(MR. RANDOLPH BEDFORD)
No.3— The Flesh and the Spirit.
The curative effect of the strong spirit on the weak body have their instances by the thousands. The effect of the sick spirit on the physical man is told in the histories of every hospital and asylum; in the delusions of the spiritualist asking to be fooled.
The fire of genius—a spirit which, as Oliver Wendell Holmes says is within us, but not of us—which was the muse of Homer, the demon of Socrates, and the inspiration of Angelo, who could see the finished statue in the block of stone yet in the quarry— is related to the hallucinations of the insane, and often accompanied by similar physical ills. For human genius is a god of gold with feet of clay; a not bad thing, for, if it were perfect it could not be human or know human beings as they are. Genius as a manifestation of energy is of more obscure origin than insanity; for how can we know psychology before we knew physiology?
Psychology is still the most inexact of sciences; but gradually we learn to draw the chart and tabulate the facts of such cases as, say, that sonnambulist who asleep showed a wondrous memory, but who was dull and stupid when awake. The psychical accident called genius often manifests itself in many commonplace people, for perhaps only half a minute in a lifetime; flashing a second of sense and eloquence as if for that briefest period of time a light gleamed once, to be forever after hidden by the curtain of the conscious and the flesh. It is something beyond training and study—for education did not make Shakespeare a poet, nor prompt Reynolds to paint, nor give Darwin his desire to be a naturalist.
Civilisation has done worse than clothe the body, it has swaddled the mind, bound the soul with inhibitions and restrictions; covered up sex with convention, made the nakedness of children shameful to themselves, and so repressed nature and stifled natural desire, that nature, stronger than its binding conventions, breaks out in insanity. Our asylums are full of cases representing the wowser "don't"—the repressed wish, that was thought to be dead because it was buried in the subconscious soul, fighting invisibly until in the struggle reason is destroyed.
In 1920 there were 19,402 people in asylums of the commonwealth, or 3.58 for every thousand of the population. In Great Britain the proportion is about the same, and in both countries 33 per cent, of the cases recover; but in Australia the asylums are more availed of voluntarily, producing a greater number of entries proportionately, and so we have proportionately fewer lunatics at large than in Britain (although the fact of certain politicians being at liberty would seem to contradict the fact).
Most people have delusional insanity, more or less, dependent on lack of education, superstition, or naturally low intelligence. These may gravitate to church revivals or spiritualistic seances, which are exciting causes of insanity in susceptible natures during adolescence. To that youthful period that should be joy, if man then were taught to know himself really, and not merely lies about himself, his world and his soul, comes illusional insanity charging its subject with being incapable, unworthy or unnatural, accusing itself of imaginary crime and unpardonable sin, and therefore for ever dammed.
Of such were the early followers of John Wesley, himself an epilept. One of these, troubled with colic, said: "Satan hath followed me day and night; I carry the body of Judas fastened to my neck," and another youthful superegoist said, to explain a great storm, "The Earth is accursed for MY sake." Wesley himself occasionally saw things, and he relates:—
"Sixty of our brethren were present at our love feast. At about three in the morning as we were continuing instant in prayer, the power of God came mightily upon us, insomuch that many cried out for exceeding joy, and many fell to the ground," and at all his field meetings the same thing happened; "Many sank to the earth; they dropped on every side as if thunderstruck."
Youth is mostly affected in this way, its humility being in the ratio of its inferiority complex. It is generally the adult patient who suffers the exaltation of being God, devil, king, or millionaire. The unhappier unbalanced adolescent believes that God has deserted him; he hears accusing voices—the voice of the sub-conscious, the still small voice of conscience megaphoned through his delusions, and the more horrific in sound because of the patient's depression produced by excessive blood pressure. Precocious dementia is by some authorities ascribed to auto-intoxication from internal sexual secretions or other toxins; in fact almost all mental unbalance has sexual origin; although Freud, in ascribing all emotions to sex, seems to become himself unbalanced in judgement. But the suggestive nature of the catatonic state and auto-hypnotic trance are of such similar mechanism as to contradict the presence of toxin or cerebral lesion as the cause of precocious dementia.
The witch burners (who are with us still if public opinion permitted) were faith healers of themselves; burning or drowning the witch so that a village child might be cured of diphtheria (then unrecognised) or a cow be cured of rickets. In that revenge on old women there was something of sex perversion too, for cruelty is sex qualification. In America masked murderous cowards of the Ku Klux Klan rave of their love of God and their determination to preserve the chastity of woman; and their methods are the flogging, branding, and murdering of negroes, white trade unionists, of men who do not attend church, and of men who do drink beer. The female vigilantes, or woman K.K.K'.'s, still flog their witch, if they do not burn her; kidnapping young women to the woods, stripping and tying them to trees, and flogging the "devil" out of them—the "devil" in the patient being in most cases the possession of youth and beauty the moralists never knew.
The primitive people's idea of the mad man as one under the direct protection of God certainly hinted at the subconsciousness they did not know. Hysteria is a disorder of the subconscious mind—a peculiar mental state in which the psychical and physical symptoms are largely due to auto-suggestion. There is a splitting of consciousness— the subconscious mental life develops into a spurious second personality which the reacted conscious self cannot control. There was one case recorded of a girl who was three people; and they fought each other like brothers of a large family, and hated each other bitterly. Behind all these phenomena there is the devil of fear, a paralysis of will leaving the subject in trivial cases tortured by little fears and doubts, and in grievous cases driven by fear to death. Many of these subconscious fears that at last dominate are known and labelled. One case of Agoraphobia (the fear of open spaces) is that of a girl, who, although she had a large apartment, insisted on sleeping in the bathroom and locking herself in.
Hysteria imitates almost every disease. Whatever part of the body it attacks it will create the proper symptom at that part. There are hysterical forms of paralysis—the forms most often cured by the faith-healer —of rythmic chorea; there is a convulsive hysteria which yields when the human soul is wracked by a great and sincere emotion. Asthma is produced in some people by smelling the odor of a horse or a cat, and diabetes is more often fatal than it should be because the patient is told that it is incurable. Tell a diabetic the fact that most diabetic patients die, not from diabetes, but from intercurrent disease, and he will improve.
Let Sursum Corda! be the slogan of every man! up heart!
"I am an old man," said the centenarian hermit. "And I have had many troubles, but most of them never happened."
The world wants hope; and to find it it has but to see clearly. We are not at the end of the world, but at the beginning; man cannot disappear until he knows himself as well as he knows his clothes. The lying and the prurience and the false modesty of sex that, at their worst, causes introversions of natural impulse, ending in madness, and at their best making externals shameful and secret prevent him examining his soul, and keep him content with hearing his soul mentioned casually on Sundays by a man who doesn't know his own.
The perfection of man will arise when all, or at least the majority of men, shall need no professors of psychology. That isn't possible with this generation, but with the next, or the next after that, it will be given that psychology takes its proper place in education.
With its Greek infection the European mind is a poor transmitter of faith, whose apotheoses is found in the ascetic religions of the East—a fact which the latest faith doctor to win Australia senses, probably unconsciously, when he says that Australia is more materialistic and less spiritual than India. "Yet Europeans accepted the fraudulent Mrs. Eddy and the Mormon Jo Smith, although Mr. Smith's popularity was greatly due to his advocacy of the harem.
So then, the hope of psychology is in the new, in the children who when they are grown shall say they have obeyed the wisdom that said "Man, know thyself." To give the coming generation their chance their education must teach them to despise fear; it must prevent the repression of children, of which the least result is to force them to wear hated dresses and to eat hated food, and to teach them to beware of their own bodies; it must recognise that the reaction of barriers against normal sexuality produces most homo sexual outbreaks. In man good and bad are inextricably woven, so that evil is done that good might be, as in many known cases of youths committing suicide so that they might "return to their mothers." Behind all fetiches, luck charms, traditions, prayers and rituals, is the fact that all animals, primitive men, and present civilisation depend on bluffing; and that only the very strong can afford to be true and speak truth, and be hated therefore by most people, who would like to be true and, dare not.
The base of some religions, and the common dream of the sexually repressed, is that the world shall be destroyed by fire; and the dreams of the world on fire are only repressed wishes for sexual abandonment. Often an individual reveals by what he hates or refuses to accept, that which he has himself repressed, and why he has repressed it. The panic terror of the youth of an inferiority complex produces perversion in the attempt at protective compensation, making them sometimes hideous beasts instead of attractive lovers, and sunk in despair by the scorn of the normal. Great pitifulness can imagine, to take a less serious case, the terror of the butt of the school or the community; the withdrawal into that inner self so foreign and impossible to understand, and the fear at the first knowledge that mental control is lost.
Children must be released of this necessity to bluff in order to survive. The father who determines to "break the spirit" of his son is doing it all too literally, depriving the child of the habit of protest against the evil and jealous world he must later meet, and which would deny him his struggle for happiness. The home tyrant fathers the obsession that God wants the boy to suffer for his "sins", induces a crazy humility and a strong reflex that, in the youth too strong to be beaten, produces hatred and haughtiness and that generally stupid thing called "dignity"—merely as a defence against the feeling of inferiority, which over-repression bred in him.
In extreme cases that defensiveness becomes the delusion of omnipotence as protective compensation, as an unusual resistance to normal sex cravings ends in madness, the resistance being insurmountable because the patient has been taught, by the beloved people in whom he has faith, that any wish pertaining to sex is horribly licentious and disgraceful. Herein comes the value of the faith in the physician, in "the open confession that is good for the soul." Said one case of youthful dementia, at the beginning of his improvement. "By confessing your sins to the world you can make the world like yourself. By keeping them in, you go mad."
Many cases of kleptomania showed that only articles which might have sexual symbolism were stolen, and our asylums are filled with the victims of repression and of active sub consciousness or "soul", victims of prudish parents, of super-moral preachments, of the wowserism which places clean youth in chains and stifles its naturalness under terror of the pangs of conscience and the fear of Divine punishment and human ridicule.
Man has searched for the truth from the moment he began to think, and for all time the truth has been in himself, hidden beneath the cloak of convention, of superstition, and of fear, which convention and repression had assisted himself to weave.
Daily Herald (Adelaide, SA : 1910 - 1924), Saturday 16 June 1923, page 4
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