Later that same year, before an audience at Fordham University in New York City, Jung spoke out against Freud in public, specifically blasting his interpretation of the Schreber case. Schizophrenia, he declared, “cannot be explained solely by the loss of erotic interest.” Jung knew that Freud would consider this to be heresy. “He went terribly wrong,” Jung later reflected, “because he simply doesn’t know the spirit of schizophrenia.”
The great break between Freud and Jung took place largely over the issue of the nature of madness itself. Early psychoanalysis’s greatest partnership was over. But the argument over the origins and nature of schizophrenia was only just beginning.
* * *
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A CENTURY LATER, across the world, schizophrenia affects an estimated one in one hundred people—or more than three million people in America, and 82 million people worldwide. By one measure, those diagnosed take up a third of all the psychiatric hospital beds in the United States. By another, about 40 percent of adults with the condition go untreated entirely in any given year. One out of every twenty cases of schizophrenia ends in suicide.
Academia is filled with hundreds of papers about Schreber now, each venturing far from Freud and Jung with their own takes on the patient and the illness that tormented him. Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst and godfather of post-structuralism, said that Schreber’s problems sprang from his frustration with somehow not being able to be the phallus that his own mother lacked. By the 1970s, Michel Foucault, the French social theorist and countercultural icon, held up Schreber as a sort of martyr, a victim of social forces working to crush the individual spirit. Even today, Schreber’s memoir continues to be the perfect blank canvas, and Schreber himself is the ideal psychiatric patient: one who cannot talk back. Meanwhile, the central argument about schizophrenia raised by the Schreber case—nature or nurture?—has been baked into our perception of the disease.
This is the argument the Galvins were born into. By the time the Galvin boys came of age, the field was splitting open and dividing and subdividing almost like a cell. Some said the problem was biochemical, others neurological, others genetic, still others environmental or viral or bacterial. “Schizophrenia is a disease of theories,” the Toronto-based psychiatric historian Edward Shorter has said—and the twentieth century produced easily hundreds of them. All the while, the truth about what schizophrenia was—what caused it, and what might alleviate it—has remained locked away, inside the people with the condition.
Researchers seeking a biological key to schizophrenia have never stopped searching for a subject or an experiment that might settle the nature-nurture question once and for all. But what if there was a whole family of Schrebers—a perfectly self-contained group with a shared genetic legacy? A sample set, with enough incidence of the disease that it seemed clear that something specific and identifiable must be happening inside some or even all of them?
A family like the dozen children of Don and Mimi Galvin?
DON
MIMI
DONALD
JIM
JOHN
BRIAN
MICHAEL
RICHARD
JOE
MARK
MATT
PETER
MARGARET
MARY
CHAPTER 3
In the early years of their marriage, Mimi liked to joke that her husband would come home just long enough to get her pregnant.
Their first boy, Donald Kenyon Galvin, was baptized in September 1945, within a few days of Japan’s surrender. His mother had endured his arrival in the world without incident; Donald’s birth would be the only time Mimi would accept anesthesia for the birth of any of her twelve children. The baby and his mother lived together in a little apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, a peaceful section of New York City near the famous tennis club. Between strolls with the baby, Mimi taught herself to cook. For six months, she was alone with little Donald, listening to news reports from the South Pacific, wondering when her son’s father would make it home.
Don returned just after Christmas, moved in with his family, and spent a few months on temporary duty as a security officer at a shipbuilding facility in Kearny, New Jersey. Then he was gone again, off to Washington for three months to finish his bachelor’s degree at Georgetown. And then, in the summer of 1947, to the Navy’s General Line School in Newport, Rhode Island—just weeks after Mimi gave birth to their second son, Jim. Don took Mimi and the kids with him that time, and again, a year later, to Norfolk, Virginia, where he served first on the USS Adams, and then on the USS Juneau, shuttling between New York and Panama, Trinidad, Puerto Rico, and the rest of the Caribbean—all while Mimi stayed home alone with the boys for weeks at a time.
Mimi had been nursing an entirely different dream of their life after the war. She had envisioned her husband going to law school, like her two uncles and her paternal grandfather, Thomas Lindsey Blayney, whom she adored despite her father’s exile from the family. Mimi wanted to be in New York, where their families were, where their children would grow up with their cousins and aunts and uncles—a childhood like the one that had been ripped away from her when she was forced to move from Texas as a child.
Don had entertained that idea, or he seemed to. But he had dreams, too. He explained in his usual charming way that the Navy was a means to an end for him—that he thought he could get the Navy to sponsor his studies in the law or, better yet, his real passion, political science. This turned out to be a frustrating miscalculation. Despite glowing reviews and hearty recommendations from his commanding officers, he was turned down each time he applied for graduate-level course work. It always seemed that someone with connections, a congressman’s son or a senator’s nephew, got the appointment instead.
Alone in Norfolk, Mimi had to pinch pennies while Don was at sea. The small checks from the Navy, about thirty-five dollars a week, would get lost in the mail, and she would have to rely on her neighbors for groceries and meals. It was a different story when Don was in port. With his Georgetown education, his command of languages, and his interest in international relations, the handsome young lieutenant was making a good impression. Aboard the Juneau, Don wasn’t just the ship secretary; he was the resident chess master, taking on all comers. Between missions, Don was the captain’s regular tennis partner, and he and Mimi socialized with the brass at the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk, where Don became known for fixing Iron Curtains, a potent lowball made with vodka and Jägermeister. Don’s smooth, professorial air impressed a number of admirals and generals—as well as at least one of their wives, who happened to come along as a passenger on one of the Juneau’s trips to Panama.