It is truly amazing how far modern psychiatry has come! It is almost as if a fresh start were necessary, a joint burning of all books and the complete abandonment of all classifications. A man exhibiting even the slightest inner conflict is already infallibly ill; there is no question about it. And there we are left wondering about the vexatious state in which science has placed itself. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that the less a man thinks, the less thought influences his life, the healthier he is; in other words, the science of mind has set as a model of mental health the man whose mind does not act. There is something wonderful and unbelievable about this; it is undoubtedly a major achievement, and it never ceases to amaze. Discharge for the jolly fool, and therapy for the antisocial, the melancholic, the misanthropic, the gloomy, the lonely, and the silent! Therapy for those who cannot come home from work and smile while scratching their bellies in front of a television set! Therapy, and may the sick forever exchange philosophical works for coloring books!
Tag: psychology
Teaching Patients How to Live
Hand in hand with marketing, the psychology practiced in consulting rooms has given to want to teach patients how to live. In other words, psychologists want to give philosophy lessons. Thus, psychology is being mixed with what marketing dictates, and a laughable worldview, without the slightest depth, is being configured as a parameter of mental sanity. Psychologists, instead of working on their own lack of culture and ignorance about life, have transformed the science of the mind into a mere product of well-being.
Jung’s “Intuition”
Of all the fundamental Jungian psychological functions, “intuition” is the most interesting and challenging for those who seek to understand them in depth. The very individual in whom this perceptual mechanism is accentuated, should he seek to interpret it, will find himself in great difficulty, since to interpret it would be, in short, to rationalize it, and one does not rationalize the irrational. Furthermore, if we compare it with the other irrational function according to Jung’s classification, the “sensation”, this one seems without a doubt more understandable and less abstruse to those who do not have it salient, since it is activated through stimuli that are more easily visible and palpable. Like “sensation”, the “intuition” is spontaneous, but although, as Jung says, it is an exclusively perceptive faculty, working in conjunction with the functions of judgment it induces an appraisal of what it perceives. This appraisal is, therefore, automatic and based on the inexplicable. What impresses most is that it often comes out loaded with certainty, and a certainty that defies logic, since it is based on an irrational perception. And to see that this mechanism proves to be effective over and over again, proves to be reliable to the point of not only rivaling, but invalidating conclusions reached by other faculties—apparently more logical faculties—in those who possess it pronouncedly… Remarkable.
The Psychological Mechanism That Is the Precursor…
The psychological mechanism that is the precursor of disillusionment is one of the most interesting mental faculties ever known. It manifests itself as a need, a natural unconscious tendency to project idealizations onto real entities and situations. In the minds that experience it, all conscious mental activity seems prone to detach itself from the concrete and spontaneously blend with subjective and fanciful tones, creating a parallel reality in which experience is intensified and presented in ideal aspect. Freud, of course, classified what little he understood of this mechanism as mental illness. But if, on the one hand, it contributes to accentuate, if not to produce future unpleasant contrasts between expectation and reality, it should be noted that creativity is entirely dependent on this capacity to attribute fantastic qualities to concrete experience. From the poet who idealizes the beloved woman to the engineer who creates in his mind the impossible, all of them have their inventiveness, and therefore their distinctiveness, originating in this very same mental faculty.