The following essay is a thought experiment. Taking a
kind of folk-conception of ‘madness’ that can be seen in certain
classic and popular works of literature as a starting point, the
author, in the spirit of Ernst Bloch’s utopianism, attempts to tease
out positive and potentially liberating aspects of this ‘lay’ view of
the ‘insane’, emphasizing possible advantages and sympathies for the
position of the ‘mad’ that this naïve view may have over clinical
concepts such as ‘mental illness’. As a thought experiment, however,
this effort to think through the best possible aspects of the popular
association of madness and genius, so deplored by certain advocacy
groups, is purely tentative; no conclusions are reached and no
positions are final.
1. Madness and Illness
As children we may be shocked by many things, but one’s first encounter
with ‘madness’ must be one of the most profound. Maybe we meet a
neighbor, a member of the family, or some strange person wandering the
streets; and suddenly we are confronted with something utterly alien,
yet in such an intimate form -- something completely different, but
with
arms and legs and a face much like ours -- that we are transfixed,
frozen in a mixture of fascination and fear. Perhaps I am abstracting
too much from my own childish reactions -- but when I grew older, I
found, in literature, that I was not the only one fascinated. In the
Grimms’ tales, for instance, the ‘Wild Man’ who lives in the woods,
feared and mocked as a fool, is redeemed, turns out to be a true king
of a world that only he new all along, and those who denied him become
the real fools (Grimm and Grim, trans1987). In the Arabian nights:
To my
way of
thinking, the mad have a more subtle understanding than the sane. They
behold differences and affinities which are hidden from common men, and
are often visited by strange visions…’ (Anonymous,
1990, p. 55).
Of
course there is Don Quixote, Hamlet, Oedipus and Orpheus, each consumed
by passions or delusions or overwhelmed by grief to the point of
madness. In one of Chuang-Tzu’s inner books, it is the madman who gives
the illustrious but pompous Confucius the simple, essential Taoist
insight to know one’s place (Chuang Tzu,
trans 1962, p. 221-2). In Nietzsche,
it is the madman that first realizes the death of god -- He is mocked
by
the villagers he tries to share this insight with, but after ten years
in a mountain cave, emerges as ‘Zarathustra’, Nietzsche’s prime example
of the ‘over-man’ (Nietzsche, trans 1974, p. 181). Even in Plato, in
the
Phaedrus, arguably the most representative of his dialogues, we find
Socrates explaining that it is a kind of ‘madness’ that overtakes the
philosopher that inspires the love and pursuit of ‘truth’ (Plato, trans 1997,
p. 522).
With this, we form the common notion of the ‘madman’, still full of our
childish wonder: He lives in the woods or closed up in a house, maybe
he walks the streets shouting at demons, scaring children, howling at
the moon. He is like a wild animal. Haunted, tormented -- maybe he
laughs like a hyena or is obsessed with repeating some menial task.
Believes he is the chosen one. He is out of control and lives life as
if in a spell, seeing things that aren’t there, believing things that
aren’t true. The madman is overtaken by something, bewitched by some
spirit, maybe evil. -- And yet the madman is not so simply just a
perversion. In the way that our ears may over-compensate for the loss
of our eyes, whatever overtakes the madman, in throwing him into a dark
world of confusion, also unveils truths that we are blind to. Madmen
are prophets and oracles. Their visions are visions of a reality we
have no access to. When we speak of madmen, we are not simply dealing
with hallucinations and delusions; visions can carry a potentially
grave weight -- and, so possessed, the mad can sometimes create works
of
an intensity or depth that the sane cannot experience. If we are
religious, we may interpret the madman’s visions as revealing spiritual
truths. Maybe the spiritual world is seeping into our own. Maybe it
always does, but it takes the influence of some evil spirit, some devil
or witch, a ruler of some dark place, to unveil it. Or maybe those
spirits only appear evil to
those who do not yet have enough awareness -- as one sighted individual
would be ‘mad’ on an island of the blind.
Madmen are outcasts, true -- but they are witch doctors, shaman, holy
men, also.
We grow up, though, and realize that ‘madness’ isn’t such a popular
word anymore. It was used in a time, like our own childhood, under the
influence of superstitions and snake oil. We know too much for that
now. There was the scientific revolution, and Bacon and Descartes and
the other moderns purged the occult forces -- ‘exorcised’ them, even --
from the old Christian-Aristotelian Scholasticism of the ‘dark’ ages.
Now, there are no more un-seen forces. The apple doesn’t drop because
it is ‘actualized potential’. It falls because the world is a taught,
well ordered machine in which every action corresponds to an equal and
opposite reaction. Eventually even ‘reason,’ the last divine concept,
was demystified, and ‘Truth’ became ‘sufficient
reason’ -- what
explains, what works, and nothing more. We all
know the story, we get
it in our elementary school science classes; There aren’t mysteries in
the world’s getting underway -- there are rational and publicly
observable reasons for everything, and nothing is accepted until it is
shown that any ‘rational’ person can follow steps that deliver us to a
certain conclusion. Here the madman is no longer seen as the expression
of alien forces -- from there on out he is simply a broken system, a
malfunctioning machine; in clinical terms ‘schizophrenic.’ What once
were visions are now ‘hallucinations’, what were revelations are now
‘delusions’. ‘Bizarre’ and ‘inappropriate’ behavior becomes symptomatic
of physical deficits and deformities, and any fascination once inspired
by the ‘madman’ turns to pity and regret for a poorly calibrated
mechanism that ought to be taken to the clockworks and tuned up.
My own childhood does not seem so long ago that I can’t remember that
uncertainty I felt the first time I saw a ‘madman’ playing in the yard
as if he was a child himself. It frightened me a little, I admit, but
that was over as soon as my parents told me that he was ‘sick’. Because
that meant doctors and nurses and his family would take care of him,
someone would watch him; and illness is just some tragic thing that
happens that we have to cope with. It was somehow comforting for me as
a child to know that it was an unfortunate accident that had occurred
to an individual whose basic nature is settled and not seriously
subject to revision -- my hope, now, would be to grow out of that
comfort without growing afraid of the uncertainty I will have thereby
landed in.
2. Myths of Science
And so, we were ‘wrong’ as children -- and the entire world,
apparently,
was wrong in the past. The scientific revolution was hundreds of years
ago -- so long ago that it is obvious that few scientific ‘facts’ have
been so for too very long, barely any for more than a fraction of human
history. Nowhere do we find basic notions are just what they are, and
our most intimate convictions, universal laws and ‘eternal’ truths,
everyone must know, have grown
and changed into what they
are now only
after their hidden and latent
incubation in societies’ various phases
and states. We all know that for a long
time, in our tradition, it was
more important that we interpret the world in a way that fit biblical
scripture rather than scientific research, and that all changed -- but
it is by no means certain that some similar state will not happen
again, should a certain faith gain enough influence. Nor are we sure
that some new, unaccounted for and unprecedented worldview may come to
dominate in a way that would make our present one seem like as much of
a superstition, as much unquestioned convention, as what we now see in
the past. Maybe this much we could even take for granted. If throughout
history nothing has stayed the same, how justified could we be to think
that now we have finally arrived? For many this seems an obvious point,
but for many others, ‘Science’ is still believed to, in some vague way,
act as an ultimate foundation for our modern values. Here a kind of
folk-myth about ‘Science’ -- that it give direct observation of an
objective reality -- is basically just as much a superstition as what a
scientific rationalist may call religion; for all intents and purposes,
there has been no ‘objective reality’, even for most academics and
philosophers, since eighteenth century. In reality there is no
‘Science’, only ‘the sciences.’ And any scientist, even, would hesitate
to suggest that any one
science should act as a sovereign over all the
others. We may replace ceremony and sacrifice and myth with functions
and policy -- but in doing do we replace the motives for the creation
of
myth and ceremony and sacrifice as well, or is there not an extent to
which that desire for replacement is in actuality only another instance
of the original desires, and thus a change in content but not in form?
And even though the correspondences between physical instruments and
physical bodies may be relatively stable from observer to observer, it
is not that fact itself that told us this was valuable, nor that the
study and documentation, systematization and categorization of such
correspondences should form the basis our belief system -- instead it
was a whole host of psychological and cultural pressures and practical
necessities that chose for us, ahead of time, so to speak. The work of
the sciences is to categorize and classify publicly shared events
registered on arbitrarily fixed frames of references through fixed
standards of measure, sometimes for the purposes of creating
statistical projections for predicting events and coordinating
behavior. But this has to arise out of a cultural preference for these
‘impersonal’ facts as opposed to personal revelation and decree -- and
that preference is at the mercy of a notoriously fickle public opinion.
The fact is that just as the sciences can give the ‘how’ of the world
(that is, it can describe how things interact, how processes go down),
but cannot describe the ‘why’ (why processes go down the way they do,
rather than some other way, or why there is anything at all rather than
nothing), they can tell us ‘how’ to accomplish goals (which is,
to be sure, very important), but not ‘why’ to go after any of them. In
the end even the desire to be alive, that we should value life, cannot
be discovered through any strictly logical argument. And so if we are
living in a large society we are still always dealing with alien forces
-- that is, the power of public opinion; all those other people out
there, making their strange, foreign, unpredictable decisions,
following their own alien whim.
3. Plurality
Anyone familiar with the history of ideas and societies must
be impressed with the abundance in the plurality of human values and
ways of life. And yet, read over the shoulder of a commuter on the
subway, a Christian text -- ‘everybody, beneath all the superficial
differences, are essentially the same, have the same needs…’ It is
important that we note that this was a Christian text, since what it
implies is that all people really
have the same needs and desires, it
is just that not all people know it -- some people do know what is best
for those who don’t, and it is their duty to show them the way. This
was the rationale of the crusade. Now ‘humanism’ adopts it (all humans
have these inalienable rights
-- particular rights which
necessarily
exclude some others…), and they have Freud on their side (there are
basic psychic structures, drives). Rousseau, surely a major influence
on any idea of universal human rights, wrote ‘man is born free, and yet
everywhere he is in chains’ (Rousseau,
trans 1997, p. 41). But even this goes
too far. When we look back over the course of history, we can find
societies without any concept of ‘natural’ rights for every person,
societies in which such a concept would simply have no place in the
worldview. Where people can’t even think
that they should be free,
where people have no idea of a right to personal freedom to even aspire
to, then freedom is not only not a valid possibility, but could
potentially be a loss of cultural identity, as well as a destruction of
people’s most sacredly held beliefs. (Incidentally, when I worked with
juvenile sex offenders I noticed that a popular justification for the
offenders’ molestation of others was based on a similar idea that all
people are the same -- the offender assumed that the person they took
advantage of either really
wanted the sex that the offender forced on
them) because they believed that, like them, everyone really wants sex
all the time), or, on those occasions where the offender had ‘consent’
from someone much younger than them, assumed that the victim had the
same cognitive or emotional development as they did. ‘We are all
essentially the same.’) People who say these things are at once so
certain about what we are, as if we are all finished and have nothing
else left to grow into, while at the same time implying that we are not
yet there and ought to become a certain way.
For the less puritanical of us, there is far too much variety out there
for us to have recourse to an idea of our abstract identity. There are
the various Hindu and Buddhist philosophers, who on a basic level
recommend detaching from the world, as it is only a distraction from
the one truth of non-dualism. There is ample documentation of the
Native Americans, who existed on an equal level with their natural
surroundings (and the settlers who only saw this as a justification of
their own superiority over them, as well as the animals they coexisted
with). There was, in the middle ages, a certain religious sect often
called ‘Free Spirits’ -- a group who believed they needed to die in
pain
to attain salvation, and asked friends to torture them when they came
close to dying. (Rexroth, 1974, Ch 3, Paragraph 26) And recently, there
are stories of people who,
though
they show no other signs of ‘mental illness’, have an inexplicable
desire to amputate a limb. (The limb they want gone never changes -- it
is always just that one limb, and at a very specific place. Those who
aren’t driven to suicide by this persistent desire, will often, given
that doctors cannot amputate healthy limbs, attempt to amputate the
limb themselves. Some are fortunate enough to survive. There is a
documentary about this phenomenon called, interestingly, ‘Whole’ -- One
person interviewed said that, after he successfully removed his limb,
he finally felt ‘whole’) (Gilbert, 2003).
We have the liberal who
believes that each of us should be able choose our lives for ourselves
-- and against this, the fundamentalist who thinks that we are not ours
to do whatever we want with, but God’s own property, and should act in
accord with his revelations, and for whom democracy and the humanist
notion of the ‘right’ to individual sovereignty may exclude the
‘natural’ right to be governed by a religious leader, in a determined
way, in a religious state.
Even a skimpy, random sampling, such as this, of all that is out there
is already enough to show that in taking any one of these varied types
of humanity as exemplary or prototypical, we unavoidably neglect
others. It would be ridiculous, pompous -- and more importantly
irresponsible -- to look back on the record of civilizations and the
history of ideas, in face of such a variety of manifestations of human
life, and attempt to identify simple, core qualities, present in every
person, throughout every society and stage of history that could stand
for a ‘human nature’. As soon as we reach a certain level of
cosmopolitanism, rather than trying to average out human variety and
cancel out anything but the lowest common denominator, with respect for
other forms of life, we must begin
with a pluralistic notion of human
nature -- some sort of value relativism must be the starting point.
But there is a sad exclusivity within most societies. If we imagine
ourselves in other scenarios we can also imagine how an individual may
thrive in one society and be eaten alive by another. And it is against
this background that we must re-examine our ideas about madness, or
mental illness. We are old enough now to know how horribly people have
been treated in the past by others who had the best intentions. It
seems the simplest thing in the world to say that these people are
‘sick’, ‘obviously’ suffering, and in need of ‘help’. It seemed just as
simple a thing for the builders of the Indian schools of the old west
to say that the poor savage children needed to be ‘rescued’ from their
heathen lifestyles. The result was of course genocide. And don’t forget
that during the Middle Ages it was seen as an act of Christian love to
torture criminals sentenced to death, in order to inspire in them the
proper level of hatred of the flesh and worldly things, so that they
might attain salvation (Augustine,
Letter 158, especially Ch. 2, paragraph 11). At some point, when
working with the
mad, we
will have to decide where our allegiance lies, with the crowd or the
individual -- that is, with the common or the exceptional. Good
intentions are not enough, and we can never be sure how many injustices
we neglect, not because we couldn’t do anything but simply because we
overlooked them.
4. Delusions of Sanity
It is a cliché point that the sober do not generally try to convince
you that they are not drunk. But neither do the sane, by analogy, have
to stomp their feet and shout that they are not mad. And yet isn’t it
true that any of us who have never
second-guessed ourselves must
already be insane? There are madmen with the education and credentials
of any highly esteemed professor. World leaders, intellectuals, some of
our most exemplary geniuses and artists have gone mad. Surely there was
a time when they were slipping, before they knew it -- maybe they never
knew. And if our best could succumb to it, why not any of us? We ask --
What is madness? -- but who can answer? What qualifies one to say?
Unfortunately the only people with first hand experience cannot be
trusted -- they are ‘crazy’. And yet is it not healthy, to an extent,
to
suspect a mental illness in ourselves, even if only in lonely, pensive
moments, when we try to take stock of ourselves? It could all be wrong,
this world we believe in. It’s a possibility -- admit it. Wouldn’t it
be
insane not to? Surely, approached honestly and fully, the question of
one’s sanity is the question
of the reliability of the world one counts
on, which is ultimately a question we each must face as we face our own
deaths -- no credentials or public accolades will prepare us or cushion
the blow, should madness come. Indeed it is a problem that has a unique
way of putting one’s own competence into question while immediately
undermining any answer. We feel certain we are sane. But we may feel
certain even if we are not. In face of the mere possibility, the
slightest suspicion ensures us that we could never unequivocally,
categorically label ourselves
sane -- though the absence of suspicion is
no assurance either. To what, then, do we appeal when the
‘schizophrenic’ says to us ‘I am not crazy, you are’ while we bite our
tongues and think, ‘no, I am
not crazy, you are…’?
Today, generally, the madman is dealt with through a medical model, in
which he simply suffers from the ‘illness’ of ‘schizophrenia’. The goal
of the therapeutic team that works within this model is to help the
individual ‘recover’ from the illness. The recovery process involves
reintegrating that individual into a community -- which means
encouraging that individual to embrace all of the social practices and
behaviors necessary for living a normal, fulfilled, life. (See the NAMI
‘Roadmap for Recovery’ (NAMI, 2004)) This seems to be a very reasonable
goal, and undertaken with the best intentions, but, again, good
intentions are not enough. Rather than take things at face value, we
should examine for contradictions, asking questions that may in no way
be new or revolutionary, but that still, apparently, have not been
asked enough.
One question that should immediately arise is -- where does the model
of
normalcy, this ideal, come from? Where can we go to find normalcy?
There is nowhere, because it is an abstraction. The character of a
society, at its most rational, is a matter of statistical modeling. But
statistics, as static representations of a process constantly
undergoing change, are like snapshots of waterfalls, and may actually
never represent the particular life of any one person or community. An
idealized ‘normal’ commits us to the same fallacies as the cheap
tabloids that advertise to tell what ‘men’ really want in bed, or what
‘women’ really want in a man -- the abstract is personified, and taken
as a thing with desires and
motives, when in actuality categories have
no wants or preferences.
To a certain extent the real society behind that ‘generalized other’
that stands for normalcy is more irrational, whimsical, and harder to
pin down than any schizophrenic. Sanity, in relation to this
background, could be seen as a special, derivative case of the more
fundamental insanity that is the will to live -- and the amount of
beauty we find in that original absurdity is surely a good barometer
for the amount of beauty we are able to see in the ‘officially’ insane.
But even if we could find some stable definition of normalcy, to say
that a person should be normal is to assume that a person is, or should
become, the kind of thing for which
normal values are best -- which
would be to ignore the values that emerge from the other person’s
perspective. And before we begin to standardize people, we should ask
ourselves if it is not possible that the life that is designated as
normal is precisely the life that drives some of us mad? On one level
it is obvious that the madman -- especially in schizophrenia -- is a
person who does not eat when it is time to eat, but only when he is
hungry; who does not sleep when it is time to sleep, only when he is
tired; who, essentially, does not relegate his own whim and interest to
the proper times. How often is madness, even in schizophrenia, nothing
more than the inability, or unwillingness, to postpone inspiration, to
delay gratification, to have a thought and be able to put it off until
later, until the lunch bell, or until the train stops, or until the
movie is over, or until the weekend, or until we retire? In thinking
about madness, should we not investigate the extent to which societal
norms that are potentially to blame for our horror at the madman? That
is, if sexuality were not as taboo as it is for so many, would the
madman’s ‘bizarre’ sexual fixations be seen as a ‘symptom’ of
‘illness’? If we were not upset by certain taboo vocabulary, would we
be shocked by the swearing in the madman’s rants? Similarly, if we were
not disgusted at ‘trash’ culture, if we were not sick of the spiritual
wasteland that the media has turned our marketplaces and cities into,
would we find it so sick when the madman incorporates images from pop
media into his ‘delusions’? That is, if we were incorporated into a
world that we found worthy of reverence and respect from moment to
moment, rather than one that seems about to fall apart any second,
would the madman seem so mad? When schizophrenics feel that they must
talk to a certain famous business mogul or movie star, we may laugh.
(And not only because we know that they would not help; we also know
how miserable the stars might be, how unworthy -- at least judging by
what we know of most of them -- of personal respect). But if we lived
in
ancient Greece, we may not laugh off the madman’s obsessions so easily
when he tells us that he feels he must meet Zeus, or Prometheus on his
stone; or when he feels that he must find Shiva; or when we might
interpret ‘poor’ hygiene as an expression of the Aghora faith. We may
wonder if, in an uninhibited world, there would even be a madman. It
may also be worth making the obvious point that, if there is such a
thing as ‘normal’, being the average life that most people live, then
in respect to the present state of the world this ‘normal’ life has
lead us to, which almost everyone agrees is alarming (and this is an
understatement), maybe ‘normal’ is the last thing anyone should be
encouraged to become.
One could easily here defer to ‘pragmatism’, and say that a person just
has to follow a certain schedule if they are going to survive the
present society. But this immediately brings in political
considerations. Those privileged enough to provide funding for services
for the insane (many still depend a great deal on private funding) are,
naturally, generally going to be sympathetic to, and want to uphold,
the norms that put them in the position to help in the first place.
This may lead to a vested interest in which the madman’s desires are
subordinate. One might also observe, though, that, in a world on the
brink of ecological crisis and facing the reality of mass starvation,
if social work were really pragmatic,
then the accumulation of gigantic
amounts of wealth by a relatively microscopic amount of individuals may
be diagnosed as a mental illness, a perversion, anti-social,
socio-pathic behavior that should be diagnosed and treated, even if
against those few individual’s protests. (Perhaps, just as we should be
able to allow the insane to enjoy their own alien worlds (when that
does in fact seem to be what they want) while still stopping someone
from committing violent acts against others, we can allow those with
extreme concentrations of power to keep their own insanities,
irrational obsessions and eccentricities, but not to the extent that
they consume resources frivolously when it means doing so at the
expense of the more basic needs of others, as is so often the case. But
surely we can measure these things by degrees rather than in all or
nothing terms).
At any rate, a double bind seems to arise here, if the ability to
function in society becomes the only thing that gives one the right to
reject it. How does an individual prove that he or she is capable of
making a decision that jeopardizes his or her life -- say, by climbing
Mount Everest, or becoming sexually active, even of living an ascetic
life of poverty and material denial? Individuals are deemed capable if
they can show that they are ‘of sound mind’, and what does this mean
but that they could function
in society. Would it be impossible for a
person to reject society on the
grounds that the person cannot function
in it? The question is: why should we try to prompt an individual into
assimilating him- or her-self into a culture that is so callous and
sick as to cast him or her off for not living on its terms and meeting
its standards? Is there not the possibility that isolation is better
than conditional community and fair-weather friendship? And why would
the social worker (which in luxury cases amounts to a professional
friend) -- who knows the society is sick (why else would there need to
be social workers?) -- try to mold the odd into a life of banal
normalcy
that most obviously dislike and secretly probably resent (even mock?)
as well?
Here the question turns back on us, so that it is not only for the
benefit of the madman that we should reconsider our relationship to
madness. We have to ask -- Why is it that we may respect (though we may
not find it the right way for us) and even marvel at, for instance,
religious ascetics in India who chain themselves to trees, or wander
the woods alone living off roots for the rest of their lives, or twist
their necks back so that they can only consume liquid, depriving
themselves on their paths to enlightenment; but when a
‘schizophrenic’ wanders the streets of our cities following the voices
that call, wrestling with the demons that haunt, there is nothing but
pity for a malfunctioning machine, and offers to change in the form of
treatment? Why is there no respect for the madman’s lot? Is it only
because, unlike religious ascetics, they cannot have their life
validated by a group or installed into an accepted, standardized belief
system? Of course this is not to suggest that we should return to, say,
a medieval treatment of ‘madness’, or any other in the past. It is
doubtful that there has ever been a time when the world was not
corrupt, and those who long for the past must obviously feel more of an
affinity with the kings than with the slaves; that this could be such a
mundane fact and still not cause us to reflect upon the witch hunts and
inquisitions that may be going on under our own noses seems odd. This
is why the question of madness is a question about ourselves as well,
and not only because we may all be mad. When we ask about the outcasts,
we ask about our own limits -- we ask what we are able to be, and what
we are unable to be without censure.
Let us, then, ask ourselves if the hallucinations of the schizophrenic
could not only just be tolerated, but could even be infinitely more
beautiful than normalized,
officially sanctioned reality; if, in face
of the boredom and prevailing sense of being generally unfulfilled, it
could not be a challenge to us to rethink what the madman is; let us
ask if his delusions may not be greater than our sanity? Thoreau said
that hunger and cold are more agreeable to him than most peoples’ means
of fighting them off (Thoreau, 1854). And during an
uprising in the
streets of Paris in 1968, students wrote on the walls of their
university -- ‘Who wants to live in a world in which the only insurance
against dying of starvation risks dying of boredom?’ (This quote, on p.
18, and other slogans from Vaneigem, 1967) Might the madman not feel
the same?
We may protest: ‘But the madman didn’t choose to be mad . . .’ The madman
is
under a kind of spell, thrown around by the whim of an alien power
greater than himself; or, more likely today, we say that he is sick.
But neither did any of us choose
to be born, and it is ultimately by
chance that any of us are here at all. It seems that the Judeo
Christian God -- totally self determined and unconditioned by any
accident -- has been a model for too long. Maybe we should return to a
polytheistic outlook, one that will be more suited to our multi-valued
societies -- or better yet something new altogether. Our own lives are
not things we could have given ourselves. That ultimately irrational
surge and thirst for that life, which gives birth to the things we need
to see just by providing reasons to see them, is in the end just as
alien, strange and inexplicable as any spell or sickness. If we say
that a person must choose everything about life for him- or herself, we
not only contradict ourselves, we remove any respect we may have for
the tragic aspects of life and repress a whole realm of experience --
loss and hardship become mistakes and unfortunate glitches in the
mechanistic order only, rather than a tragic drama we have the
privilege to play out.
We say that schizophrenics lack ‘insight’ into the ‘disease’ when they
do not interpret their ‘delusions’ and ‘hallucinations’ as symptoms of
that disease rather than as a real and valid part of their existence.
But we must realize how strange it is that some people are marginalized
or medicated or both for having ‘delusions’ in a country in which
eighty million evangelical Christians honestly believe that a man will
come back from the dead to save anyone who holds one proposition to be
true and condemn the rest to burn forever. It rarely occurs to many
that they may not have their religion if its founders were around
today. It is too likely that anyone who claiming to have spoken to god
in the form of a burning bush would be labeled a schizophrenic and
encouraged to take medication to deaden these kinds of visions. But for
some reason we can picture Moses imprisoned in Bellevue easier than we
can see those in Bellevue as prophets already. Still, the will to
exist, to live and feel and go on, and to do the things that will
sustain us -- and to do so in the most rational, efficient way possible
(instead of the most beautiful, or in the way that adheres to certain
religious symbolism) -- is no more than a religion itself. Again; the
will to live rather than die is not the conclusion of any rational
argument -- it is the necessary precondition for rational argument.
‘Delusions’ and ‘hallucinations’ are not any more irrational than
common opinions, but are the expressions and symbolisms and dreams of
individuals and minorities that happen to stand on the debit side of
public opinion. And our
‘sane’ delusions can be very real, very active
in our lives, and don’t have to be so ‘out there’, even when they are
not bound to any religion. How else did diamonds become valuable but
through an irrational desire for rare but unnecessary things? How does
one body type come to be viewed, for a time, as more attractive than
another? How does one religion, or other mode of life, come to
dominate? If we took away all
of our irrational desires and
predispositions, we would lose every culturally biased preference, and
would end up taking away the desire to go on living rather than let
ourselves rot into our beds. We would never need to create rational
systems if it weren’t for the already existing and ultimately
irrational desire, lust, for
life.
Despite the best intentions, social workers cannot reconcile the
contradiction that though they respect religious differences in theory,
they do not in practice anytime they actively dissuade an individual
from interpreting what is clinically recognized as a delusion or
hallucination as anything other than a genuinely religious experience.
Lack of ‘insight’ is a refusal of a certain categorization, a certain
interpretation of experiences. Almost every ‘psychosis’ has a
corresponding symbolic figure in some religious belief system, and with
just a little imagination we could imagine any ‘insane’ person who is
not already similar to a god becoming one for some future religion.
Every madman is a potential saint. It is here where, for social
creatures such as ourselves, truth as ‘what works’ can seem alarmingly
similar to ‘might makes right’. Do we have so much faith in the
majority that we are willing to standardize all the outcasts? Do we
have such a weak imagination that we cannot see just as much value in a
life actively consumed in battles with demons and spectacular manic
epiphanies as in a life passively consuming meaningless commodities,
rote schedules, and minor conveniences? Thoreau also said superfluous
wealth can only buy superfluous things (Thoreau,
1854). Poverty is not
a curse in and of itself. Haven’t many more geniuses and visionaries
already been marginalized and even killed than we’d like to admit? How
many ‘St Francises’ were burned at the stake before one was given an
order? Are there ‘Heraclituses’ we are scaring into the hills? Are
there ‘Soctrateses’ in our own prisons? Nothing makes it easier to
sanction, imprison, marginalize people than the idea that we are doing
it for their own good, that we know better for them than they do. When
one is sure about what a
human is, sure what would be
best for the
world, what would be best way for people to live, what would give
people what they really want,
what is really best for them,
whether
they know it or not, one can commit almost any crime. But today we
don’t burn witches, we just ignore them. Pretend they don’t exist. Rule
out even a remote possibility that they might live legitimate lives --
lives different than ours, lives we wouldn’t choose for ourselves, but
legitimate lives nonetheless. No one wants to be a tyrant, but
sometimes -- maybe all times -- there are vanishing points in our
outlook, and we are just blind to the damage we do.
5. Ethics and Ambiguity of Help
We should also admit that too many give so selflessly to the mad and
homeless and poor in an effort to make up for some guilt feelings, or
some desire to be needed by others, or some other of their own personal
neuroses. Though if they are in fact helping, we may not care why they
do it, if we are really going to give alms, why don’t we share the best
of ourselves? How would I
give alms, how would I share
with others what
has made me ‘better’? What if
it would mean, for others, a time in a solitude in
which all spiritual beliefs are abandoned, all fundamentals questioned,
arriving at anxiety, willing poverty and isolation, alienation from
others for years before they figure themselves out and can finally be
kind to strangers again? Who would want that? Most would consider it a
curse. But if this happens to be what was best for me, might it be the
only scenario in which I could really
help someone? Although, it’s
true, words have few vitamins. But the point is, maybe those who work
with the mad should try to be a little more selfish -- people could
choose to work with the mad because they still, like a child, or like
the speaker in the Arabian Nights, believe that the mad may have a more
‘subtle understanding’ of things ‘hidden from common men’, and who
would like to learn something about themselves
at the same time they
help another.
But here we should admit that when we have spoken of the mad man we
have been speaking of an abstraction, and that madness itself surely
doesn’t always baptize a person into a greater understanding of
anything -- biography and predisposition, things often also absent from
the rhetoric of ‘illness’, surely factor into the experience of madness
as well. And yet it still be argued that ‘madness’ is a better title
than ‘mentally ill’, even for those who don’t become saints -- despite
powerful advocacy groups who, acting on behalf of the ‘sick’, want to
remove the ‘stigma’ of ‘madness’ and replace it with ‘mental illness’
(some families just refuse to let a member become a new person; they
will do anything to force them back into old roles) -- as if it were
any
trade off to be stripped of mystery and victimized by a ‘disease’.
Of course there is no reason why someone who enjoys the environment of
the most outdated, fundamentalist, conservative therapeutic facility
should be persuaded to leave on principle alone. If a person’s
traditional therapies and medications are working for them, let them
work. The hope of this essay is simply show how much of a missed
opportunity -- how poor of a response to the challenge that madness
presents to our own ideas of what we are -- it is to see strange
behavior as nothing but symptoms of illnesses. This is not to advocate
for a value relativism that would just accept everything and lead to a
passive complacency, but a kind of value relativism that comes to terms
with the irrationality of values and can therefore strive for goals
while at the same time accepting differences and plurality. If we were
to settle on one ‘ideal’, then if we ever became good enough at
identifying and treating differences, humans would have reached a sadly
rigid, fixed identity, with no hope of surprise, novelty or change. It
just seems obvious to some of us that people have different needs to
the extent that each of us is practically a species of our own.
Wouldn’t it be better to draw up a new category for each new oddity
than to try to fence it into to the few we already have and rigidly
fixate on?
Maybe it would take a great artist, a saint even, to be able to see in
each of our individual insanities just one more wonderful instance of
the many dramas and tragedies and comedies that have the privilege to
get played out in our shared world. But if we approach an encounter
with madness as an encounter with a new and completely different kind
of person, we could not but question whether the goals we set for the
insane at social clubs and therapeutic facilities are really the best
for the participants there, or if they are just the goals that make it
easier for us to help them. Is it really the best we can do to try to
get the insane into normal nine to five jobs, normal patterns of
living, normal patterns of passive consumption of products and popular
entertainment? Is that really the ideal that every person should strive
for? Is that how weak our imagination is, that we see anything else as
symptomatic of an illness? Can’t we instead help these alien beings we
find in our cities to achieve their own alien, opaque goals -- goals
that may not make sense to us but that may be the cold peaks of the
highest manic inspirations, or of the most placid, serene, detached
ambivalence; experiences of such resonance and motion and beauty, from
the inside, that they should never be discouraged? And how many new
directions would be opened up for the art, drama and music therapists
if popular notions of acceptable work were disregarded?
We must admit that we all have a secret world we live in -- one that
even our most intimate lover couldn’t know, and that even we ourselves
miss simply because it is too intimate to us also, too close to us to
see -- those parts of us we can never really get the right angle on, no
matter how we twist and crane our necks, peeking in the mirror. So if
we ever find that there are times in which we can’t express ourselves;
if we ever find that nobody understands us, and that maybe we don’t
understand ourselves sometimes; or if we ever feel that the world does
not make sense, then let us have some sympathy for the mad. And,
if we
don’t ever feel these things, let us be sure that we are already mad
ourselves.
References
Anonymous. (1990). The Adventures of the
Royal Bastard in The book of
the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol. IV. (E. P. Mathers, J.
C.
Mardrus, Eds.) New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis.
Vaneigem, R. (1967). Revolution of Everyday Life.
(Donald
Nicholson-Smith, trans.) London: Rebel Press.
Biographical
Note: Jason Bernard Claxton was born in Tennessee and has lived in
Alaska and Brooklyn. He has worked with the elderly and at-risk youth
in Murfreesboro, at a Homeless shelter and a halfway house in
Nashville, and and a therapeutic psychosocial club in Manhattan's upper
west side. He has published fiction in The Southern Review and poetry
in Sleepingfish and Elimae. He is currently enrolled in CUNY Shool of
Law.