The Patient

Through her madness, Lara understood that the reason her former self had to be abandoned was because it was ignorant of the true meaning of living:
‘ . . I have concerned myself with externals only, and have missed all the meanings of the great inner significance . . . I became mad - not because of some inner deformity - but because of too close supervision and trying-trying to force the thing I was into an unnatural mould.’

The "second self" that had been created in the madness now suggested to Lara that: the best weapon with which to fight fire-is fire. And she suggests fighting madness with madness. Perhaps she is not so insane as I think - perhaps she is saner than I was before she came to me. She presents her idea with so much logic she makes me think that instead of losing reason in madness - and finding insanity on the other side - that, in reality, l will lose insanity in madness - and find a sound mind on the other side. The consequences of this decision were that:
‘…. I cannot escape from the Madness by the door l came in, that is certain . . . I cannot go back - I shall have to go onwards-even though the path leads to "Three Building"- where the hopeless incurables walk and wait and wait for the death of their bodies.
I cannot escape it- I cannot face it - how can I endure it.’

‘And once the great Madness in me found a voice, there was no stopping it. It rolled out in such tumult I was amazed at it myself; wondered where it all came from.
It seemed obscene and terrible that I should answer in adult language, things said to me in my childhood. Things I had forgotten, until they again began to pour about me in a flood of bitter memories. Even incidents I remembered clearly came back so warped and twisted they seemed like evil changelings . . . I felt so much better that I had at last found the courage to look and see things as they were not camouflaging them in the rosy light of a meaning they did not have that I wanted to shout and sing.
That voice was reason making a last desperate stand-but it was just a shadow and had no power to check the things I was feeling. Still it held me silent for a few short minutes and forced me to consider the thing I knew was happening to me . . .But not for long:

All my human fear of pain and death and loss of reason was drowned in wild exultation . . . So the last connected and coherent thing in my thinking gave way-and the Madness filling me rejoiced. Because at last there was nothing to stay it, it shouted and exulted with a noise that tore my throat out, charging through me till it nearly dragged the life out of me.
Part of my mind stood there and took in the whole situation, yet could know nothing about it. The thing that was raging did not seem wrong to me then-but the rightest thing in the world-a magnificent accomplishment .’

The nurses came in at this point, transferred Lara to solitary confinement, and placed her into a new strait-jacket, extra-strong, and strapped her to the bed rail. However, the flow continued unabated. Lara began to hallucinate and this continued for at least a day. Then, despite the tight binding of the jacket, she felt a sense of liberation and experienced her arms as free.
By the morning of the third day, Lara was far away in the heights of ecstasy and she began to emerge from the Madness.
‘ By the morning of the fourth day I had settled down into something of the person I still am to this day . . . The fifth morning they took me out of the jacket. I had been wringing wet with perspiration most of the time during those five days and nights and the odor which assailed me when that jacket was loosened, was asphyxiating. Truly, something had died, and was decomposing! There was a timbre to the odour of that perspiration which was totally unfamiliar. Even the sweat glands had become a voice in that conflict.
My hands were filled with a heavy glutinous substance. Every nerve and fibre in my whole body registered the effect of what I had been through. My whole chemistry was changed. Truly I was a different person.’