful or exact form of science. They are precisely anti-sciences.’’
It is not against science in general, its contents or concepts, that geneal-
ogy takes aim, but rather against the social power accruing to science at
a particular historical moment: ‘‘It is really against the effects of a power
of discourse that is considered to be scientific that the genealogy must wage
its struggle.’’ 23
So this is a story about panic, and also about knowledge and power.
Here the social sciences are important not only in informing the meth-
ods used to compose such a story but also as players in the story itself,
active historical participants in the social theater that they claim as their
site of research. Doubling as both a method and an object of my study,
sociology is not a simple hero in this story, enabling a sick woman to
locate her panicky symptoms in a broader context of social and historical
relations. Rather, sociology, social psychology, psychiatry, and psycho-
pharmacology are treated as historically specific social fields where panic
is made into an object of knowledge by scientific discourses and disci-
plined subjects that partially construct the very object they promise to
explain and control. Both subjects and objects of knowledge—sociology
and its panicky populations, psychiatry and its terrified patients, psycho-
pharmacology and its centrally nervous systems—are situated in shift-
ing historical networks of power. What you know and don’t know about
panic is one of power’s networked effects.
Thirty-five years after the Iroquois Theater burns, the social is again
set on fire, this time by a 1938 cbs radio drama of The War of the Worlds,
starring Martians outfitted with high-tech death rays aimed at thousands
of startled inhabitants of the state of New Jersey. Hadley Cantril’s now-
famous 1940 study of the ‘‘panic broadcast’’ is sponsored by the Rocke-
feller Foundation and the Federal Radio Education Committee; Cantril’s
empirical measure of ‘‘suggestibility’’ is made possible by new techniques
of survey research incubated in the belly of the radio broadcast indus-
try.24 Power operates the channels of transmission for what you hear and
don’t hear when terror talks.

10 history, memory, story

 In 1980, three decades after the U.S. government opens a new National
Institute of Mental Health and declares the management of mental dis-
ease a public health priority, ‘‘panic disorder’’ emerges as a new psychi-
atric diagnosis.25 Defined by floating attacks of terror that occur with-
out any apparent cause, panic disorder is estimated to afflict millions of
people in the United States. In 1982 a drug called Xanax, manufactured by
the Upjohn Company, appears on the market, quickly becoming a best-
selling treatment for panic attacks and anxiety. Even when the panicky
body is your own, the experience of such a dis-ease never falls entirely
outside the storied histories of power’s play, of power’s insistent produc-
tion of panic knowledge.
‘‘Biopower’’ is the name Michel Foucault gives to the coupling of the
power of the modern state with the planned administration of the life,
health, and diseases of individuals and entire populations. Foucault’s
earliest intimations of biopower can be found in The Birth of the Clinic: An
Archaeology of Medical Perception (1963), where he narrates the conver-
gence of social and medical space architectured by the late-eighteenth-
century French state, partly in response to the political demand to control
contagious epidemics, most dramatically the plague.26 Located simulta-
neously at multiple levels of social organization—including economic
relations, state surveillance strategies, and knowledge practices in medi-
cine and the social sciences—the appearance of biopower for Foucault
marks the very ‘‘threshold of modernity.’’ For the first time, ‘‘methods of
power and knowledge assumed responsibility for the life processes and
undertook to control and modify them,’’ bringing human health and dis-
ease into ‘‘the realm of explicit calculations.’’ The result is the historical
emergence of a ‘‘normalizing’’ society.27
‘‘Psychopower’’ is the name I would offer for technologies of power
and techniques of knowledge developed by a normalizing society to
regulate the psychological life, health, and disorders of individuals and
entire populations. In part conceptual kin and strategic ally of mod-
ern biopower, psychopower operates through psychological monitor-
ing, measurement, and discipline, administering order in the unruly
psychic realms of perception, emotion, and memory. As Nikolas Rose ob-
serves, the twentieth-century ‘‘ ‘psycho’ knowledges,’’ organized around
the psychological ‘‘discipline of the normal individual,’’ play an increas-

history, memory, story 11