Yeats, symphrenia and the centre that cannot hold
Helen Edgar, October 2026
Content note: brief mention of psychosis, psychiatric labelling and eugenics.
Key words
Autistic rhizome: Autistic community imagined as a rhizome, a root system with no centre that spreads in every direction, where any point can connect to any other (Gray-Hammond & Edgar, inspired by Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).
Ethodiverse: from ethodiversity, short for “ethological diversity”. The natural variation in behavioural and existential styles within and across species, in human and non-human animals alike. It includes neurodiversity but reaches beyond the brain and beyond the human (Tarragnat, 2025).
Existential diversity: the idea that people differ in how they experience existence itself, and that these differences are natural variation, not distance from a “normal” centre (Gray-Hammond & Edgar, forthcoming).
Mycelial network of care: care modelled on fungal mycelium, the underground threads that connect plants and share resources between them (Sheldrake, 2020 & Edgar, 2026a). Support that flows through many connections rather than from one central source.
Monotropism: a theory of attention in which attention pools into fewer channels at a time and runs deep and intense in them, rather than spreading thinly across many (Murray et al., 2005).
Neuronormative: treating one typical way of thinking, perceiving and relating as the standard everyone is measured against (Walker, 2021).
Symphrenia: “connected bodymind”. A way of experiencing the world in which connections are felt with unusual monotropic depth and intensity, sometimes more than a person can hold. Symphrenic is an identity people can only choose for themselves (Gray-Hammond & Edgar, 2026).
W. B. Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in January 1919, as the world seemed to be falling apart: the First World War was barely over, revolution was sweeping Russia, Ireland was edging towards war, and his wife, George, was pregnant and seriously ill with influenza. The poem draws on his theory of “gyres”, spirals of history turning in two-thousand-year cycles, and imagines one age ending as a “rough beast” slouches towards Bethlehem (Yeats, 1920/1989).
For Yeats, a centre that cannot hold means catastrophe: order fails and “mere anarchy” follows. I want to read the line against that grain, through my own personal experience of burnout and madness.
The widening gyre
The poem begins: Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer. Yeats hears loss of control, I feel something familiar connected to my mental health. Symphrenia describes perception that spirals outward, taking in connections others do not perceive, sometimes more than a person can hold (Gray-Hammond & Edgar, 2026). From the centre, a falcon that far out looks lost, but it is still flying, listening to the wind, to other birds, to currents the falconer cannot feel. So I wonder: who is the falconer? Why should the falcon only ever hear one voice, and why should the human voice be the one that matters?
Whose centre?
In mental health spaces in our society, the centre defaults to neuronormative expectations: which connections count as reasonable, and whose accounts are believed. Fricker (2007) calls the lack of shared language to make your own experience intelligible hermeneutical injustice. Existential diversity, a concept David Gray-Hammond and I are exploring in our Wider Existence series, treats differences in how people experience existence as ethodiverse variation rather than distance from a fixed point (Gray-Hammond & Edgar, forthcoming; Tarragnat, 2025). Read this way, a centre that cannot hold is not only collapse, a centre too narrow for the range of human and non-human existence is always going to give way, we need a wider way of existing together.
Who gets pushed to the edges and liminal spaces is not random it is governed by power and privelege. Yeats spent decades seeking connections beyond the visible: séances, symbols, a Spiritus Mundi of shared images, a cosmology built from automatic writing. As a celebrated Protestant Anglo-Irish man, he was read as a visionary. Similar experiences, described by a poor woman, a colonised person, or a Black man in a mid-century American psychiatric ward, were far more likely to be read as symptoms (Crenshaw, 1989; Metzl, 2009). I cannot call Yeats symphrenic; only a person can claim that for themselves, but his poem shows how much depends on who is speaking, who is believed, and why and intersectionality and social privilege shapes all of this especially maybe in Western developed countries.
Perhaps as a way to control the ever-widening gyre, Yeats’s fear of disorder later drew him towards authoritarian politics and eugenic ideas (Yeats, 1939). It may have been a longing for the centre to hold him, to accept him. He longed for a society to control whoever does not fit it, which could arguably have included people like himself.
The rough beast
When the centre gives way inside me, the ground seems to fall away, literally fall, like I am spiralling down beyond the human world. It often feels as though I can’t quite hold on and reality is slipping away yet I am always some how held on by a few threads enabling me to work and function like this in some capacity. Unlike David, I have never had a full on psychotic episode, yet I am always feeling between worlds, seeing, hearing and perceiving things others say are not real or that I am just imagining. I have had to find new ways of grounding and regulating. For me, what helps has never been a firmer centre. It has not been the neuronormative route of social skills programmes, or learning to reason my thoughts and visions and voices away. Some people find those approaches helpful, and that is their choice to make, but my thoughts and visions don’t go away, they are a part of me and they also bring me joy and creative ways of being that I love.
So I am learning to lean in. I now centre myself in a community with no centre, what David and I call the Autistic rhizome (2025). It is an ever-shifting space of kinship, rest and sensory safety. It holds people who can embrace chaotic, Mad, symphrenic ways of being without judging, stigmatising or trying to change us, while still supporting the hard reality of living this way.
Perhaps Yeats’s rough beast is not the monster after all, perhaps it is what a centre calls monstrous when it meets something it cannot hold. We do not need the centre to hold. We need something that holds without one: a rhizomatic web, a mycelial network of care rather than a wheel.
References
Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139–167.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.
Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford University Press.
Edgar, H. (2026a, February 22). The Autistic rhizome: Community, liminal spaces and belonging. Autistic Realms. https://autisticrealms.com/the-autistic-rhizome-community-liminal-spaces-belonging/
Edgar, H. (2026b, March 15). Expanding the mycelial network of care: Autistic community, safety, and rhizomatic futures. More Realms. https://morerealms.com/expanding-the-mycelial-network-of-care-autistic-community-safety-and-rhizomatic-futures/
Gray-Hammond, D., & Edgar, H. (2026, October 7). Symphrenia. The Wider Existence. https://www.thewiderexistence.co.uk/p/symphrenia
Gray-Hammond, D., & Edgar, H. (forthcoming). Existential diversity.
Gray-Hammond, D. (2025, June 29). The Autistic rhizome: Reclaiming knowledge, rewriting reality. https://www.davidgrayhammond.co.uk/p/the-autistic-rhizome-reclaiming-knowledge
Metzl, J. M. (2009). The protest psychosis: How schizophrenia became a Black disease. Beacon Press.
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398
Sheldrake, M. (2020). Entangled life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures. The Bodley Head.
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies. Autonomous Press.
Yeats, W. B. (1939). On the boiler. Cuala Press.
Yeats, W. B. (1989). The second coming. In R. J. Finneran (Ed.), The collected poems of W. B. Yeats. Macmillan. (Original work published 1920)
Find out more:
Read more at The Wider Existence
This post is part of an ongoing exploration of symphrenia and existential diversity with David Gray-Hammond. To read our first essay, Symphrenia, and follow the series as it grows, visit The Wider Existence: https://www.thewiderexistence.co.uk/. If something here speaks to you, or misses something important, we would be glad to hear from you there.