DIONYSUS LOOKS AT MENTAL ILLNESS Barry Spector 650-327-5493/ (7,900 words)

DIONYSUS LOOKS AT MENTAL ILLNESS
Barry Spector
650-327-5493/shmoover@comcast.net
(7,900 words)
Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.
--Pascal
Tourist: “Have a nice day!”
Bagwoman: “Don’t tell me what to do!”
Dionysus was the god of paradox, masks, frenzy, ecstatic joy, drunkenness, tragedy – and madness.
Wherever he appeared, he subverted the classical Greek consensus of reason, exalted discourse and
refined culture. He posed annoying questions upon king and philosopher alike, tore down the walls of
the isolated ego and insisted that everyone was fundamentally animal, instinctual, sexual and irrational.
He represents the archetype of the Other, an aspect of nature – and human nature – that is both outside
the boundaries of the known, familiar and acceptable, but also within, at its very core. Since he
confronts us with the mystery behind the reconciliation of opposites – male/female, active/passive,
light/dark, mortal/immortal, sacred/secular – we can only define him by what he isn’t. Simply by
existing, he threatens our carefully built sense of who we are.
Consequently, patriarchs have attempted to repress the Dionysian impulse for over two millennia.
However, his modern incarnations persist in our imagination as the Other. He is everything that
America in particular has cast into the shadows: women, gays and people of color. By denying this
innate archetype, we deny much of our own souls.1
If Dionysus were to speak to Psychology he might ask: Is a child molester a criminal (the law: yes), a
sinner (Catholicism: yes) or a sick person (Psychiatry: yes)? Why is a terrorist or tyrant evil, rather than
sick? Why are convicted murderers not considered insane? Why do we punish criminals instead of
rehabilitating them? Why does America demonize children because their parents are poor? “Why are
the mentally ill disproportionately female and poor? In a dysfunctional culture, what is a dysfunctional
family? What is functional? Why do we take so many drugs, legal or otherwise? Why, in these
maddening times, isn’t everyone running through the streets raving and grieving? Isn’t willful
innocence a form of madness?”
Invoking this god as my guide, I want to circle around these themes in a Hermetic, Dionysian,
soulful, non-linear manner, showing more interest in surprising connections and brief liftings of the
veil than in logical proof. In his realm, the questions are more interesting then the answers.
--------------------------The god of madness lives in our asylums and halfway houses and among the homeless. And at home:
according to some researchers, one in four adult Americans suffers from a diagnosable mental disorder
in a given year,2 six percent are seriously debilitated, and half will develop a mental disorder at some
time in our lives. (Kessler, 593-602). Depression has doubled since World War II, with each
generation showing increasing rates. It now impacts nineteen million American adults.3 One in ten
women and six percent of children take antidepressants, triple the rate in the period 1994-96.
(Vedantam 2004).
Nearly half of young people have some sort of psychiatric condition (counting substance abuse), and
almost twenty percent have a personality disorder that interferes with everyday life. (Blanco, 14291437). Eighteen percent of college students take prescription psychological medications, and fifteen
percent are clinically depressed. (Kakutani 2005). Suicide is the second leading cause of death among
college students. (APA, www.Healthyminds.org/collegementalhealth.cfm).
Although the percentage of Americans confined to mental hospitals has declined since the 1960’s, the
numbers of those seeking professional help has increased. Still, nearly three-quarters of those with
serious psychiatric problems never see a psychiatrist at all, turning instead to alcohol and other forms
of self-medication. (Friedrich 1975, 354).
---------------------------------The statistics indicate that many of us are going crazy, but who determines what sanity is? For decades,
Benjamin Rush’s nineteenth-century definition prevailed: “…an aptitude to judge of things like other
men, and regular habits, etc.”4 Freud added the abilities to love and work. Thomas Szasz, however,
insists that most mental illness is composed only of behaviors that psychiatrists – white, middle-class
men – disapprove of; and this category describes all of society’s Others. Behaviors such as
masturbation no longer fit, but others are continually added.
We know what is acceptable by identifying those who, as John Jervis writes, “contradict the official
self-image, disturb its clarity, question its necessity.” (Jervis 1999, 84). “Female” behavior has long
been the baseline for determining what is rational. Doctors committed nineteenth century women to
asylums for such “symptoms” as flirting too much, refusing to marry men chosen by their fathers, and
excessive religious fervor. Asylums, writes Phyliss Chesler, functioned as “… penalties for being
“female,” as well as desiring…not to be.” (Chesler, 1972, 16). The gender imbalance remains, even if
such behaviors are no longer valid excuses for institutionalization.5 It remains safer for women to
express their dissatisfaction through depression than through violence (more typically male behavior).
One in eight women will be diagnosed with depression during their lifetime, and they are twice as
likely as men to receive electroshock treatment. (RN Web,
http://rn.modernmedicine.com/rnweb/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=135916&searchString=electroshock).
Middle-class women utilize private therapy, but often consider hospitalization in midlife (if they can
afford it), when they are both overworked and beginning to feel sexually and maternally expendable.
Chesler claims that, prior to 1970’s feminism, most women simply gave in to mixed expectations of
their social condition, which provided them few options. Now, single, divorced, and widowed women
all have lower rates of mental illness than married women, and the reverse is true for men. (Hodges
1999, 90). Poor women, however, confront the penal system and state mental hospitals.
If “female” behavior – collective, emotional, “hysterical” – defines the shadow of our value system –
and of the prejudices of psychology – then the perspective within the pale is American radical
individualism, which emphasizes the individual differentiating out of the family, the heroic ego in a
hostile world.
Society manipulates definitions of sanity when unstable social conditions require scapegoats.
“Drapetomania” explained the “irrational tendency” of black slaves to flee captivity. Rush diagnosed
rebels against federal authority with “anarchia […] excess of the passion for liberty […] a form of
insanity.”6 The dominant medical perspective still reflects Puritan prejudices when it defines some
children as born “neurologically defective” (a more acceptable term than “original sin”).
The pharmaceutical industry provides the answer to nature gone wrong (previously cured by baptism
at birth). 2.5 million children and 1.5 million adults manage hyperactive and attention deficit behaviors
with Ritalin. (N.Y. Times Editorial 2006). Peter Breggin, MD, writes that the Attention Deficit (ADD)
diagnosis was developed specifically to justify “the use of drugs to subdue the behaviors of children in
the classroom.” (Breggin 2002, 110-114). The U.S. produces and consumes ninety percent of the
world’s Ritalin, most of which is given to our children, including ten percent of all ten-year-old boys.
(N.Y. Times Editorial 2006).7
However, when we hear of epidemics of depression and anxiety, we need to ask whose interest that
impression serves. Follow the numbers: between 1995 and 2002 the number of children and teens
diagnosed with depression doubled. (Ma 2005, 434 – 442). American doctors are five times more likely
than British doctors to prescribe antidepressants to minors. (Satel 2004).
Follow the politics: while minimizing poverty, irrelevant schooling and epidemic violence, the
psychiatric priesthood maintains a symbiotic relationship with the pharmaceutical industry, which
annually spends $25 billion on marketing worldwide and employs more Washington lobbyists than
there are legislators. (Crews 2007).8 Simply put, madness is big business: labeling others (Others) as
sick, scaring parents and pushing (prescribing) drugs as the only cure. Each edition of the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual has included more mental disorders than the last. The 1980 edition described
112 more than the 1968, and the 1994 edition listed over 350.9
Deinstitutionalization reduced the asylum population from 500,000 in 1955 (half of all hospital beds)
to the current 60,000. But Reagan-era budget cuts decimated the community mental health systems
that supported the released patients, making thousands homeless. (Friedrich 1975, 70). Drastic
overbuilding of hospitals in the 1970’s left many institutions in serious financial trouble. Psychiatry
provided the answer to this problem with new diagnoses like “oppositional defiant disorder.”
Marketing campaigns convinced thirty thousand families that only private hospitalization would keep
their children from suicide.10 The result: six times more adolescents – primarily white and middleclass – are confined to locked psychiatric wards than in 1980. (Males 1996, 31). Teens in public
facilities have actually decreased, because minority kids go to jails and receive no treatment at all.
Enforced hospitalization exemplifies the loss of freedom in a society that claims personal liberty as
its highest value.11 The “therapeutic state,” says Szasz, uses psychiatric justifications to strip
individuals of their rights. It creates two classes: those who are stigmatized as crazy and subject to
coercive intervention, and “us,” whose conventional behavior and well-concealed abnormalities
indicate our innocence. “Only in psychiatry are there ‘patients’ who don’t want to be patients.” No
one else – neither priest nor judge – has the psychiatrist’s power to have someone committed, even
if he came of his own free will. “If you’re in a building that you can’t get out of, that’s not a
hospital; it’s a prison.” (www.psychotherapy.net/interview/Thomas_Szasz).
Many of the involuntarily committed are considered dangerous to themselves or others. Yet too
often, psychiatrists function as the Church once did, as agents of the state, as gatekeepers. By
setting the limits of acceptable belief and behavior and the consequences of violating those limits,
they determine who is or isn’t the Other.
-------------------------------Perhaps poet Theodore Roethke romanticized suffering when he asked, “What is madness but nobility
of soul at odds with circumstance?” Yet we can’t consider mental illness outside of its social, cultural
and political contexts. Psychologist Mary Watkins writes, “The symptom as it appears in the individual
points us also toward the pathology of the world, of the culture.” (Watkins 2001, 210). Depression is
rare among non-Western people – until they move to America. (Leff 1977, 323).12 Schizophrenia is
eight times more prevalent in cultures like ours that combine high rates of poverty with low senses of
social belonging (Shulman 1997, 70).
Our characteristic American expectation of positive emotions and life-experiences makes sadness
more pathological here than elsewhere. Sociologist Christina Kotchemidova writes, “Since
‘cheerfulness’ and ‘depression’ are bound by opposition, the more one is normalized, the more
negative the other will appear.” (Kotchemidova 2005).
Ronald Laing argued that the modern family functions “to repress Eros, to induce a false consciousness
of security […] to promote a respect for ‘respectability.’” (Friedrich 1975, 91). To be respectable is to
produce, and, in America, to look cheerful. Our obsession with feeling good (“pursuing happiness”) has
long been enshrined as a fundamental principle of the consumer society. Kotchemidova writes, “Our
personal feelings are constantly encouraged or discouraged by the culture of emotions we have
internalized, and any significant deviance from the societal emotional norms is perceived as emotional
disorder that necessitates treatment.” (Kotchemidova 2005).
She argues that Americans feel significant pressure to look cheerful in order to get a job. Once they
are employed, putting on a ready-made smile is simply not enough. “Corporations expect their staff
to actually feel good about the work they do in order to appear convincing to clients.”13
----------------------------Most advertising is in some sense selling happiness or relief from unhappiness. Despite all our
“stuff,” however, our characteristic American individualism subverts social networks, making it
difficult for those in emotional or spiritual crises to find containment except through drugs, religious
literalism or madhouses. In a culture that remains Puritan at the core, we typically feel that our
suffering is our own fault, and that others who appear to be happy are normal (in religious terms,
among the elect). The cultural pressure to appear upbeat invalidates sadness, pathologizing it into
depression.14 Thus a person who feels sad may also feel guilty.
The gatekeepers who update the DSM comply with these prejudices, having reduced acceptable,
“normal bereavement” from one year to two months. Physicians typically take less than three minutes
to diagnose depression. (Levine, 2007). Psychiatrists now administer drugs instead of psychotherapy
in over seventy percent of patient visits.15
Time Magazine’s gatekeepers described 1950’s left-wing comedians Mort Sahl and Lennie Bruce as
“sicknicks.” (Jezer 1982, 287). But simultaneously, hipsters used “crazy” in positive terms. The
powerless attain some control by inverting language, as 1960’s blacks used “bad” to replace “good”
and teenagers now use “sick” to indicate approval.
Clearly, however, madness predates capitalism, and economics doesn’t explain it all. Enter Dionysus.
The term bakkheuein (“maddened by Dionysus”) occurs in over half of the extant works of Greek
tragedy. “Divine madness” came as gifts from the gods. The Muses inspired poetic madness, Apollo
was the god of prophetic madness and Aphrodite gave erotic madness.
From the Greek perspective, madness is a fundamental, archetypal aspect of the psyche. Dionysus, the
mad god himself, was the patron of ritual madness. Classicist Walter Otto understood both the Greek
world and ours: “A god who is mad! [… ]There can be a god who is mad only if there is a mad world
which reveals itself through him.” (Otto 1965, 136-40).
Plato distinguishes two basic kinds of madness: “one arising from human disease, the other when
heaven sets us free from established convention.” (Plato 1973, par. 265). This insight however, hardly
exempts us from the necessarily painful experience of transformation. Another classicist, E.R. Dodds,
described the conflicting emotions involved: “…a mixture of supreme exaltation and supreme
repulsion. […] at once holy and horrible, fulfillment and uncleanness, a sacrament and a pollution.”
(Dodds 1968, Appendix).
This ambivalence describes Dionysus himself, known both as the cause of madness (Bakkheios) and
its cure, Lusios, “the Loosener.”16 And it recalls one of his stories: the Titans (progenitors of the
gods) captured the baby Dionysus, tore him to pieces and devoured him. Athena saved the heart and
gave it to Zeus, who ate it. Out of this Dionysus was reborn. Zeus struck the Titans with thunder and
burned them to ashes, from which humans were formed. Therefore human nature has something of
the divine from Dionysus, and something evil from the Titans. The titanic aspect – excessive,
manipulative, patriarchal, inflated, violent – is expressed in the madness of mass society, which
nearly always represses the irrational, androgynous, Dionysian aspect.
Which madness do we follow? James Hillman summarizes the old thinking: “…insanity is
following the wrong god.” (Hillman &Ventura 1992, 169). In any case, repressed diversity
ultimately re-appears as psychopathology. Raphael Lopez-Pedraza writes, “Illness is essentially
repression.” (Lopez-Pedraza 1990, 58). The myths of Dionysus take this idea even further. In story
after story, those who deny the divinity of this Stranger call upon themselves a terrible fate. He
drives them raving mad – mad enough to slaughter their own children by mistake.17
His most famous story is Euripides’ Bacchae, in which King Pentheus persecutes him and his
followers. It ends when Dionysus drives the women of Thebes (led by Pentheus’ own mother,
Agave) insane, and they mistakenly kill and dismember Pentheus. But casual readers of the play
often miss a crucial distinction between the women who choose to follow Dionysus – the
bacchants– and those – the maenads (from mania, “possession”) – whom he drives insane because
they have resisted him.
It might have been different, writes Nor Hall: “Had they joined the Dionysian company willingly,
they would have enacted this state of wild abandon within a protective circle.” (Hall 1988, 31).18
------------------------------------Robert Johnson writes,
We hear a screech of brakes and a crash […] Cold chills go up and down our spine; we say
“How awful!” – and run outside to see the accident. This is poor-quality Dionysus […] what
happens to a basic human drive that has not been lived out for nearly four thousand years.
(Johnson 1987, 19).
When we agree on a definition of Apollonian “normality” peopled by contented, comfortable, positivethinking citizens working or recreating in the mild sunlight of a suburban world, we naturally, perhaps
desperately, long for a visitation from the darkness.
I suggest that America, with its history of unrepentant slavery, aggressive genocide and puritanical
sexuality, has and continues to identify – and demonize – the Dionysian impulse with racial and sexual
minorities. And our unique mythology of innocence functions to keep the white, middle-class safely
within the pale of acceptable belief.
“Poor-quality Dionysus” indicates the return of the repressed. “Mad,” after all, has other meanings:
angry, rabid. If we think of some mental illness as a socially powerless, alienated person’s attempt to
unite body and feeling – to resurrect Dionysus and the other gods from the underworld – or if we
substitute “uninitiated” for “mentally ill” – madness can be part of a natural if painful process of
restoring balance.19
As Jung taught, the society that emphasizes Apollonian values and represses the Dionysian sets up a
dynamic in which the god can only return as symptoms. This impacts many women who feel compelled
to repress feminine values. In taking on the compulsively driven, cutthroat standards of the corporate
world, they are like the bacchants who cry out to Dionysus for release. Marion Woodman writes that
when women elevate thinness at any price to the highest value, the repressed gods take vengeance
through somatic distortions like obesity or anorexia:
The Dionysian “madness” inherent in compulsive eating may be a modern expression of what
was earlier known as “possession” and in more recent years as “hysteria” [… ]The symptom
may be the cross on which thousands are forced to writhe because they are unaware of the
androgynous god striving towards consciousness. (Woodman 1980, 9-10, 103-4).
Countless Americans retain the memory of trauma – whether from racism, poverty, abuse, or PTSD. In
broader terms, no one escapes the modern condition. We all suffer from the collective emotional effects
of the long-term shift from indigenous paganism to monotheism, urbanization and industrialism. We
are all, to some extent, alienated from the Earth and from our bodies. We are the net products of a
process that has taken some 200 generations to unfold, reaching its peak with many of our recent
political and corporate leaders.20 Large-scale denial of the sorrows of our history means that nearly
every American suffers from suppressed grief, which returns as anxiety, addiction, narcissism,
depression or merely a vague sense of guilt.
The mad culture, led by madmen, continually requires new scapegoats to sacrifice and restore our
innocence. Three million Viet Nam veterans (and now, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans) carry the burden
of delayed stress for us all. Movies that portray them as ticking time bombs allow us to consider
memory’s immense power without confronting its universal application. But, warns Dionysus, we are
all ticking.
Who best displays our national shadow for us but our children? Look at their clothing: baggy pants
drooping below the waste, butt-cracks showing, untied shoes, oversized, black, hooded sweatshirts.
This depressed style of presentation common among adolescents everywhere, regardless of ethnicity or
social class, cries out: Look at us, look at what we carry for you!
-------------------------Depressed people carry the shadow of our manic celebration of progress, extraversion, cheerfulness and
grandiosity, below which is a bedrock layer of Calvinism. They are the canaries in the mineshaft,
showing us that the more popular culture emphasizes these characteristics, the more depression spreads.
We who channel the madness into fundamentalism or consumerism may feel temporarily welcome
among the elect, while the Others – those who cannot do so – are proof of our righteous standing and
innocence.
At least since the beginning of the nuclear age, popular culture has hesitantly acknowledged this
condition.21 Novels like Catch-22, Slaughterhouse Five and One Flew Over The Cookoo’s Nest hinted
that modernity, with its stressful pace of change and nearly constant fear and anxiety, is mad, or
maddening. Paul Shepard describes an “epidemic of the psychopathic mutilation of ontogeny” – in
simple terms, we don’t grow up the way nature intended anymore. We are, by indigenous standards,
children. (Shepard 1982, 124).
We casually call ourselves “normal neurotics.” Medications and alcohol level our highs and lows,
effectively casting out both angels and demons. Still, twelve million Americans suffer from bipolar
disease and perhaps forty million experience anxiety.22
Clearly, any caregiver hopes to reduce suffering. “Successful treatment,” writes E.F. Torrey, “means
the control of symptoms.” (Fuller 1988). But when psychotherapy merely attempts to recover a sense
of “productive normalcy,” that condition which is itself a cause of our unhappiness, it becomes yet
another effort to recover lost innocence – and a condemnation of an archetype ruled by the mythic
image of Dionysus.23
--------------------------------------Critic John Zerzan argues, “To assert that we can be whole/enlightened/healed within the present
madness amounts to endorsing the madness.” (Zerzan 2002, 158-9). It is partially a question of
awareness, much of which is conditioned by the media, whose primary purpose, lest we forget, is to
sell us to advertisers.
On the one hand, we collude, veiling both our complicity and our suffering. On the other, media
obsession with crime and terrorism produces an on-going sense of anxiety.24 This decades-long, roiling,
alternating sense of both paranoia and denial describes our peculiarly American form of collective
madness.
This has occurred – since long before 9/11 – in three major ways. On the positive side, pundits present
a unified front of reassurance and denial: Liberals overrate problems, global warming is a fiction,
racism is a thing of the past, Iraqis welcome us as liberators, etc. Television idealizes the nuclear
family and small-town values in cloying commercials that convey a ubiquitous, Disney-style
innocence. Sit-com protagonists are almost exclusively young, attractive, middle-class whites whose
problems – caused individually, not systemically – consistently resolve themselves. Reality shows are
Social Darwinist fables in which the ablest triumph but everyone gets a hug. It’s all good. Essayist
Michael Ventura, however, measures how deeply “[…] people know that ‘it’ is not all right […] by
how much money they are willing to pay to be ceaselessly told it is.” (Ventura 1985, 97)
The negative side involves both sanitized violence (“It’s not real, Dad!”) as well as a constant
atmosphere of low-level dread: illegal immigrants, teen pregnancy, drugs, urban violence, satanic
cults, child molesters, “security” rituals at airports (do we laugh or cry when we give up our water
bottles?), and TV news, where “if it bleeds it leads.” Fifty-five percent of local newscast coverage of
children concerns violence. (Glassner 1999, 70). As a result, three out of four parents worry –
unnecessarily – that strangers will kidnap their children.25 Between 1990 and 1998, as murder rates
declined dramatically, murder stories on network newscasts increased by 600 percent, not counting
O.J. Simpson stories. (Glassner 1999, xxi).
Ignoring race and the political-economic sources of terrorism, we fret about issues that the media
choose for us.26 After several generations of TV, we differentiate between ignorance and apathy: I
don’t know and I don’t care.27 Meanwhile, the Dionysian scapegoat – defined as lacking the essential
Protestant virtue of self-control – presents a tempting return to innocence. Everyone can avoid
discussing gun control when newspapers editorialize, “It’s Not Guns, It’s Killer Kids.” (Glassner
1999, xix). We dread the disturbed individual, the bad seed, rather than systemic inequities. Thus, our
emphasis on individualism links happy denial to this constant, low-level background of fear.
Periodically, when actual – or contrived – episodes of terror evoke the old frontier paranoia, we
jettison our moral and democratic priorities like recycled computers.
The third factor is our electronically enhanced mania. In most public, urban spaces – stores, shopping
malls and sports arenas – we endure unrelenting onslaughts of loud music, blinking lights and highdefinition visual images. Often the atmosphere approaches that of gambling casinos, which are
deliberately designed to create “altered states” of consciousness, so as to heighten anxiety and
encourage shopping. However, this anxiety never fully dissipates, and we acclimate to greater levels of
it.
This awkward combination of fear, denial and over-stimulation has ruled our consciousness during the
sixty years of television, which was born amid both consumerism and McCarthyism. From the start,
Lucille Ball diverted us while Richard Nixon admitted, “People react to fear, not love.” The roots of
our paranoia go back to the original confrontation of Puritans and Indians. Ever since, we’ve held the
contradictory notions of chosen people and eternal vigilance. If we are attacked, the release of
disillusioned energy drives us to engage in, condone – or happily watch – extreme violence. Our lost
innocence – we have done so much good – justifies our Biblical fury.28 Bad dreams constantly interrupt
our 400-year sleep of denial, and we awake exhausted.
For thirty-five years we’ve flocked by the millions to disaster films. This genre works both sides of the
fear/denial dichotomy by heightening fear of apocalyptic retribution and then cleanly resolving the
threat through the intercession of selfless heroes.
The pathology of this condition is that it subjects us to overwhelmingly persistent messages that
completely discount our emotional, intuitive and moral intelligence. It is exactly the same wounding
that children receive if adults tell them that they (the children) don’t really feel something – and this
happens all day long, every day of our lives. We all learn this: My ways of evaluating reality are
failures. And, since failure in America is always moral failure, I am also a failure. As Jerry Mander
writes, “Television isolates people from the environment, from each other, and from their own
senses.” (Manders 1978, 168). The result is epidemics of depression, self-medication through
substance abuse, consumerism and fundamentalism – and a peculiar aspect of “poor-quality
Dionysus,” the distanced, vicarious enjoyment of violence.
After 9/11 the mad fusion of fear and denial reached cliché proportions with color-coded terrorist
alerts. Americans awakened daily to a degree of apprehension that shifted according to un-confirmable
“findings.”29 However, most (employed, pre-recession, white) people had the existential experience of
nothing being particularly wrong. By 2006, seventy-nine percent expected another terrorist attack
soon, but only twenty percent were personally concerned.
(www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=119758). In psychology experiments, such
intermittent reinforcement drives lab animals insane. And it drives humans to release the tension by
sacrificing a scapegoat.30
With our characteristic denial of death, Americans also ensure that we carry great loads of
unexpressed grief. African shaman Malidoma Somé observes: “A non-Westerner arriving in this
country for the first time is struck by how [… ] (Americans) pride themselves for not showing how
they feel about anything.” (Somé 1993, 96).
This succinct, tribal definition of alienation brings us back to the loss of the Dionysian experience. If
we can neither grieve nor tolerate the vision of the dark goddess and her bloody, dismembered son,
then we can’t experience joy either. We tolerate pale substitutes: romance novels, horror movies (with
characters who refuse to die), the spectacles of popular music and sports, Sunday church and happy
endings. We learn early to emphasize the light (“lite”) and exclude the dark.
It follows that we’re fascinated with media (mediated) violence. Death’s repressed experience reemerges in images. As suppression of sex creates pornography, American attitudes toward death result
in what sociologist Ellen Zinner calls “necrography:” highly sensationalistic, electronic mayhem. This
substitute gratification allows us to meet death and remain unharmed; thrill and pseudo-terror replace
grief.31 Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, however, insisted that our denial of death “has only increased our
anxiety and contributed to our… aggressiveness – to kill in order to avoid…facing of our own death.”
(Kubler-Ross 1969, 15).
How does this happen? Subject to vast, impersonal, forces impacting us from remote, Apollonic
distances – government, corporations, junk phone calls – we may refrain from exploding in personal
violence. By tolerating long-distance violence against the Third World, however, we innocently
displace our rage upon the Other in the same way we’ve received it.
America was characterized from the start by extreme violence. It was present in the “idea” of America
– not the abstract ideals of the founding fathers, but the projection of darkness onto the Other in the
seventeenth century. By the Industrial Revolution, Americans had been slaughtering Indians and
enslaving Africans for two centuries. Technology certainly amplified alienation. But as a seed of
depression and long-distance violence, it fell on fertile soil that had been well prepared.
The final factor is TV, which helps us remain sheltered from the world and our impact upon it. “We
are so desperate for this,” writes Ventura, that we are willing to accept ignorance as a substitute for
innocence.” (Ventura 1985, 94). On the other hand, even as programming perpetuates fear, it
desensitizes us to the actual effects of violence.32 We innocently observe and quickly forget.
Never having confronted either our complicity or our own suffering, we must find a way to see them.
We are so abstracted that we don’t care whether death occurs on a three-inch game-boy or in a
Palestinian street. The only nation to use atomic weapons also invented napalm, cluster bombs and
“anti-personnel” mines. The nation that exports thousands of hours of electronic mayhem33 and has
more handguns than citizens is shocked – shocked! – each time a (white) teenager massacres his
schoolmates.34
Somé describes the consequences of refusing to grieve: “People who do not know how to weep
together are people who cannot laugh together.” (Somé 1993, 96). To paraphrase Mexican poet
Octavio Paz: a culture that begins by denying death will end by denying life.
----------------------A major function of the myth of American innocence is to channel our grief toward either
“Titanic” distractions or Dionysian depression. Conversely, from the indigenous perspective of
Guatemalan shaman Martin Prechtel, depression is, quite simply, “the refusal to grieve…petrified
sorrow.”35 Many men are well aware of this condition. One of the most common statements at men’s
retreats is: “I haven’t cried in thirty years – and I won’t start. If I did, it would never stop.” This leads
to a view of madness as the fine line between delusion and revelation, or between the return of the
repressed and spontaneous initiation – the territory of The Bacchae.
The return of Dionysus can appear as psychological dismemberment. For centuries, however, such
experiences have typically occurred outside of any ritual containers. Schizophrenics enter liminal space
alone, without guides. Freud felt that psychoanalysis couldn’t help them, and psychiatry now diagnoses
them with bio-chemical imbalances or genetic defects that require lifelong drug treatment to repress the
symptoms.36
Jung, however, saw psychosis as a natural renewal process, a spontaneous, unconscious attempt at
radical inner transformation, which he termed metanoia. John Weir Perry argued that we should
“regard the term ‘sickness’ as pertaining not to the acute turmoil but to the pre-psychotic personality
[…] in need of profound reorganization.”37 Many of his patients described visions consistent with the
ancient symbolism of kingship and initiation. Joseph Campbell wrote that such fantasy “perfectly
matches that of the mythological hero journey.” (Campbell 1988, 208). From this perspective, madness
becomes an opportunity, under the dubious guidance of the mad god himself and his priests.38
Mircea Eliade described shamanic initiations in Siberia: “The profane man is being ‘dissolved’ and a
new personality…prepared for birth.” Initiates are torn apart: “ They ‘die’ and […] are cut up by
demons […] their bones are cleaned, the flesh scraped off.” (Eliade 1995, 88-91). Similar images can
appear in the visions of modern people who descend into madness. “If they are not supplied from
without,” writes Campbell, “…they will have to be announced again, through dream, from within.”
(Campbell 1949, 12).39
What is being “dis-membered”? It is phallic, isolated, heroic masculinity that breaks down for a
new identity to emerge. Dismemberment has one advantage, writes Nor Hall: “…we get to see all
the parts.” (Hall 1988, 37).
In historical accounts of persons who went mad but also had religious experiences, most took their
revelations literally. They had visions of death, apocalypse, crucifixion, sexual inversion, and rebirth –
all images of initiation. Those who did recover developed a poetic way of thinking past the literal to the
metaphoric. In 1830 John Perceval wrote, “The spirit speaks poetically, but the lunatic takes the literal
sense.” (Bateson 1961). Hillman observes, “Only as Perceval becomes humorous, doubtful and ironic
does he become sane […] he moved from gravity to levity.” (Lecture, Pacifica Graduate Institute,
March 2004).
But Perceval was an exception. Most get stuck in “chronic liminality,” writes Robert Moore. In the
myth of Ariadne, many heroes entered the underground labyrinth, only to be killed by the Minotaur.
Theseus defeated it because he was grounded; he had kept in contact with the world above by means of
Ariadne’s thread. It enabled him to return to the light (normal consciousness) after completing his task.
Those who have no thread of connection to community wremain below in that “labyrinth of
transformative space,” but only partially transformed. Thus, says Moore, many pathological states are
merely failed initiations. The danger is that approaching the symbolic brush with death of initiation can
evoke literal death. One of his clients was lucid enough to say, “I need to die, before I kill myself.”
(Moore 2001, 48). Seven centuries earlier, when people could still think metaphorically, Rumi advised,
“Die before you die.”
Until the seventeenth century, Europeans believed that madmen were close to the unseen world and
accepted them within the community, rather then banishing them to the margins. Traditional Africans
still perceive distress as a call for help: madness is a sign that the community (who know nothing of
“family systems therapy”) is sick. They perceive madmen as undergoing crises resulting from the
activity of spirit and protect them, hoping that their healing will benefit the community. To them, a sick
world speaks through the most sensitive of us.
Perry and Laing attempted to provide just this kind of ritual space in the late 1960’s and 1970’s. The
therapeutic community movement aimed to support people while they broke down and went through
spontaneous healing, rather than reinforcing the existing ego defenses that maintained the underlying
conflict.
But can men transform themselves – by themselves – in a world that lacks real community? Shortly
before killing himself, Ernest Hemingway wrote, “What do you think happens to a man going on 62
when he realizes that he can never write the books and stories he promised himself? […] If I can’t exist
on my terms, then existence is impossible.” (Freidrich 1975, 108).
Suicide was his failed initiation, the heroic ego’s literal response to the symbolic challenge of
transformation. By contrast, James Joyce brought his distressed daughter to Jung, who could see that
she was psychotic, but he was more interested in Joyce: “His ‘psychological’ style is definitely
schizophrenic, but with the difference […] the ordinary patient cannot help talking and thinking in such
a way, while Joyce willed it and […] developed it with all his creative forces.” (Jervis 1999, 93).
Joyce had both the will and the talent to move his madness into art. Some just get lucky. One man,
stuck in an unsatisfying life and ignorant of mythology, fell into a midlife psychosis, compelled to
draw grapevines on his walls. Fortunately, a therapist introduced him to a relationship with Dionysus,
and he gradually achieved healing through alliance with the right god. (Personal communication). As
Plato wrote, “…the greatest blessings come by way of madness, indeed of madness that is heavensent.” (Phaedrus, 244b).
-------------------------------Dionysus is an image of our dismembered soul. We see ideals in other gods, but we see ourselves in
him. He reflects our diminished, modern condition. But paradoxically he also represents our instinctual,
embodied, integrated, original face. “I'm looking for the face I had,” wrote Yeats, “before the world
was made.” And his unique condition is one of his gifts to us. The only god who suffers, he models the
universal connection between personal wound and intrinsic purpose. Finally, he shows us the way back
to wholeness – the ecstasy of being outside ourselves. But with no communally accepted and ritually
precise methods of accepting his invitation, we encounter ecstasy’s other face: violence and horror.
Denying him, we force him upon others, because he must reside somewhere. Then he recruits his
followers from imprisoned or marginalized regions of the culture – and the psyche – those with nothing
to lose.
He requires that we endure the tension of irreconcilable opposites – ecstasy/violence, male/female,
sacred/profane – and resist the temptation to choose. As soon as we locate him in one half of any of his
polarities, we repress the other side, and it begins to plot vengeance. Each truth is a mask that conceals
its opposite. He enters our lives when that opposite quality breaks out past the mask.40 Often, by that
point, it is too late to appease him.
The distinction between the maenads and the bacchants is crucial. Approaching the darkness in a ritual
manner, within a strong communal container, we may pass through madness into a deeper sanity. The
bacchants sought a holy madness caused by – but also cured by – Dionysus. They provoked extreme
emotions, but opposed the other, more destructive madness he imposed upon the maenads. They
engaged in the first to avoid the second, losing their minds to become sane.
Athens incorporated toned-down Dionysian rites into its religion. Among its major festivals were the
Anthesteria, when he returned from the underworld, and the Greater Dionysia, celebrated with
dramatic presentations. The mad, drunken god was the patron of Greece’s most profound cultural
creation, tragedy. The entire male population of Athens crowded together in the theater in broad
daylight. Confronted with irresolvable conflicts, they suffered like Dionysus himself, weeping
openly in a purging (katharsis) of emotion.41 Aristotle (Poetics, 1449b, 27-28) explained that this
came through “pity and fear,” but classicist W.B. Stanford translates eleos (“pity”) as
“compassionate grief.” (Stanford 1983, 24). They left the theater exhausted but revitalized, not
because their differences had been resolved, nor because a victim had been sacrificed for their sins,
but because they had suffered together.
In the Dionysian festivals, solemnity and mourning combined with dancing, drunkenness, and inversion
of sex roles. Wild processions with large phalluses recalled his mythic intrusions into the city – and the
mind. The rational Greeks respected the irrational. In myth, Apollo – most exemplary Greek God of
reason, beauty, exalted discourse and refined culture, voluntarily relinquished his shrine at Delphi for
three months every year, inviting his raving, trailer-trash, half-brother Dionysus to move in.
-------------------------------------What would a culture that invited Dionysus back look like? The easy answer is a replay of the 1960’s:
sex, drugs & rock ‘n roll, wild abandon, relaxed boundaries, blurring of gender roles, long hair, colorful
clothing, anarchy, irresponsibility, spontaneity, and chaos. The Id conquers the Superego. A return to
childhood and innocence…
Wait. Stop the fantasy. First, lest we forget, when the the archetype emerged in the form of sexually
ambivalent Rock stars, its darker side also appeared as disturbed but charismatic figures – Jim Jones,
Charles Manson and David Koresh – who led crazed maenads on lethal rampages.
Second, I have already described the repression of Dionysus as a return to innocence. To recapitulate:
the myth of American innocence is a story we tell ourselves about ourselves, a series of narratives that
presents America as a beacon of freedom, equality and opportunity, the land of the new start, where
anything is possible if we only work hard enough. An America divinely inspired to spread those ideals,
that only goes to war to defend democracy and spread the pure light of freedom. Pure. Light.
The myth, however, requires that America and Americans cast a large part of ourselves into the
darkness. It requires a large population of Others, from the Native Americans and the African slaves to
non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants to gay people to international communism and the current Other, Muslim
terrorism, all of whom the myth has weighed down with Dionysian characteristics. Because they have
carried Dionysus, we haven’t had to.
Dionysus Lusios relaxed the boundaries of ego, family and society.42 To truly invite him back into
white, Christian, patriarchal, American culture after so long is to make a huge cultural decision to relax
those boundaries without knowing what will come in. This is the essence of Dionysian ritual as it is still
practiced in places like Haiti: create the container, invoke the gods, then step back and get out of the
way. It is to invite the madness back, in hopes that it might save us from our own culturally induced,
hyper-rational, disembodied madness.
Dionysus was the only god who died and was reborn, and the only god (with the exception of Demeter)
who grieved. Here is the clue. For long-term healing to occur, America will have to pass through, to
spend much time, in the territory of grief. For Dionysus, if we truly welcome him, will open up the
boundaries of innocence and memory, and through the gaps (as poet William Stafford wrote) will come
“…with shouts, the horrible errors of childhood storming out to play through the broken dike.”
Consider another story. Hera was disgusted by Hephaestus, her lame, ugly son, and hurled him out of
Olympus. He survived and was ultimately accepted, but never forgot his early abuse. Eventually, he
took his vengeance by tricking Hera into sitting in the infamous chair, where she was instantly bound.
Murray Stein argues that behind the rejection of the son is the rejection of the mother under Patriarchy.
The result is a cycle of mutual ambivalence and hostility. In Jungian terms, a man’s repressed feminine
“marries” his shadow complex of repressed masculinity, giving the feminine an evil tone. Projected
onto actual women, this feminine threat justifies his unwillingness to become emotionally intimate.
This emotional distance describes a long series of American heroes, from Daniel Boone to Rambo,
who unleash their violence upon the Other, save the innocent community and then ride off into the
sunset – away from women and all relational values.
But this story entertains the possibility of an integrated masculine identity. The war god Aries was
unable to force Hephaestus to relent. So Zeus called upon Dionysus, who got him drunk. When he
woke from his stupor, Hephaestus beheld Aphrodite and fell in love. They married, Hera was
released and peace was restored, all because of Dionysus. Getting Hephaestus drunk symbolizes
initiation into a masculinity that has made peace with the mother complex. Dionysus, says Stein, is
both the “agent and the product of initiation… the integration of feminine spirit into masculine
consciousness.” (Stein, Murray, audiotape: “Feminine Spirit and Dionysus”).
------------------------------------Before he bestows these gifts, however, Dionysus will confront us with the madness of our history:
the massacres, smallpox-laden blankets, slaughter of the buffalo, sexual repression, witch hunts,
thefts of resources, robber barons, invasions, B-52’s, napalm, deforestation, My Lai, Wounded Knee,
Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, embargoes, assassinations, coups-de’tat, slave-whippings, selling of
children, castrations, rubber hoses, lynchings and stolen elections. The children ignored and the lives
wasted working at unsatisfying jobs while chasing the elusive pie in the sky. The sorrows. The
madness.
An unveiled look at American history reveals an enormous catalogue of injustice. It also requires,
however, that we be willing to imagine a different story. America has two histories; the first is literal,
unveiled history. As painful as it is to contemplate, the truth undermines the myths of innocence and
good intentions. Persisting in the “search for the Other” – Dionysus in America – we imagine a second
history that psychologist Stephen Diggs calls “unconscious and alchemical.” (Diggs 1997, 26).
This is the story of America’s slow transformation and descent from the Apollonian heights of the
heroic, isolated ego and the abstract, distanced killing of life. It is America’s return to its body, to the
communal experience of shared joy and suffering; healing as a gift of the Other.
However, honoring Dionysus means re-learning the old rituals of mourning from indigenous people,
because we are at the end of an age, and the appropriate behavior at the death of anything –
especially an empire – is mourning. In Beloved Toni Morrison used “disremembered past” to
describe that which is neither remembered nor forgotten, but haunts the living as a ghost. The path to
healing, for the soul and for the soul of the culture, goes directly through the recovery of memory –
inviting the return of the repressed – through art and ritual.43
I envision a culture that invites, invokes and celebrates its own grief. And we have only to look to
the Other to re-discover the way. Consider the Jazz funerals of New Orleans. The traditional
procession has two sections. The “first line” consists of officials, musicians, the family of the
deceased, and pallbearers. The “second line” of local people follows behind. Everyone marches from
church to cemetery, while the band plays slow hymns and dirges. This is the first stage of the
familiar three-part ritual/initiation format. The second stage is internment at the cemetery, where the
dead and the living briefly share liminal space.
The third stage is the procession home. Now the second line takes over and the tone changes from
melancholy to ecstasy. The band (now in the rear, separating the living from the dead) shifts into
high-spirited tunes, and the mourners’ slow cadence becomes wild dancing, or “second lining.”
Returning to the neighborhood, they celebrate the life of the deceased; in making ritual closure with
the dead, the mourners achieve re-integration into their community.
Imagine combining two Dionysian concepts, Greek Tragedy and New Orleans Funerals. Imagine mass
public rituals attended by the citizenry and political leaders, in which warriors and civilians, rich and
poor, women and men, white and colored, gay and straight, and crazy and “normal” confront the
impossible paradoxes and crimes of our history and suffer together. Imagine an American President
standing in this container, begging forgiveness for his country from an African-American and a Native
American. Imagine the community pouring out grief for all those who died as soldiers, victims and
activists, and even for the forests that once covered the continent. Imagine the relief at having finally
shed tears together as a mosaic of uncommon peoples sharing the land with the Other, and the gratitude
bordering on ecstasy with which an entire nation dances the “second line” on its way back home.
Imagine a critical mass of individuals willing to bear their own shadows, unlike Pentheus, the boyking who realized too late that he was a “man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” (Isaiah 53:3).
Death before rebirth. Such madness might cure us of our madness.
For four centuries, Dionysus has been willing to offer America images of its own dark soul, so it can
see what it must reconcile with. Imagine if America stopped trying to force those images back outside
the walls of the city, back onto the shoulders of the Other. Imagine (to use Christian terminology) that
he loves us so much that he offers us the path to suffering – and eventually to laughing – together.
Imagine a language like ancient Greek, whose word for “stranger” (xenos) also meant “guest.”
Before bringing down the hammer on Pentheus (Bacchae 802) Dionysus pleads:
Friend, you can still save the situation.
1
--My book, Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence, explores this theme
in detail.
2
--All statistics in the section from NIMH website (except as noted),
www.nimh.gov/publicat/numbers.cfm
3
--Cross-National Collaborative Group, 1992. The World Heath Organization estimates that by 2020
depression will become one of the most common disabling disorders in the world, second only to heart
disease. (Kleinman & Cohen, 1997).
4
--Rush, the father of American psychiatry, advised, “…TERROR (his italics)…should be employed in
the cure of madness…FEAR, accompanied with PAIN, and a sense of SHAME, has sometimes cured
this disease.” (Quoted in Frank, 1995, 165).
5
--As recently as 1984, a guideline published by an association of private hospitals suggested that
sexual promiscuity was cause for “immediate acute-care hospitalization” for teenage girls. (Glassner,
1999, 77).
6
--Quoted in Bruce E. Levine, “How Teenage Rebellion Has Become a Mental Illness”
(www.alternet.org/story/75081/)
7
--One study revealed that up to twenty percent of fifth-grade boys were receiving stimulant drugs
from school officials (Breggin 2002).
8
--The New York Times reported (6/8/08) on Psychiatrist Joseph Biederman: “A world-renowned
Harvard child psychiatrist whose work has helped fuel an explosion in the use of powerful antipsychotic medicines in children earned at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from
2000 to 2007 but for years did not report much of this income to university officials.” Due in part to
Biederman's influence, the number of American children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder
increased 40-fold from 1994 to 2003. (Bruce E. Levine, “Exposed: Harvard Shrink Gets Rich Labeling
Kids Bipolar,” www.alternet.org/story/88333/)
9
--Crews writes (“Talking Back to Prozac,” Ibid), “Those stigmata, furthermore, are presented in a
user-friendly checklist form that awards equal value to each symptom within a disorder’s entry. In
Bingo style, for example, a patient who fits five out of the nine listed criteria for depression is tagged
with the disorder. It is little wonder, then, that drug makers’ advertisements now urge consumers to
spot their own defectiveness through reprinted DSM checklists and then to demand correction via the
designated pills.”
10
--Skeptics, however, called the new disease “KID” (Kid-with-Insurance Disorder), pointing out
the amazing rate of “recovery” once the insurance ran out and parents had to start paying out-ofpocket (Males 1996, 242-253).
11
--It also evokes the astonishingly brutal history of treatment of the mentally ill, in which all manor
of torture was used well into the 20th century, including mustard baths, application of hot irons,
“punishment chairs,” bleeding with leaches, electro shock and “refrigeration therapy.” Most relevant
to the myth of innocence is this quote by C.S. Lewis: “…those who torment us for our own good will
torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience…” (Frank 1995,
156-167).
12
--The longer Mexican immigrants live in the U.S., the greater their likelihood of experiencing
psychological problems. (Vega 1999).
13
--(Kotchemidova 2005). To her, twentieth century America took on cheerfulness as an identifying
characteristic. The new consumer economy of the 1920s called for cheerful salespeople careful to
avoid provocation of vital customers. A powerful emotional deintensification process also began at
that time. The American etiquette obliged “niceness,” which excluded strong emotionality. Railroads
introduced “Smile School” in the thirties. Among the dozens of self-help cheerfulness manuals, Dale
Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) sold more than fifteen million copies. In
the fifties, the media industry invented special devices to induce cheerfulness – something it has not
done for any other emotion. The TV “laugh track” is a curious American invention, still resisted in
many countries. In the 1980s politicians discovered cheerfulness. All Presidents since Ronald Reagan
smile in their official photos. And of course we have the “smiley face,” which sold over 50 million
buttons at its peak in 1971. Today there is a “Smiley Section” on EBay running for 45 pages.
14
--Depression has been defined as “disturbance of affect.” But “affect” is culturally determined.
Positive expectations and assumptions of the right to the “pursuit of happiness” make feelings of sadness
and despair more pathological in America than anywhere else. Hazleton (1984) argues that feeling good
has become no longer simply a right, but “a social and personal duty.” If we cannot accept normal
depression, we become ashamed and alienated from ourselves, and this is what makes it so lethal.
15
--The percentage of patient visits to a psychiatrist involving any psychotherapy fell to 28.9 percent
in 2004-2005 from 44.4 percent in 1996-1997 (Mojtabai & Olfson, 2008). Bruce Levine argues that
Psychiatry has increasingly replaced psychotherapy with “medication management,” which largely
consists of symptom assessment and prescription updates. It typically takes 10 or 15 minutes and is
scheduled every two to three months, rather than weekly, as is psychotherapy. Insurance companies
favor medication management because it is so cheap, and drug companies favor it for obvious reasons.
Psychiatrists themselves favor it because they can make far more money with it. Those who offer only
medication management routinely make nearly triple the income as do those who provide mostly
psychotherapy. (“Does It Make Sense to Treat Depression with Drugs?” -www.alternet.org/story/95114/does_it_make_sense_to_treat_depression_with_drugs__/)
16
--Curiously, in the Tutzujil Mayan language of Guatemala, the word for alcohol translates as “the
Tear Loosener.”
17
--On one level these stories reflect historical opposition to his cult. But what are the archetypal
implications? Why does the gentle god of ecstasy arrive with such ferocity? King Lykourgos
persecuted young Dionysus, who hid under the sea, protected by goddesses. He re-emerged, no
longer ecstatic but furious, driving Lykourgos mad enough to kill his own son. Boutes, who chased
the maenads into the sea, went mad and drowned himself. Perseus killed some of Dionysus’
followers. The god responded by entrancing the Argive women, who devoured their own infants.The
three daughters of Minyas scolded Dionysus’ devotees. Disguised as a maiden, he warned them of
their folly, but they ignored her. So he changed himself into a lion, then a bull and then a panther. Ivy
and vines grew over their looms. In their madness they dismembered and devoured one of their
children, then roamed the mountains until Dionysus finally changed them into birds. When Dionysus
approached Eleuther’s three daughters wearing a black goatskin, they rejected him and he drove them
mad. They were cured only when their town instituted the worship of Dionysus Melanaigis (“of the
black goatskin – in league with the dead.”) Similarly, King Proetus’ three daughters went mad,
infecting other women, and all left their families. Some ate their own children and wandered as cows
in heat, fitting partners for the bull-god. Zeus asked Ino and her husband Athamas to hide the baby
Dionysus from Hera. But she discovered the ruse and struck them with madness. Athamas killed one
of his sons, thinking he was a stag, and Ino threw the other into boiling water.
18
--Hall is actually writing about the daughters of Proetus, but the principle is the same.
19
--“Restoring balance” is precisely how African Shaman Malidoma Somé describes the purpose of
ritual. (Somé 1993).
20
--Psychiatrist Russel Lee concluded that each of the political leaders of World War I was bonkers:
“The very qualities of egocentricity and megalomania characteristic of many psychoses are precisely
those that lead men to aspire to high office.” (Freidrich 1975, 213). Also see Bower, Bruce, “The
Predator’s Gaze -- Scientists Explore the Frightening World of Psychopaths”
(www.sciencenews.org/articles/20061209/bob9.asp). He describes psychopaths as “superficially
charming, intelligent people who don't feel deep emotions and lie about almost everything because they
neither understand nor care about others,” and argues that “in today's rapidly changing business world,
increased corporate rewards for risk taking and nonconformity can offer the psychopath faster career
movement than before.”
21
--Indeed, the first modern (some say post-modern) novel, Don Quixote, takes madness as its basic
theme.
22
--Bipolar disease: www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/33225.php; anxiety:
www.adaa.org/AboutADAA/PressRoom/Stats&Facts.asp
23
--James Yandell (2002) writes that he once heard a Freudian analyst state that the goal of
psychoanalysis is “the eradication of mystery.”
24
--Jeffrey Scheuer claims that by the time the average student graduates from high school, he/she has
viewed 18,000 TV murders. (Scheuer 2001, 170).
25
--Crimes in which a child is snatched by a stranger are actually quite rare. Of almost 800,000 missing
children in a one-year period, just 115 were victims of a stereotypical kidnapping, and half of those
involved sexual assault. (D. Jennings and D. Spangenberger, “Do tough sex laws help or hurt?” Dallas
Morning News, 10/21/2007).
26
--Ten percent of women in their forties expect to die of breast cancer, while the real odds are one in
250. (Glassner 1999, xvi, xxv).
27
--Poll researchers in 1990 concluded that Americans “…know less and care less about news and
public affairs than any other generation of Americans in the past 50 years.” The Age of Indifference: A
Study of Young Americans and How They View the News (Washington, D.C.: Times Mirror Center for
The People & The Press, 1990). Thirteen years later, when asked whether the U.S. found weapons of
mass destruction in Iraq in 2003, 33% of FOX viewers said “yes,” as opposed to 19% of ABC viewers
and 11% of PBS viewers (“Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War,” PIPA/Knowledge Networks
Poll, October 2003).
28
--Or, to reverse the equation: Our need to explode in violence requires a catalyst, lost innocence.
29
--Journalist William Rivers Pitt documents at least five occasions when damaging reports of
administration malfeasance emerged in the media, only to be forgotten when the government quickly
raised the terror alert. (www.truthout.org/docs_2006/071307J.shtml). Also see Tim Dickinson,
“Truth or Terrorism? The Real Story Behind Five Years of High Alerts”
(www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/18056504/truth_or_terrorism_the_real_story_behind_five_yea
rs_of_high_alerts).
30
--The only other comparable emotional mix is the universal war experience of long periods of
boredom interrupted by periods of absolute terror. Psychologist Edward Tick writes, “This twin
dimensionality…makes it surreal, almost hallucinatory. Horror is married to boredom, fascination to
putrescence.” (Tick 2005, 26).
31
--Quoted in Stephenson 1985, 40. John Stephenson adds another facet of our acceptance of
substitute gratification: demonization of the real thing. He received junk mail with purple ink warning
of enclosed materials dealing with funerals. The only other time he’d received mail with warning on
the outside contained sexually explicit materials.
32
--We can theoretically take two populations of children and predict that, as young adults fifteen
years later, those who watch more TV will be more violent than those who watch less. (Kaiser Family
Foundation Publication # 3335 -- www.kff.org)
33
--American movies accounted for 80% of global box office revenue in 2003 (Galeota 2004, 22).
34
--Anti-racist activist Tim Wise argues that the media generally “deracializes” incidents of violence
by whites, portraying them as the acts of aberrant, inexplicable individuals, while portraying black
violence as group tendencies. (“A New Round of White Denial: Drugs and Race in the ‘Burbs’”
www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45/334.html). White males have perpetrated almost all of the fortyodd mass shootings on high school and college campuses.
35
--Prechtel, Martin, Grief And Praise, audio CD. (www.mininova.org/tor/1317785).
36
--Not surprisingly, the pharmaceutical companies that sell the medication, financially endow
university departments of psychiatry, and selectively fund pro-drug psychiatric research programs back
this reductionistic view. In 2006, the drug industry accounted for about thirty percent of the American
Psychiatric Association’s $62.5 million in financing. About half of that money went to drug
advertisements in psychiatric journals. (Carey & Harris 2008).
37
--Perry argued further that “…‘chronic schizophrenia’ is created by society's negative response to
what is actually a perfectly natural and healthy process[…] It's a well-known fact that people can and
do clear up in a benign setting. Actually, they can come down very quickly. But if some of our cases
had gone to the mental hospital, they would have been given a very dire message: ‘You've had a
mental breakdown. You're sick. You're into this for decades, maybe for the rest of your life!’ and told
‘You need this medication to keep it all together.’ I am quite certain that if some of our clients had
been sent to the mental hospital, they would have had a long, long fight with it.”
(www.globalvision.org/dream/dreamch2.html).
Psychologist Larry Robinson, however, disagrees: “Acute, adult-onset psychotic episodes may be seen
this way, but schizophrenia appearing in adolescence is another thing entirely. I think it’s a mistake to
conflate these two phenomena.” (Personal communication).
38
--Dismemberment evokes the thousands of persons who suffer from multiple personalities
(“Dissociative Identity Disorder”). Most psychologists agree that this illness results from such severe
early trauma that one’s personality fragments into numerous identities, and they design therapies to
reintegrate them into one. But if we assume that the pathology has more to do with the repression or
denial of autonomous systems of the psyche, then full acceptance of these mutually exclusive aspects of
the self is the beginning of real healing. For some people talking to oneself becomes less a symptom of
instability and more a reframing of their life stories to include more of who they are.
39
--Hero With A Thousand Faces, p. 12. The prophet Ezekiel saw the reverse process in a valley of
dry bones. God commanded him to prophesy, after which the “sinews and flesh came upon them…”
and the corpses arose as living beings. (Ezek. 37).
40
--Jung Writes, “Enantiodromia. Literally, ‘running counter to,’ referring to the emergence of the
unconscious opposite in the course of time. This characteristic phenomenon practically always occurs
when an extreme, one-sided tendency dominates conscious life; in time an equally powerful
counterposition is built up, which first inhibits the conscious performance and subsequently breaks
through the conscious control.” (CW. “Aspects of the Masculine.” Chapter 7, paragraph 294).
41
--Kartharsis also means that which clarifies understanding, or “the pleasure of seeing clearly after
being in the dark” (Golden 1992).
42
--The root of Lusios is lysis, also the root of analysis, which means setting free. A catalyst is a
chemical agent that precipitates a process without itself being changed.
43
--Mnemosyne, the Goddess of Memory, was the mother of the nine Muses.
--------------------------------------------
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Author Identifying Statement
Barry Spector is seeking a publisher for his book, Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of
American Innocence. He has contributed two previous articles to the Jung Journal. He and his wife
Maya lead an annual “Day of the Dead” ritual in the San Francisco Bay Area on or about November
first, and various poetry salons. Email them at to be included in invitations to their local events.
Correspondence: 3751 Bay Road, Menlo Park Ca. 94025. Phone: 1-650-327-5493. Email:
shmoover@comcast.net. Please visit their website, www.barryandmayaspector.com, to read more of
his articles.