Unconditional Positive Regard in Wide Sargasso Sea

What I found most interesting about the novel Wide Sargasso Sea was the question of what sanity is and who is qualified to judge it and how that judgement can affect people, Antoinette specifically. Rhys takes you through the plot in the first two parts of the novel in sequences of developments of the story. In the final part, Antoinette carries you through her dreams and reality in a first person stream of conciousness until the reader is able to forget the author's reality and Antoinette is able to forget her own, or atleast lives it in a dream-like state. This dream like state which Antoinette creates for her self I believe is born from her isolation. Antoinette feels isolated and has trouble defining herself in her isolation.
Antoinette is seen as an "outsider" or "crazy creole woman". Antoinette since early childhood has had little support. Perhaps Christophine, her Aunt Cora, and her cousin really made a significant impact but when she is sent to a convent school by her Aunt Cora I feel as if the security of her sanity comes into question. She has little freedom to explore her thought and I believe it is that moment that foreshadows her future troubles. She is isolated by her own dreams which she is unable to gain support to help her with. From that point on, the real fall occurs. On her movement to England, Antoinette paints England as a cold dark place. Unhappy with her surroundings and unhappy with her situation, anxiety sets in and she becomes more locked into her questioning and isolation and when her husband basically abandons her she is left even more alone. There is one quote I enjoyed that I feel really portrays Antoinette's pure isolation. She thinks to herself in part three, "There is no looking glass here and I don't know what I am like now. I remember watching myself brush my hair and how my eyes looked back at me. The girl I saw was myself yet not quite myself. Long ago when I was a child and very lonely I tried to kiss her. But the glass was between us—hard, cold and misted over with my breath. Now they have taken everything away. What am I doing in this place and who am I?" She is so isolated from the real world and her reality that she loses touch with herself. This was even hard to avoid by her husband even more so categorizing her insanity.
I found the development of this novel very interesting because of the psychology concept of Unconditional Positive Regard. It is a humanistic psychology theory coined by Psychologist Carl Rogers famous for his work in client centered therapy. Rogers asserts that what causes anxiety in people is people not really knowing who they truly are or having completely achieved individuation. He claims that people can not fully break through those anxiety, depression, or insecurity barriers without something called unconditional positive regard, a judgment-free support system, often times a therapist or a friend. Once the client feels completely unpressured to fulfill other's opinions and expectations of them and unjudged they are able to discover their true self. Antoinette doesn't really have that purely unjudgemental relationship present in her life and even worse her husband later categorizes herself as insane. I also found it interesting the impact attending her school could have possibly had on her sanity. I attended a very strict old fashioned catholic highschool so I am aware of the controversy that surrounds strict traditional catholic schooling and the effect on young people's particularly the adolescent's psyche. Many present day psychologists do not believe that it allows for teenagers to define themselves and achieve individuation in a time that psychologist Erik Erikson claims is when universally humans battle Identity vs. Role Confusion and must form their own identity. The theory behind Erikson's Stages of Development is that one cannot move onto the next stage until it has completed the previous. The next step in Erikson's stages happens to be Intimacy and solidarity vs. Isolation. In the novel, Antoinette is never given the opportunity to fully define herself, proven by her time spent infront of the mirror, and when her social structure falls apart she is left in social and self isolation, isolation being a feeling characteristic to anxiety and depression and even abnormal disorders. I believe that if Antoinette had experienced a support system and had not experienced her sequence of events the novel may have had a slightly different ending and her "insanity" was not as genetic as Rochester believed.
Carl Rogers On Becoming A Human: A Client Centered Guide to Therapy can be found here (Chapter 7 is most pertinent): http://books.google.com/books/about/On_becoming_a_person.html?id=0yHBXXhJbKQC