Story and the Human Condition

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Friends and Families of Psychiatric Survivors of Wisconsin

Story and the Human Condition

Language and evolution.

But this realm [within], as we know from psychoanalysis, is precisely the infantile unconscious. It is the realm that we enter in sleep. We carry it within ourselves forever. All the ogres and secret helpers of our nursery are there, all the magic of childhood. And, more important, all the life-potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization, those other portions of ourself, are there; for such golden seeds do not die.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

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There are two things that are important about story, when it comes to forced psychiatric "treatment". First, the oppressed are precisely those whose stories cannot be told. Their story cannot be told because then the truth would be known about the oppressor.Slaves had no stories. Women and children didn't, until recently. Jewish Germans had no story under the Third Reich. See the page regarding slavery for more on this topic. Let us ask ourselves whose story we never hear. That way, we may begin to recognize our shadow selves----those who remind us of things we don't want to face about ourselves.We fear these things about ourselves. We repress them and then pretend they don't exist. We pretend they're not a part of us.

But, the more deeply we bury them, the bigger and nastier they become.

We have to choose another person, or another group, onto which to project these most paranoid fantasies. Then, we have to make sure that we never recognize that group's humanity. We have to rigidly control that group. We have to claim that group is "dangerous". Perhaps we really believe the group is dangerous. Or, perhaps, deep down inside, we know it's really ourselves that we fear, and that group just happened to be in the way.

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"It is generally believed that a treatment that is more effective than its alternative will be used, but psychological treatments for schizophrenia and other psychotic reactions have been avoided despite the evidence for their effectiveness from thetime of moral treatment to the present. Less effective, even destructive treatments have been seized upon, in part because they do not require understanding these patients. Understanding schizophrenic persons means facing facts about ourselves, our families, and our society that we do not want to know or to know again (in the case of repressed feelings or experience)." (Bertram Karon,1992)

"Life is much too horrible in its inescapable, unmerited and unjustifiable possibilities of sorrow to be termed 'tragic.' The 'tragic' view is, so to say, only a foreground view, held by people who marvel still, unable to conceive that life is the thing it is. . . .The only appropriate bearing is that of the solemn, ceremonial dance of the Shiva in his madness, with the balanced wing-beats of the rocking arms and hands, and the inexorable pounding of the naked soles, to the rhythm of the tinkling ankle-rings, and therewith the masklike smile."

Joseph Campbell, editor

The King and The Corpse; Tales of the Soul's Conquest of Evil, by Heinrich Zimmer

Dreams

Most readers will have heard [the story :-) ] of that experiment where one group of subjects were deprived of sleep but allowed to dream. The other group was sleeping very much but never dreamt.

Which group fared better?

The dreamers.

What is a dream but a story told to us by our unconscious. The unconscious mind wants to draw our attention to some particular that may have escaped the narrow focus of the conscious.

Although the unconscious is vast, it is also dimly lighted.

A pun suggested by the unconcious.

Both meanings are exactly right.

Let's think of ourselves as being inside of a library at night, when it's closed. Not really a perfect analogy, but . . .

We're holding a flashlight, which illuminates very brightly, but only one thing at a time. We know that there's lots of other stuff all around us.

Books, magazines, comic books, newspapers, hand-written documents, microfiche, microfilm, audio, video, art-----all sorts of things.

We know they're all there, somewhere, but we're only vaguely aware of their existence as we focus our attention on that one thing that is in the beam of the flashlight.

So, when we turn the flashlight off, like at night, when we're sleeping, we become more aware of all those other articles that we hardly noticed before.

That's the first meaning of "dimly lighted." But, the unconscious used the opportunity to point out something else about itself.

It is playful, childlike and innocent.

You know how kids are fascinated by the similarities of some words or by the literal meanings of phrases?

We say we're "broke" when we're out of money, but we're not really in need of repair. We talk about the tightness of our "jeans," but our DNA sounds the same.

The unconscious, like a child, hears the sounds but isn't all that aware of spelling or grammar nuances. Spelling and grammar are activities of the conscious mind.

So, what did the dreamers in the experiment get that the non-dreamers didn't?

Biomedical theory of mental illness is very convenient for parents who have abused their kids in childhood. They don't want anyone to know.

Not only does the biomedical model afford these parents a ready-made cover story.

It also silences the abused adult kids forever.

The biomedical model of mental "illness" is ready made for unhealthy family systems who have singled out a particular person (i.e., the one who then becomes diagnosed with "mental illness") as the scapegoat.

Then, we as a society again single out that same person and the group of "mentally ill" to whom she or he belongs as a scapegoat.

Double scapegoating.

Scapegoating is a hostile social - psychological discrediting routine by which people move blame and responsibility away from themselves and towards a target person or group. It is also a practice by which angry feelings and feelings of hostility may be projected, via inappropriate accusation, towards others. The target feels wrongly persecuted and receives misplaced vilification, blame and criticism; he is likely to suffer rejection from those who the perpetrator seeks to influence. Scapegoating has a wide range of focus: from "approved" enemies of very large groups of people down to the scapegoating of individuals by other individuals. Distortion is always a feature. From the Scapegoat Society, U.K.