A Workable Picture of Reality - Mentalization, Unreliability and Psychiatry in the Fiction of Patrick McGrath

Patrick McGrath (1950) was born and raised in England. As a child, he lived on the grounds of Broadmoor Hospital, an institution for the criminally insane, as the son of the residing Medical Superintendent. He now lives mainly in New York.

Most literary criticism hails McGrath as a Gothic – or even a New Gothic – writer and enumerates a whole list of intertextual links to Gothic texts. McGrath’s own attitude towards that stamp has always been ambivalent. On the one hand, he supported it by editing a corpus of short stories entitled The New Gothic, but on the other hand, he has often indicated that he dislikes being labelled.

This dissertation suggests that McGrath’s main focus is psychiatry, but that he deliberately borrows ‘props’ from the Gothic genre in order to emphasize the horror that is apparent in the narrators’ minds.

In consequence, this dissertation focuses on the psychiatric aspects of his writing. It describes the various mental disorders that McGrath ascribes to his protagonists (e.g. schizophrenia, narcissism, antisocial personality disorder, etc.) and identifies more likely intertext such as Freud’s case studies or R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self. It furthermore investigates whether the narrative unreliability, which is a typical trademark of McGrath’s homodiegetic narrators, can be related to the psychological concepts of mentalization and attachment.

A homodiegetic narrator is a narrator who not only narrates the story, but also functions as a character in that story. He/she is considered unreliable when his/her story for various reasons cannot be relied upon. Rhetorical theory on narrative unreliability was developed by Wayne Booth when he explained unreliability as an ironical distance between implied author and narrator. From a cognitive perspective, Ansgar Nünning later adjusted the focus of research on unreliability towards the reader, while he at the same time put into doubt the notion of the implied author. This dissertation employs both theories – and when relevant theory by Phelan, Martin, Hof, Riggan, etc. – to describe McGrath’s unreliable narrators

Attachment theory was described in the late fifties by John Bowlby. He postulated that attachment patterns are formed in early childhood in a relationship with caregivers. The infant is in need of a secure adult attachment figure in order to develop emotionally and socially. Attachment theory should be understood within an evolutionary context since the caregiver – be maintaining proximity – offers the child safety and security against a number of dangers. Ainsworth, and later Main, described several attachment styles (secure, anxious, avoidant, disorganized). Subsequently, Mikulincer and Shaver linked these attachment styles to adult romantic relationships by Mikulincer and Shaver. These attachment patterns can furthermore be recognized in McGrath’s narrators, who most often display an anxious attachment style, which is characterized by, for instance, a desire for protection and proximity.

Mentalizing is the “imaginative mental activity that enables us to perceive and interpret human behavior in terms of intentional mental states (e.g., needs, desires, feelings, beliefs, goals, purposes, and reasons)” (Fonagy et al. 2012 5). In their research, Fonagy, Luyten and colleagues describe how the capacity to mentalize is to a large extent determined by attachment experiences, as the capacity for mentalizing typically first originates in early childhood, and crucially depends on the extent to which the caregiver is able to think about the child as an intentional being, a person with his/her own thoughts, feelings and intentions. A disrupted attachment in childhood (abuse, neglect, etc.) might hamper the development of the capacity for mentalizing.

This dissertation concentrates on how McGrath’s narrators display several kinds of impairments in the capacity to mentalize, how these impairments – in line with contemporary attachment theory and theory on mentalization – are linked to the narrators’ attachment style and mental disorder, and how this influences their narrative reliability. This dissertation also points out that McGrath employed a variety of metaphors that emphasize the nature of the narrators’ mental disorders, his/her specific mentalizing impairment or attachment issue.