I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this--I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.
Antonin ArtaudRead
I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the despair experienced in mental health treatment environments and the struggle between the desire for relief and the oppressive nature of therapy.
Antonin Artaud's quote explores the deeply unsettling experience of undergoing psychiatric treatment. Despite his long stay in an asylum, he emphasizes that it was not his suicidal thoughts but the invasive nature of the conversations with psychiatrists that caused him distress. His statement suggests a profound disconnection in the therapeutic relationship, highlighting a struggle against an oppressive system that can exacerbate feelings of despair rather than alleviate them.
Themes
Mental HealthTherapyDespairPsychiatryOppression
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used in a mental health awareness campaign to illustrate the complexities of treatment.
More from Antonin Artaud
All quotes →Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.
Antonin ArtaudRead
If our life lacks a constant magic it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form and meaning, instead of being impelled by their force.
Antonin ArtaudRead
It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.
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A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt . . .
Antonin ArtaudRead
In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it.
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