A Summary and Analysis of J. G. Ballard’s ‘The Insane Ones’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Insane Ones’ is a 1962 short story by the British author J. G. Ballard (1930-2009). The story concerns a world in which the various nations have been combined under one totalitarian government known as the United World (UW).

Psychiatry has been outlawed, and people with mental health problems are ‘free’ to live as they wish, with the law punishing them for any crimes or transgressions they commit.

‘The Insane Ones’: plot summary

The story takes place in a world in which legislation surrounding ‘Mental Freedom’ has been passed, outlawing the psychiatric treatment of people with mental illnesses. The mentally ill are allowed to go about their lives freely, on condition that they face the consequences for any crimes they commit.

The protagonist of the story, a psychiatrist named Dr Charles Gregory, is driving along the coast of North Africa, having served a three-year prison sentence for illegally practising psychiatry in France. When he treated a girl who turns out to be the daughter of the President-General of the ‘UW’ (short for ‘United World’, a kind of vast multinational bloc), and she died following a raid on the illegal clinic, he was put on trial and sentenced to three years in jail.

He picks up a hitchhiker, a young girl travelling across the same part of Africa, and she recognises him as the disgraced psychiatrist. She asks him to help her friend (although in reality she is probably asking him for help for herself), but he declines, mindful of how much trouble he got into last time he helped a patient. The two of them stay in the same motel, in separate rooms, before planning to resume their journey the next day.

The next morning, Gregory wakes to discover that the girl, whose name is Carole Sturgeon, has cut her throat in her room during the night. Gregory learns from the police that Sturgeon was the daughter of an important official at the Cairo Embassy, and that she’d escaped from the American Hospital.

As Gregory drives off, he curses Bortman, one of the oligarchs responsible for the Mental Freedom laws, blaming him for the death of Carole Sturgeon. Gregory had found himself in a dilemma, wanting to help someone desperately in need of his professional help, but forbidden to do so by the law.

When he gets to Algiers, Gregory goes and seeks his old colleague Philip Kalundborg, who tells him how bad things have become in the United States since the new legislation was passed. People regularly throw themselves off buildings, and the whole of the world is turning into a ‘madhouse’. By contrast, in North Africa a less tolerant attitude is still taken towards the insane: people with schizophrenia are blinded and put on display in cages.

While the two men are talking, a young man named Christian approaches Kalundborg, seeking his help. Kalundborg refuses. When Gregory gets back to his room, he finds Christian rifling through his possessions, and Christian tells him that Bortman had Christian’s father struck off as a lawyer. Christian’s father subsequently took his own life, and Christian wants to kill Bortman as retribution.

When Christian tries to throw himself out of the window, Gregory catches him and clings onto him, dragging him back into the room. Christian laughs and tells Gregory that he’ll be in trouble with the police if they find out he intervened to stop a man ending his own life. Christian gives Gregory another dilemma: if he helps him to forget his obsession over killing Bortman, he’ll be breaking the law by ‘curing’ a psychiatric patient. But if he doesn’t agree to help him, he may be implicit in any attack on Bortman’s life which Christian carries out.

For two months, Gregory analyses Christian and cures him of his obsession with Bortman. Christian then agrees to return to the States, with Gregory staying on in Africa. But as he is preparing to leave, Christian tells Gregory that, now he is sane again, he realises he must kill Bortman and strike a blow against the system. Gregory is left helplessly calling after the young man, knowing that the murder of Bortman will be pinned on him, the evil psychiatrist.

‘The Insane Ones’: analysis

Although J. G. Ballard disliked the term dystopian as a descriptive label for his work, a number of his early short stories, such as ‘The Watch-Towers’ and ‘The Insane Ones’, are concerned with totalitarianism and surveillance in a way that is loosely ‘Orwellian’, without being overly indebted to Orwell’s model.

‘The Insane Ones’ is a good example of how Ballard writes well about totalitarianism, partly because his forays into this subgenre of dystopian fiction are always ambiguous and (one strongly suspects) satirical as much as serious. Of course, satire can be serious too, but one of the most delightful aspects of this Ballard story is that the premise teeters on the edge of black comedy.

After all, a world in which pesky psychiatrists have been prohibited from treating or curing people who are insane sounds like an awful idea. But then to sell this notion to the insane – and to the broader society – as a kind of perverse ‘freedom’ makes the premise laughable and absurd (if not absurdist).

Of course, it’s meant to be so. Ballard is exploring the ‘mad’ idea of giving mentally unstable people the freedom to act out their darkest and wildest wishes, as long as they accept the consequences of their actions. So this is not freedom at all, any more than it would be freedom-granting to say to a sane member of society, ‘You can go and do whatever you want, including breaking the law, if you wish. But if you do break the law, you’ll have to face justice for your actions.’

What the ‘insane ones’ of Ballard’s story have been given, then, is an illusory freedom, a freedom from psychiatric treatment and analysis. But why should the totalitarian authorities – represented by the shady and sinister figure of Borkman in Ballard’s story – want to attack the psychological sciences?

Ballard tells us early on in ‘The Insane Ones’, when his third-person narrator is explaining the ‘Mental Freedom’ legislation to us. The attack on psychiatry began as a backlash against those subliminal psychological techniques advertisers had used on society in order to manipulate them. Indeed, Ballard wrote a brilliant short story, ‘The Subliminal Man’, all about this kind of unconscious mass-conditioning of society.

The psychiatrists, then, are seen as part of the same untrustworthy cabal of psychological wizards using their new techniques to control and programme ordinary people. The fact that the forcible removal of psychiatrists from society will lead to more murder, suicide, and violence doesn’t matter to the people behind the United World government: at least this way, they are in control, rather than the mysterious mind-manipulators.