Stanford University professor David Rosenhan and some of his students decided to see what would happen if they feigned hearing voices to gain admission to hospital, but then behaved completely normally once they were inside.
http://www.bonkersinstitute.org/rosenhan.html
Their ordinary behaviour was interpreted as schizophrenic in all but one case. Note taking was described by staff as, ‘engaging in writing behaviour.’
”Given that the patient is in the hospital, he must be psychologically disturbed. And given that he is disturbed, continuous writing must be behavioral manifestation of that disturbance, perhaps a subset of the compulsive behaviors that are sometimes correlated with schizophrenia.” D. Rosenhan.
All the students were compelled to admit that they had mental illnesses and take antipsychotic drugs as a condition of their release.
Once the cat was out of the bag, one peeved hospital administration challenged Rosenhan to send them more pseudopatients which they would then detect and unmask, so to speak.
Rosenhan agreed.
Over the next weeks the hospital identified 20% of their admissions as Rosenhan ‘fakes’…..
but Rosenhan had sent no-one there…..
booyakasha….!
Our ‘guilty until proven innocent’, model of sanity, is rooted in Freud’s Drive Conflict theory, the jewel in the crown of Western Civilisation’s war of attrition against the Principle of Relatedness.
Drive Conflict theory eroded the significance of Mother, and common sense, to such a point that the quality of interaction with baby now became a factor that was secondary to the child’s inherent constitution.
cut to the chase, mon.
People no longer affect one another. You hurt yourself because you are weak and stupid. As for Mother…
DON’T SPEAK HER NAME…
We will no longer speak Her name. In fact we will refer only to her ‘object-relations’.
Mother doesn’t get front billing in early life… just a part of her, nor will she play much part,
or have any responsibility for how screwed up you are.
and that is the official theory, mon.
”..it was regarded as almost outside the proper interest of an analyst to give systematic attention to a person’s real experiences.” J Bowlby.
What this means for’ mad’ and ‘sane’ alike is that there is no legitimate suffering in life. Psychoanalysis’ central theory places itself outside the vales of sympathy and compassion required to heal grief, trauma and tragedy. To heal, the wound must first be given legitimacy, and second, meaning.
”My argument with psychoanalysis is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, when in fact, possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people’s suffering.” Arthur Miller.
There is a line in Sophocles’, ‘Oedipus Rex’, sung by the chorus and therefore almost certainly the philosopher’s own personal perspective on life..
”Life becomes death longing, if all longing else be vain”. Sophocles.
It means that life is not worth living for its own sake. Freud said that the purpose of his method was to return people to ordinary misery. Ordinary misery is not enough. There has to be involvement in life beyond individual gain and measure for it to be meaningful. There has to be connectedness with one another and meaning afforded to legitimate suffering.
Not to have this is worse than death.
The Divine Feminine is the keeper of such truths.
Without sufficient representation of Her in our lives we need a host of back up theories about the inevitablity of our isolation and how it is somehow intrinsic to experience. In fact it is a collective mallaise caused by the devaluation of the Goddess.
..and produces what Masud Khan calls ‘symbiotic omnipotence,” a mood of inertia, helpless dependence, and emotional manipulation in people….
”whose outward lives looked okay but who were empty inside.” Dale Mathers.
Here’s how it works…
The depleted mother tries to compensate for the absence of a sacred vessel for motherhood by idolising the child.
actively discouraging..
”the perception of others as valuable or nourishing, through subtle collusion and indulgences”. M. Khan
and keeping it from the real world.
She hides her sacred heart in her child. The child gets to be ‘special’, but carry’s this great burden of archetypal expectation, almost as a redeemer….. expected to do miracles… but denigrated like a demon when it all goes wrong…
”such a maternal relationship leads to dissociations…” M. Kahn.
The child can’t integrate his own personality. He’s been inappropriatley seduced into propping up something that is not his task to shoulder. His specialness is in exchange for mother’s use of him as a repository for all the archetypal material she’s been schooled to disown from her own soul. In the process he gets turned into a kind of golden idol..
”that we can then worship and adore so we have the illusion that everything is wonderful but actually have no real contact at all..” D. Mathers.
it’s a horribly split reality that leads to all kinds of superior, narcissistic behaviour and feelings of pathological entitlement on the one hand and worthlessness on the other.
The scary thing is that Yahweh’s Covenant with his people ticks all the boxes for Symbiotic Omnipotence.
Exclusive attachment,
THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS BUT ME..
active discouragement of other influences,
THOU SHALT NOT MAKE IDOLS
shared specialness,
THOU SHALT BE AS A BRIDE UNTO ME
poor communication,
BURN THEM ALL,
”failure to integrate aggression,” M. Kahn
BURN THEM ALL.
and prohibitive harmony…
BURN THEM ALL.
Kahn’s prognosis is poor…
”with maturity they became even more isolated, suffering a pervasive mood of diffuse anxiousness and apprehension.” Kahn
being special is a con.
”Always remember that you are absolutely unique, just like everyone else.” Margaret Mead.
The healing here is not particularly in any moral outrage that one might have in what being special pans out to be but in the longing and incompleteness at back of it all…
because that longing and incompleteness is another way of talking about love.
which is why longing has such great power in it.
