The Center Cannot Hold Chapter Summary

Elyn R. Saks’ memoir The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness is a book that delves into Saks’ experience with schizophrenia. Saks immediately shoves the reader into her experience from the prologue. In the prologue, Saks recounts a psychotic episode that happened at Yale, where she ran onto the roof while speaking gibberish. Saks ends up missing an assignment and asks for an extension. After receiving an offer from her teacher, she once again goes onto the roof. Later that night, after another episode, Saks is taken to the emergency room where she is strapped down. The prologue is pretty much a flashback compared to the rest of the events of the book. The following chapters are meant to give background to Elyn Saks. From her homelife,

I had a few thoughts on my own regarding the title. In chapter two, following Saks’ experimenting with drugs, she ends up needing to go to rehab. She calls this place “the Center” (Saks, 2007). While reading on throughout this chapter, with the repeated use of the word “center” I had many different thoughts. Maybe “the center” in the book’s title was referring to this “center”, and since she managed to get through rehab, the center didn’t hold her there forever, especially given the strict rules. Maybe “the center” is the reader, since from the very start, I, the reader, was placed in the center of Elyn Saks’ experience with schizophrenia. The former idea maybe isn’t the exact reason, since rehab is only a small part of the book. The latter idea seems a bit more likely, since Saks probably wanted to bring the reader inside her own mind in a way. But I couldn’t think of a potential way to connect that idea to the “cannot hold” portion of the title. But then I realized it was all standing right in front of me. In the first chapter, Saks describes her consciousness as a center. And as “consciousness loses its coherence. One’s center gives way” (Saks, 2007). In other words, the center cannot