Seni's Question: "What Is Happening to Me?"

 

Seni Lewis shouted into the void at Croydon’s Mayday Hospital, late August 2010: “What is happening to me?” With a little knowledge of the structure of the unconscious and the way our minds work, someone could have stepped into the breach and helped him to answer his own question. 

When I was working at a Royal Free adult psychiatric ward, I met a woman, let’s call her Sara, who told me that she had heard voices for almost all her life, but thought everyone else did too, so she was never afraid of them. Another might add that as soon as you tell a doctor that you hear voices, you will find yourself bundled off to the madhouse. I think this may have been why Sara was on the ward – she had told her GP that she heard voices. 

It seems clear that what Seni was experiencing was a good deal more frightening than what Sara was talking about, and we don’t know if he was hearing voices. But there are two aspects to what Sara said that might be useful. “I thought everyone could hear voices.” Yes, I think she is right: everybody can. For many people, most of the time, the voices are experienced as something that only they can hear even if they might experience them as strange. It is a point of major revelation in a small child’s life to discover that their thoughts cannot be detected by their parents (even if sometimes the parent seems uncannily close to guessing correctly!). 

But sometimes something happens and somebody can have the experience that a word has been uttered that has something to do with them. This is the subject discussed in Lacan’s Écrit, “On a Question Prior to any Possible Treatment of Psychosis” (1958) and is an important cornerstone of his ideas about the structure of the human mind. 

One example: when I was riding behind someone who was using a crop to drive the horse forward, the rider suddenly turned around and said she could hear me criticising her for hitting her horse. She modified it to say that she could hear my thoughts, which is equally mad when you stop to think about it. It was her own thoughts she could hear coming back at her as she struck her horse. Whence the idiom: “When you strike at another, you are striking yourself.” 

Sometimes the voice is so real that people try to locate it somewhere that makes a bit more sense: e.g., as coming from the television, or from a transmitter that has been implanted somewhere – perhaps behind a picture, or sometimes inside their own ear. Sometimes the voice is silent, and the message must be deduced: a red car has driven past, which means… Or the headlines of the daily newspaper must have a message for me encoded within them. 

It is possible that Seni was hearing a voice, perhaps in the form of a command. Someone might have been able to offer Seni an ear so that he could tell them something about what he was experiencing. A report published by the Royal College of Nursing suggests that there were one or two policemen who had managed to put themselves to use in this way. Their interaction with Seni seemed to have had a short-term pacifying effect. But it is not uncommon, even among those working in psychiatric settings, to then go on to undo the good they have done by negating what they had been told (“No, there’s no voice”). This usually makes things worse. 

In the wonderful documentary set in a unique institution that takes in children with mental and social problems – À ciel ouvert (Like an Open Sky, 2013) by Mariana Otero – there is a scene between a carer and a teenage girl making pancakes in the kitchen. Suddenly the teenager shudders and steps back. She says she’s seen an earwig in the pancake batter she is mixing. The carer replies: “What a drag it must be for you to see that, I can’t see it.” I was impressed by this. The carer manages to reduce the girl’s fear, to bring things back to normal, but without denying the real nature of what the teenager is dealing with.

References 

Kate Israel and Stuart Duggan, “Seni’s Law: Preventing Deaths from Restraint in Mental Health Settings,” Royal College of Nursing report, 2025.

Jacques Lacan, “On a Question Prior to any Possible Treatment of Psychosis” (1958), Écrits: The First Compete Edition in English, transl. Bruce Fink, London & New York, Norton, 2006. 

Mariana Otero (director), À ciel ouvert (Like an Open Sky), 2013 (film). 

Mariana Otero, and Marie Brémond, À ciel ouvert entretiens, le Courtil, l’invention au quotidien, Buddy Movies 2013 (book to accompany the film).