Category Archives: psychiatry

Reality, God, and Boundaries

The “judgement of god” is to me a literary construct, thus amenable to a personal application rather to a rhetorical one. In my youth, as a fledgling Baptist preacher, it was sermon fodder, stem-winder material, for an “hell-fire-and-damnation” sermon in which I could hold forth about the impending judgement of God. I put myself in this position because this “judgement of God” was heavily upon myself and one of the most effective ways of dealing with the gut-wrenching exposure of this experience is to attempt to deflect it to other people.

For, from a literary and more personal perspective, this “judgement of God” is when reality sets in and stings us with the realization that, “Uh oh! I’ve been found out!” In that moment we are naked and vulnerable to varying degrees and it is an humbling moment. It is a moment when the ego harnesses all of its resources and almost always it will aim these resources in the form of projection upon someone else. That is the reason that my fragile teen-age identity needed the position of “Baptist preacher.”

Biblical terminology like this “judgement” and even “God” are terms I’m a bit hesitant to use; for the Bible and its terminology are highly suspicious given the history of Christianity and its present day expression. However, now having the ability to de-contextualize the Bible from how it was presented to me in my youth as well as “de-contextualizing” even myself from my youth, I have a deeper appreciation for it as Holy Writ. Yes, I would even deign to describe it as the work of the “Holy Spirit” expressed through ancient humankind and if approached with a degree of humility has value for this present moment.

With this in mind, this “Reality Check” is upon us and “heavily” or “grievously” so. I am going to take this approach for a few days as I apply it to issues that are present in our world today. “Reality” is speaking to us as a species just as it is speaking to each of us personally…at least it is to me “personally.” Limits are painful to the ego which always sees itself as without any, especially for those of us who have lived our lives in the illusion of certainty, and its twin–piety.

Imprisoned With Ideas!!!

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“Woo-hoo, we’re Jungians!!!”

This cartoon beautifully illustrates the fate of ideologies which captivate lost souls who thus become “ideologues.” Posted in a Carl Jung facebook discussion group, it demonstrates the necessary role of irony in dealing with ideas and avoiding their imprisonment, including the caption, “Woo-hoo, we’re Jungians.” This cartoon reflected knowledge of a lesser known but profound quote from Carl Jung himself, “Thank God I’m not a Jungian!” Jung knew that his teachings were captivating to some who did not exercise what the New Testament calls as, “discerning Spirit” and used his teachings to create a shallow ideological identity in which they could hide and avoid the gut-level wisdom that his teachings offered.

I facetiously toy with writing my copy of the Gospels someday, clearly identified as, “fictional,” and in them I would toss in at some point Jesus saying as he fled the hordes of “mindless” escape-oriented seekers, “Thank God I’m not a Christian.” For Jesus’ teachings clearly recognized the entrapment of taking spiritual tradition and teachings only on the superficial level and he used the world, “hypocrites” to describe them, people who were simply actors offering to their community merely the “performance art” of spirituality.

This phenomenon which is so egregiously conspicuous now in my country takes the teachings of Jesus only as “ideas” without ever bothering to explore them in depth to the point of discovering that, “the idea is not the thing” and that ideas have value only when they open-up into a region beyond themselves. The ability to understand this includes getting to the point where one realizes that buried in his heart is a hidden region that can be found only by opening oneself to it, an opening-up which is not a simple rational undertaking resulting from a moment of revivalistic fervor. This “opening up” is the discovery of the mystery of life, buried far beneath the conscious edifice of one’s persona, related to what T.S. Eliot described as, “a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.” Jesus put it this way, “You can find your life only by losing it.” This is really difficult if you are a “cradle Christian,” one who has been enculturated into the Christian faith as it will often feel as if one is losing his faith. In a sense, one will be losing his “faith” but possibly only its ideological dimension, allowing the freedom to venture into the, “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

Canned Religion and Conspicuous Piety

The Apocalypse Within

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Psychiatrist D. W. (Donald) Winnicott once observed regarding his clients, “The breakdown that is feared has already occurred.” He knew that his clients’ reluctance to forthrightly address their issues was because the pain was too great for their conscious mind to undertake…at least initially. Many of his clients had been subjected to trauma and had every reason to fear buried memories of the anguish. Others, though not overtly traumatized, had not been able to successfully adapt to the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” and their denial system had compounded the problem to the point that often it approached “trauma.” (Scott Peck in “The Road Less Traveled” noted that, “Neurosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering.”)

All of us have fears though many of them do not amount to the terror of Winnicott’s clients. But our reluctance to face these fears can be equally intense and lock us into attitudinal and behavioral patterns that keep us from reaching the point where our life is in full flow. We are like Hamlet and “cling to those ills that we have rather than flee to others that we know not of.”

Some whose “breakdown” was acute and merit the description “traumatic” will be prone to see catastrophe “out there” in the world rather than to address their own that are within. Furthermore, some whose pain can only be described as “plain vanilla” still prefer to project it “out there” as their narcissism prevents them from recognizing that they have any faults. This applies to individuals as well as groups as even groups can have a narcissistic dimension to the ideology that holds them together.

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Furthermore, if you will indulge my penchant for the esoteric, I even conjecture that even the healthiest individual has deep-seated memories of the catastrophe which was the birth of the ego, that primal differentiation of the ego from its matrix which in the depths of the unconscious parallels the big bang. None of us have actual memory of this event and never will and don’t have to worry about the possibility. We are hard-wired to have no memories of that psychic catastrophe in which the ego was born. But I do think that sometimes refracted memories of this event filter into the pre-conscious and influence our dreams and conscious thoughts, often providing an explanation to why an individual can see so clearly why the problem is with “them” when to us looking on we muse to ourselves, “Oh, if they could only see.” But for them to “see,” i.e. “withdraw their projections,” would entail more pain than they can bear. Shakespeare had this denial in mind when he had Macbeth declaring, “My dull brain is racked by things forgotten.”

literary lew

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