The Last Asylum: A Memoir Of Madness In Our Times

by Barbara Taylor

(Hamish Hamilton, £18.99)

Barbara Taylor's father fought in the Spanish civil war for the international brigade. Her mother became a judge. Her parents may have "fucked her up" - which according to Philip Larkin is what mums and dads bequeath their offspring - but they also stepped in when things became intolerable and she went mad.

Taylor underwent over 20 years of psychoanalysis until her sanity was eventually restored and she resumed her career as an academic. For a decade her parents paid for her sessions.

The Last Asylum recounts her struggle to bring the fractured parts of her self back to wholeness. It comprises transcripts of her analysis, chapers on psychoanalysis and psychiatry and a brief account of the rise of community care.

If Taylor was in bits before she wrote her book the work itself, as if to reflect this psychic disintegration, is also fragmented.

It is not just about her madness because the historical chapters seek to give a definitive account of insanity, not just a subjective one.

Analyst gives way to memoirist who in turn gives way to historian.

Sometimes this juxtaposition can jar. The book's first part recounts Taylor's descent into "the worst feeling in the world," the crisis that led her to psychoanalysis. After writing Eve And the New Jerusalem, her book on socialism and feminism in the 19th century, she starts to feel anxious, depressed and unable to function. Her housemates can't live with her and even her analyst observes: "You don't want to live with you." Drunk and distressed she is driven to north London's Friern hospital by a friend and quickly admitted.

Straight after this comes a history of the hospital, which at one time was the largest institution of its kind in Europe, followed by a more general history of asylums.

The insane suddenly gives way to the sane, the id to the super-ego. It's as if a distressed woman was interrupted by a scholar giving a conference paper.

This is not to criticise The Last Asylum. The book makes a valuable contribution to "discourse," as Taylor might call it. But I think the historian trumps the memoirist and, in the end, Taylor's illness and her "cure" seem mysterious and inaccessible in ways her historical chapters do not.

I came away from the book respecting the author but not ultimately understanding the processes that led to her recovering her sanity.

John O'Donoghue