In or around the year 1849, Princess Alexandra Amelie of Bavaria walked down the corridors of her palace slowly and sideways, like a crab, gingerly crossing through doorways as if she was nearly too big to fit through them. Those around her wondered what was afoot.
Alexandra told them there was a problem: she’d swallowed a grand piano made completely of glass as a child and it was still inside her. If she bumped into something, the piano, and thus her body, would shatter.
These days, both experts and internet commentators mostly assume that Alexandra had what we’d now call Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. She’s the inspiration for popular threads on Reddit and Instagram Reels and TikToks, with people both making fun of her and relating to her, comparing their more modern and humdrum fears of contamination or fragility or other supposed symptoms of OCD to her more fantastical ones.
Many people online say her story is proof that while we did not have words for disorders like OCD hundreds of years ago, the same disorders obviously existed, just undiagnosed and dismissed as garden-variety craziness.
Which is crazy. Because, obviously, there is no such thing as OCD. I mean, there is, in the sense that DSM disorders sometimes semi-accurately describe a grouping of symptoms that some people share. But these disorders are real only in the way that we’ve decided to call food with meat and/or cheese and/or vegetables and/or whatever other toppings, as long as it involves bread, a sandwich; a category as made-up as any other, which invites constant confusion as to whether the thing is even definable, hence the raging debate over whether a hot dog is a sandwich.
All DSM diagnoses are hot dogs then—groupings of personality traits and reactions to the world and responses to our traumas and inborn characteristics (the fillings of the sandwich, if you will) that we’ve deemed the same thing for ease of reference, as long as they share something in common (compulsiveness in the case of OCD; the bread, if you will).
But, much like the sandwich question, the diagnosis question often limits us more than expands our understanding of what is in front of us. To obsess over whether a hot dog is a sandwich is to ignore much more interesting questions such as: what the fuck is in that hot dog? Is it good for you or bad for you? Who made it? How did it come to be? Why do we enjoy something so disgusting? Diagnosis can act as a similarly limiting question. To categorize something as OCD or ADHD or whatever else is often to exclude much more interesting frameworks of understanding of the self.
In the case of Princess Alexandra Amelie of Bavaria, saying she had OCD allows us to elide more generative ways of thinking about her beliefs.
In a very good BBC radio story about the princess, psychoanalyst Susie Orbach wonders if what Alexandra was attempting to say through her insistence of having swallowed a piano was that there was something within her that, “could not be heard, that is very fragile, but something that if it could be played would have a lot of notes.”
Perhaps she was afraid of her own sexuality, of taking up space, of not being the feminine and delicate thing that people expected a princess to be. Or Alexandra’s symptoms might be about class—about feeling fragile because you have been removed from society by your wealth, or because you are threatened by the tension brewing outside your window.
“Symptoms are of use, or can be of use,” Orbach says. “They’re creative acts.”
Seeing the “glass delusion” as not simply a symptom of OCD but as a sociopolitical pathway of understanding helps explain why believing you were made of glass was a relatively common phenomenon documented through the 16th and 17th centuries. Several royals professed to be made of glass or other materials common in construction at the time.
As technology transformed, so too did people’s delusions about it. Today the delusional amongst us more often worry about things like surveillance technology—that people and cameras and microphones are watching them wherever they go. Which, of course, they are right about in some sense—we are all constantly being surveilled. It is only in their level of paranoia that we consider them ill.
By diagnosing these people as solely delusional or OCD or schizophrenic, we ignore the more important things their delusions are telling us about panopticon-ificaiton of social life. Instead of acknowledging that their delusions are signifiers of something worth paying attention to, much as Princess Alexandra’s was, we place the structure and problems of society within their own brains, individualizing what is a systemic that all of us should be concerned about.
Which is not to say there is necessarily a wrong way to look at one’s own symptomology. It can be helpful to identify with a DSM diagnosis so that you can find care, or medication, or sympathy, or community. But it is wrong to only look at your symptomology through one “correct” lens. This is how we end up where we are—a world in which we gaslight ourselves into thinking that our collective repression and oppression is actually all within our own individual heads and brain chemistries and thus solvable at the individual level.
If we want not just management of our symptoms but liberation from them, we must understand what our own glass pianos signify. We must place multiple lenses on our issues—individual, collective, systemic—in order to accurately place ourselves within the world, and accurately place the world within us.
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