The Quadruplets Research Committee that Rosenthal oversaw included psychologists, psychoanalysts, social workers, sociologists and a geneticist. Gathering up the committee’s disparate findings, Rosenthal published “The Genain Quadruplets: A Case Study and Theoretical Analysis of Heredity and Environment in Schizophrenia” in 1963, when psychiatry itself was at a crossroads, and President Kennedy had called for the replacement of state hospitals with community care.
That hopeful policy’s ill-fated implementation reflected the divided nature of a discipline torn between the narrow specificity of emerging brain science and American psychoanalysts unencumbered by empirical evidence, who attributed schizophrenia to “double-binding” mothers and pathogenic social structurers crying out for systemic remedies.
The researchers considered both of the sisters’ parents to be mentally ill, though Carl, who persuaded his wife to marry him by threatening suicide, and bit her cheek with savage violence the first time they had sex, was far more unstable. He was also deeply paranoid, like his own, possibly schizophrenic mother, who had tried to abort him the day he was born, and who expressed the opinion that it would be best if the quadruplets died.
The violence and dysfunction Farley describes is gothically sordid, painful to read about and entirely believable. Abused by their irrational father — who had banged their heads together when they were babies, and squeezed their breasts to see how they would react on dates as they grew — and tormented by their own burgeoning delusions, they had all been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and several had been hospitalized, by the time they were in their early 20s, and invited into N.I.M.H.’s clinic.
But as the fairy-tale title suggests, “Girls and Their Monsters” is more concerned with the mythic and metaphorical than the medical. Farley’s subtitle replaces schizophrenia, heredity and environment with “the Making of Modern Madness,” evoking Thomas Szasz’ “The Manufacture of Madness,” which likened psychiatry to the Spanish Inquisition, and Michel Foucault’s theory of mental illness as a socially constructed tool of state power.