Last week I visited SFMOMA, and on display was one of Sam Durant’s works, “History never ends, I hate to bother you”:
Sadie Coles HQ gives this explanation of Durant’s art:
“The show’s title [History Never Ends, I Hate to Bother You] may furthermore be read as a sardonic refutation of Francis Fukuyama’s famous postmodern thesis ‘The End of History?’, which proposed the end of ideological conflict after the collapse of the Soviet Union and advocated the spread of liberal democracy.”
I haven’t read Fukuyama’s thesis, but it would be hard to construe the latest round of globalization as an end to ideological conflict or the beginning of a liberal, democratic world. In the United States as well as abroad, our history of colonialism and exploitation continues to haunts us, and as Durant’s work implies, we continually try to escape it.
No doubt the mental health complex has been a globalizing force. Psychiatric diagnoses have themselves been described as part of our efforts to spread liberal democracy. As anthropologist Allan Young of McGill University remarked, the diagnosis PTSD “may turn out to be the greatest story of globalization.” With the appropriation of PTSD abroad come attempts to universalize the impact of disaster on both civilizations and psyches. Yet even the best intentions can be colonizing.
Perhaps trauma is a more value-neutral term than the diagnosis PTSD. Traumas, like tragedies, just about everyone endures at some point during the course of their lives. What is described as “tragic” often is determined as much by the event as the outcome, and this is also the case for traumatic events. What one person experiences as traumatic, foreshortening the sense of future possibilities, another person experiences as transformative and the foundation for a more meaningful existence. Even disasters have their bright spots. In her book, A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit chronicles not only the generosity and sense of community that emerges during disasters, but also the joy many experience at times of profound loss.
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I am looking for connections between the denial of history and the impact of psychotherapy on how we perceive our individual and collective histories. Durant’s work got me thinking perhaps it’s not history that is so bothersome, and which we hide from, but the way history has been portrayed, including how much we believe we can learn from the past. Walter Benjamin described history as “an angel blown backwards through time.” He drew inspiration from Paul Klee’s painting, Angelus Novus:
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth hangs open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage hurling it before his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. 
Excavating the heap of history is at the root of the psychoanalytic method. The treatment plan more or less goes as follows:
• Support clients as they regress to the point of their childhood wounding (also described as digging in the dirt, but perhaps the notion “dumpster diving” would be more appropriate given Benjamin’s imagery).
• Create circumstances for “abreacting,” or releasing the emotions associated with the traumatic wound that were repressed, even silenced, at the time of the injury.
• With the emotions finally released, clients can begin to rationally interpret and sort out their histories rather than repeatedly react in the present moment as if still caught in the past. Hopefully, in the process clients also develop greater compassion for themselves and those who failed them.
I would like to believe the story of history’s revision psychoanalysis provides. If only rationality and interpretation could put the past to rest (and no less, in such an orderly fashion). Are we really capable of rationally reflecting on the destruction left by progress? Does discharging overwhelming emotions set the foundation for forgiveness, or the transformation of the human psyche? Or does such an approach potentially re-traumatize, in effect recreating the psychological conditions of the original trauma? We now know that when remembrances of past traumas are triggered, the natural response of the body is fight, flight, or freeze—responses that impede rational reflection on the past. Given what we know today about how our bodies react to reminders of past traumas, what would it take for us to collectively address the wreckage caused by the US history of colonialism and exploitation? What does it take to turn the angel of history to face the future head on?
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Pierre Janet, a contemporary of Freud, was developing his own theories about trauma while Freud was devising the methods of free association and abreaction. Janet had a different take on the nature of trauma. He saw the body as central to relief from the repetition of traumatic defenses that keep people shutdown to the reality of present conditions. According to Janet, traumatic reactions are not only the result of actual efforts to defend against threat. Also recorded in the body are movements, images, and sensations that represent what the body wanted to do—so-called “acts of triumph” that would have led to a different history, one that involved facing down the threat. Yet, because of circumstances that impeded self-defense, the path out of trauma was also split off from awareness, or dissociated, along with the memories, thoughts, sensations, emotions, and images associated with the actual traumatic event. Janet said, “The patients affected by traumatic memory have not been able to perform any of the actions characteristic of the stage of triumph.” Thus, an event or situation is experienced as traumatic because it necessitates splitting off awareness of what did happen as well as what could not happen—escape from the trauma. Healing occurs by integrating all that was split off from awareness. According to sensorimotor psychotherapists Pat Ogden, Kekuni Minton, and Clare Pain,
“If, as Janet suggests, traumatization is a failure of the integrative capacity, then the first priority in the treatment of trauma must be to restore clients’ capacity to tolerate and integrate their own thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations, to bear witness to their own experience, to be able to process significant life events—past and present, painful and pleasurable, ordinary and traumatic—within a window of tolerance.”
The notion of “window of tolerance” is key: to learn from the past, we must be able to tolerate what it brings up for us. I think of Durant’s text, “History never ends, I hate to bother you,” as meaningful because it witnesses our collective failure to grapple with past events that threaten to overwhelm us. There has also been a failure to create opportunities for “acts of triumph” that could literally transform both individual and collective repetitions of traumatic defenses that keep many emotionally shut down to history (and often caught in addictions).
Art is one way to initiate acts of triumph over histories denied. Art provides one avenue towards overcoming a colonizing rationality that enforces norms while implicitly silencing alternative possibilities and interpretations. By imagining the unimaginable, what once was split off from awareness is reclaimed.
In the light of creative efforts to form more integrated selves and a more integrated society, psychotherapy plays a humble role. And although Freud’s methods seem anachronistic today, he nevertheless was brilliantly observant, even remarking, “Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.”
From David Whyte's poem, "Sweet Darkness," in House of Belonging, wisdom to remember in the new year:
... The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.The holiday season is a season of longing. Some long for time with loved ones, while others long for loved ones to spend time with. Children and grown-up kids long for the coveted gift. Many long for a new life or new sense of self, hence New Year’s resolutions. Still others long for the holidays to end, with their traffic jams, long lines, and manufactured good cheer.
Longing runs deep in human nature. Both love’s companion and adulterer, longing points the way to the love we need, but also traps us in fantasies of perfect love and perfect lives that blind us to real possibilities. An exalted and sometimes treacherous force, longing draws lovers together against all odds and keeps love alive across the miles and years. Yet when love goes unrequited, longing can drive us to despair.
Across the millennia art, music, and the humanities have recorded the power of longing for redemption as well as destruction. The modern quest to scientifically validate our collective folk wisdom reveals the human brain and body are hardwired for loving and longing. If there ever was any doubt, human sciences have discovered love is as vital for our survival as food, air, and shelter—a basic need catalyzed by longing in the way hunger and thirst drives efforts to replenish the body. But modern science perhaps gives us more, revealing the role of longing for complicated grief, or how fantasy worlds spawned by interminable longing keep the emotionally neglected child alive to the possibility of love when love is absent, or at best, anorexic.
Longing is more a mood than an emotion. It has a way of sticking around, unperturbed as reality is unceremoniously pushed aside in favor of imagining the longed-for person, object, or experience. Too much longing can result in a state of distress. Each of us has our own personal limit to the amount of distress our bodies and psyches can tolerate. Like the infant whose cries go unheeded for too long, eventually collapsing into a state of numbness, we adults eventually shut down too, often into a state of dissociation.
Having the capacity to dissociate is beneficial to survival. Mild to moderate levels of dissociation make possible continued functioning, albeit by ignoring emotional needs. The parts of us that still operate—thinking and rote interactions with the environment—benefit from a lesser-known advantage of dissociation: the release of feel-good endorphins. According to Peter Levine, author of Healing Trauma, dissociation, “’softens’ the pain of severe injury by secreting nature’s internal opium, the endorphins.” And really, what’s more painful than a broken heart?
For children who are emotionally neglected, longing for love is the norm. And for a person grieving, longing for the deceased can also become a way of living. For both the neglected child and the mourner, there is no real-world solution to their longing. With no end in sight, it makes sense to resort to living more from the head rather than the heart. Absorbed in thinking, we avoid emotions that might trigger longing and the painful recognition that the need for love goes unfulfilled.
By thinking, however, I don’t mean rational reflection on one’s internal states; though this can occur and lead to a way out of longing, or when judgmental in nature, a way into depression. Rather, I prefer John Dewey’s take on thinking:
“Daydreaming, building of castles in the air, that loose flux of casual and disconnected material that floats through our minds in relaxed moments are, in this random sense, thinking. More of our waking life than we should care to admit, even to ourselves, is likely to be whiled away in this inconsequential trifling with idle fancy and unsubstantial hope.”
With Dewey’s dynamic description of thinking, we witness the more creative side of human nature and why the expansion of the cortex—the thinking part of the brain—is believed to distinguish humans from all other life forms. Within us, we carry the possibility of inhabiting worlds of our own making, ignoring the conditions in which our bodies are embedded while nevertheless marginally functioning within them. When Dewey’s understanding of thinking is joined with what neuroscience has discovered about the relationship between dissociation and the release of endorphins, it is fairly easy to imagine how fantasies could become a comfortable hiding place from a seemingly loveless world. Fantasies certainly feel safer, and with endorphins swirling about, quite good, although I would venture to claim not as good as the real thing. Yet for a child who is emotionally neglected (and the adult that child eventually becomes), or for a person stuck in grief, trusting love can be a difficult thing to do.
I sometimes think all the distractions that characterize modern living—a zillion cable channels with round the clock programming, the Internet, the latest technology, the newest video game, the next best travel destination—are sometimes nothing more than a collective effort to keep longing out of awareness. In the United States, grief has turned into a short-term affair, something with stages that we supposedly go through, eventually reaching an endpoint, grief-free. In reality, grief is the continual act of remaking the relationship with the deceased as we go on living without them—a process that takes the length of our lives, although waxing and waning in its intensity over the lifespan. And emotional neglect is not an uncommon occurrence in our society. A majority of the population has histories of adverse childhood experiences, and broken homes are widespread, leaving children feeling unloved despite some parents’ best intentions. It’s not hard to see how a season of love like the holidays for many would feel more like a season of longing (and how a drive to profit off longing could be so lucrative).
The cure for longing is love. For many this requires a large measure of safety, someone reliable to meet them in relationship. Risking loving another person also involves acknowledging fantasies are a bridge to love and not the destination. Trusting love is not easy, especially when fantasy has been a longtime companion and stand-in for the real thing. No wonder we are so drawn to films, media, and images that can serve as fodder for our personal fantasies of love, if not dreams of perfection.
The way out of longing also involves awareness, both to painful emotions residing within and to the beauty of the world around us. The idea is to feel about life as Emily Dickenson once wrote, “To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.” Of course, advice is cheap when fantasy has become a well-worn suit of armor. But like any psychological defense, especially one used against the pain of grief or chronically feeling unloved, the remedy is found in regaining connection—to one’s soul, one’s body, others, and the environment. Just as longing is a natural experience, so too is healing from lost love, which is also potentially transformative, turning a season of longing into a season of joy.
My husband and I have been together almost 25 years, 20 of them married. We know couples past the 50 year point; they like to trump our landmark. “Pshaw. Newlyweds.” But in a nation where half of marriages end in divorce, and about half the people wanting a relationship are having trouble hooking up, my husband and I can feel like the last pair of dodos, especially when incredulity meets news of the length of our union:
“Really? Wow… (eyes look away as bewilderment eclipses curiosity);” or, “That’s a looooooooooong time;” and my personal favorite, “And you really seem to still like each other.”
Of course not everyone responds as if at a freak show. There are still intrepid souls who imagine that the rewards of a life partner outweigh the projected ennui. For them, we are paragons expected to depart wisdom gleaned from many shared years, although anyone married for a while knows having a map can stale the adventure (especially when you factor in different approaches to asking for directions).
All the basic relationship advice applies to most couples: communicate (frequently and with lots of “I” statements); air the anger (and fight fair); have sex (preferably great and often); make each other laugh; and spend time together as well as time apart. Yet such advice can feel a bit strategic, like rules for engagement that miss what keeps a relationship alive, even vital, across the years. No wonder many yearn the ideal, the soulmate. Without a deep and meaningful connection, a relationship can easily slide into routine and become an obstacle to living from the heart.
Most of us don’t have trouble with the initial spark; it’s keeping the love alive that challenges us. And let me be real: living up close and personal isn’t always pretty, and repetition is an acquired taste. It’s true; marriage is a lot of work. But a life partnership is also deeply rewarding when you work at the right things.
Yesterday my husband sent me this link to a blog post on the importance of generosity for marriages. At first, I thought he was just reminding me the holidays were a couple of weeks away. (Note: miscommunication can be a boon if you share the same sense of humor and a love of double entendres.) Instead, Tara Parker-Pope relays research about the role of giving of oneself for happy marriages. Turns out generosity, defined as “the virtue of giving good things to one’s spouse freely and abundantly,” is a key ingredient of wedded bliss. Simple things like making tea or giving a foot rub do the trick (generosity of time), along with forgiveness and sharing your appreciation (generosity of spirit). Indeed, generosity may be the key ingredient that distinguishes lifelong lovers from cohabitating spouses. As lead researcher W. Bradford Wilcox remarked, “Living that spirit of generosity in a marriage does foster a virtuous cycle that leads to both spouses on average being happier in the marriage.”
Yet generosity contributes more than happiness to a marriage. Simple, unexpected gestures of love create the conditions that delight our souls. Like a good mother’s love, the unexpected hug or compliment validates a partner’s worth. Few of us feel lovable all the time and most of us carry a sense that at least parts of ourselves are unworthy of being loved. A good partnership gently and consistently sweeps away the doubts that keep a person from feeling unconditionally loved.
In all families, as well as all cultures and societies, there are constraints not only on certain acts, but also on which feelings can be felt and expressed. Such are the inevitable limits on membership in any group. One outcome of honoring our first family’s and communities’ rules is the lifelong habit of ignoring our personal needs. Often unknowingly, we split off parts of ourselves so we can belong. Such self-denial can instill a desire for that special someone—the soulmate—who can open the doors to those split off parts of the self, even if just to peer at what might be in the hidden rooms of our psyches.
If we assume development across the lifespan is about reintegrating split off parts of the self—an idea originating with the likes of Pierre Janet and C. G. Jung—then sticking with the same person means not only making space for inevitable change and growth, but also fostering integration. And generosity keeps the process going. Think of generosity as jiggling the doorknobs of your partner’s soul. You’re curious what’s behind those doors (and sometimes a little afraid). Habitual generosity makes it safe for both of you to take the risk and look. Enough years of this kind of love and you forget about time altogether.
At onearth, David Gessner tells of paddling down the Charles River with environmentalist Dan Driscoll as he talks of the need for “hypocrites” in the green movement:
“We nature lovers are hypocrites of course,” Dan says. “We are all hypocrites. None of us are consistent. The problem is that we let that fact stop us. We worry that if we fight for nature, people will say ‘But you drive a car’ or ‘You fly a lot’ or ‘You’re a consumer, too.’ And that stops us in our tracks. It’s almost as if admitting that we are hypocrites gets people off the hook….We need hypocrites who aren’t afraid of admitting it but will still fight for the environment. We don’t need some sort of pure movement run by pure people. We need hypocrites!”
Gessner promotes a “sloppy” environmentalism—“An army of flawed and sloppy hypocrites”—one that I presume lacks the grander drama of saints and villains, instead fitting the contradictory nature of the human kind.
Hypocrite has several meanings, including a person whose behavior opposes her stated beliefs (Driscoll & Gessner’s notion), or someone who carries a false appearance of being virtuous. Yet it is the original meaning given by the Greeks—a deficiency in a person’s ability to decide—that is the kind of hypocrite I believe would benefit from a sloppy environmentalism. This latter concept of hypocrite describes many people as they try to care about nature while fulfilling other responsibilities, desires, and needs. We need a sloppy environmentalism, because frankly, given the demands taxing our “green” choices, sloppy may be the best many of us can do.
It isn’t a coincidence that around the time the Industrial Revolution got underway the push for rational choice also gained momentum, and choosing green means dismantling both. These centuries-old models of society and mind pushed modernity along, but now they contribute to stalled efforts to protect the environment—and both ignore the larger ecosystems of nature and psyche. The industrial revolution marked not just the denial of the interconnectivity of all life, but also introduced rhetoric that disregards the environmental degradation and risks that are the unavoidable scourge of industries and technologies—despite their portrayal as self-contained, closed systems. Similarly, depicting humans as basically rational beings ignores the larger “ecosystem” of the human organism and how emotions, the imagination, the body as well as cognition determine our mental states and behavior.
The failure to witness interconnectedness causes splits in society and mind, and instills the need to dissociate awareness of one realm in order to function properly in another. Even mundane attempts at straddling multiple social worlds—and their conflicting roles and responsibilities—leads to choices that can sideline the desire to go green. The prevalence of addictions, compulsive habits, and other psychological defenses also tests the belief that rational choice will get us to a greener world. Gessner reminisces about Edward Abbey—“I think of Ed Abbey fighting for the West while throwing empty beer cans out the window of his truck”—and I wonder if this is an example of how addiction kept even the most ardent environmentalist at times a bit sloppy.
If we judge a person’s commitment to the environment in terms of actions alone, we risk missing what drives the failure to consistently take steps that conserve resources—the ever-shifting emotional landscape that is common of fractured minds living in equally fractured societies. Consider sociologist Simon Gottschalk’s picture of the emotional life of the typical postmodern person: “rapidly shifting intensities which oscillate between complete indifference and passionate involvement, between intense idealization and devaluation, between terror and chronic boredom.” Not everyone rides an emotional rollercoaster, although many brace against significant emotional shifts in the course of a typical day—often by just changing from the context of family needs to the expectations of work.
Most choices are not rational, but involve a mixture of both judgment and feeling. Our feelings pull us towards something (or repel us), thereby determining what we value; our thoughts tell us why. If emotionally we can’t get behind a decision—and stay behind it—then it is unlikely we will consistently act in concert with our commitments, regardless of our best intentions.
The worldview that gave us rational thinking as the nature of the civilized mind, and environmental subjugation as the natural order of things, also produced the idea of Manifest Destiny and a desire for heroism, which for too many becomes feelings of shame when they fail to live up to the standards they set for themselves. The hypocrite—as the one who is having a hard time deciding what to do—deserves empathy and not blame for failures to make rational, “green” choices. At least in the United States where heroism is pursued (and shame avoided), we need a green movement that supports rather than disgraces us hypocrites who at times need help making up our minds and sticking to them. In a postmodern world, changing minds is as important as changing industries when it comes to creating a greener world.
“Humankind has become a very dangerous species. We need people who can sit still and be able to smile, who can walk peacefully. We need people like that in order to save us. Mahayana Buddhism says that you are that person, that each of you is that person.”
–Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace
Name calling. Cursing. Yelling when a calmer tone could deliver the same message. Who of us at times doesn’t act outside the boundaries of civility and compassion?
The material world often gets the brunt of such outbursts. My earlier work writing computer programs in Fortran left me with a childish wish to inflict pain on computers when they fail to do what I expect. If cursing them doesn’t seem to work, I sometimes flip off the power. Yeah, I show them who’s boss. I know I am not the only one who so pointlessly loses their cool. How many of us let the expletives rip when house repairs turn towards the incomprehensible? Ever put together a propane grill, or prefab bookcases, whose screws seem stripped before they even leave their sealed plastic pouches? Not a pretty sight.
Such object-focused rants seem like emotional outtakes, but they are also signs of a lack of curiosity about the world and a need for control. These verbal assaults would be fairly harmless if not for the sometimes-blurry line existing between how we anthropomorphize our possessions and how we objectify fellow humans. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM for short) is a reliable resource if objectifying someone is the goal. “He’s such a narcissist.” “She’s so borderline.” “I can’t talk to him; he’s totally bipolar.” Diagnoses are useful when there is a desire for distance and control, but perhaps more significantly, they protect oneself from feelings of vulnerability. No wonder many of us “diagnose” people close to us when relationships are precarious or we find ourselves in the wake of a break up. Yet such name-calling is a flimsy defense against heartbreak and the inevitable feelings of loss, or even grief, that emerge when people disappointment or hurt us.
By virtue of how psychiatric diagnoses are increasingly used by both professionals and laypersons, they are now largely empty speech that lack worth—what Jungian analyst Russell Lockhart called words without souls. For a word to have soul it must imply something about the nature of a person’s being, although not of a general sort that applies to anyone who meets certain diagnostic criteria. Rather, words with soul speak to what is unique about somebody, describe something significant about the person, draw us near to the person through a feeling tone, thus creating an emotional bond that validates uniqueness rather than effacing a person’s individuality.
The DSM is the preeminent diagnostic guide for the mental health field, including the practice of psychotherapy. “Psychotherapy” gets its meaning from two ancient Greek words, psyche, which means soul, and therapia, which means healing. Thus, psychotherapy is the practice of healing the soul, or tending the soul of someone in the process of healing and returning to growth. To tend to a soul involves caring about speech, listening to someone’s distinctive story, hearing the worth of a word, witnessing how a phrase or gesture carries individuality—that is to say, the act of finding soul in speech and soma. How odd that the DSM, a most impersonal tome, would be produced in a field that started with psychotherapy as such a personal relationship.
The current DSM-IV is the outcome of a power struggle between two competing perspectives on the nature of mental illness, if not what it means to be human. The DSM-IV has two general divisions, Axis I and Axis II disorders, reflecting the split between biomedical psychiatry (Axis I) that originated with the work of Emil Kraepelin, and psychoanalysis (Axis II), which started with the work of Sigmund Freud. Along Axis I are mental disorders depicted as synonymous with chronic diseases of the body, such as diabetes. In contrast, Axis II disorders emphasize the role of a person’s character, temperament, and early life conditioning. Disorders along both axes carry the implicit belief that a diagnosis is likely a lifelong condition, which through psychotherapy or drugs (or both) is altered, but perhaps never completely escaped. Both risk producing calcified souls that are manageable and predictable rather than enlivened and full of possibility as real people are. The upcoming DSM-V does not seem like it will improve much.
Perhaps a diagnosis can feel like relief from the sense of alienation and shame that often are part of feeling mentally ill. As one woman emphatically stated, I am not crazy, or bad, or lacking in faith or in discipline. I have a disease. It’s called depression. Often such an interpretation becomes a temporary defense against the threat of emotional chaos, feelings of alienation, and intense self-doubt that are the subtext of most mental disorders. Yet psychiatric diagnoses also limit opportunities for growth and connection. Old problems have a way of resurfacing for all of us. Change is often a slow process. With a diagnosis life’s seemingly terminable repetitions are recast as “symptoms” of a disorder, distancing the fear of being overwhelmed once again, although not necessarily changing the conditions that support their reoccurrence.
These names we call ourselves and others—diagnosing failures, anticipating compulsive repetitions—lack depth and are hollow places to hide our fears. And fear may be the reason psychiatric diagnoses have become part of our vernacular. For instance, despite that having a temperature is more accurately described by the medical term “febrile,” or a heart attack is technically called a “myocardial infarction,” we don’t use those words because a) people might not know what we are taking about, but more importantly, b) they make the sick body sound even sicker—and thus scarier. This seems the opposite effect that diagnoses in the DSM sometimes have. Yes, it can be scary to think of someone having schizophrenia—and thus a very different mental map than the average person. But mostly we use these diagnoses as slang because through them we distance another person—and potentially gain power over them and the feelings they evoke. These terms lack soul and their nature is to de-soul, which is why they become so versatile when there is a desire to scapegoat someone, or avoid the pain of a broken heart, or simply vent anger. With a diagnosis on the tip of the tongue, the speaker grows larger while his object becomes stuck in the smallness of an ill-fitting label. Apathy or even repulsion replace fear. Some may say sympathy is also a potential outcome, yet it is often mixed with pity that has a way of infantilizing persons diagnosed with mental disorders, diminishing their social standing if not personhood. With diagnoses, psychological banishment also becomes a very real possibility—a dehumanizing defense that may seem increasingly attractive on a crowded planet of 7 billion people (and rapidly continuing to grow).
Certainly we need a language to understand how we suffer (and make others suffer) that can help us transcend old patterns of being and relating. But do we really need the DSM? And what, if anything, should replace it?
Reading Russell Lockart’s Words as Eggs, I am beginning to consider the DSM as a lot like Humpty Dumpty. When Alice (of Wonderland) met Humpty, he made a bold statement about his ability to control words: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it mean—neither more nor less.” Humpty Dumpty really liked adjectives, because he had more control over them (like when we call someone a name). But Humpty wasn’t so crazy about verbs: “They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs: they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs.” Verbs, Lockart observed, “are words whose sole function it is to say that something exists, that it has being, that it lives, that it moves, that something has taken place.” Reconfigured as verbs, diagnostic categories become strategies for living and not defenses against people (including oneself) when life is hurtful or uncontrollable. By becoming verbs, diagnoses become more soulful and more open to growth and change, including outgrowing a mental disorder. Diagnoses would still point to how we hurt and repeatedly make the same mistakes as well as expose us to our blind spots. But diagnoses would also be a whole lot safer, since they would tell us what we are doing rather than creating fixed references for who we are. As verbs, diagnoses might also contribute to growth and change in unimagined ways, which is how soulful people like to live—full of possibility.
I suggest doing away with diagnoses that cannot be verbs. Rid them from your vocabulary if they fail to make space for growth and uniqueness. All of us “narcissus” at times. Put any of us in a toxic work environment (or society), and we will definitely “schizophrenic” now and again. And granted, some people “borderline” more than others when the end of a relationship is on the horizon—that is, until they don’t, and they do something else (such as house repairs), in which case another verb can reveal their soul-filled efforts at growth, love, and self-discovery.
“Every childhood is more or less traumatic, none is without wounding, and the pleasure of being alive is to discover how to get over it—by first getting under it and feeling our vulnerability.”
–Ginette Paris, Heartbreak
A long time ago, before the One God replaced the many gods and before Man ruled Nature, two children were born the same instant under a full moon, yet on opposite sides of Earth and to very different clans. The boy child, called Gabriel, was born to a matrilineal clan, the Amazonia, and learned to be a man while respecting women’s wisdom. He stayed close to his heart at all times. The girl child, named Liberia, was born to a patriarchal clan, the Rattus, who valued power and reason and yearned to rule the Earth.
Liberia grew up strong and cunning. She felt it was necessary to hide her heart, although she never forgot it was there. On the nights of the full moon, she would steal away into the dark forest near her village and dream of a man who could love all of her, mind and heart. On these nights, Gabriel would wake from his sleep and gaze at the moon, sensing the great moon would safeguard his future.
The people of Liberia’s clan were restless, never satisfied with the wild game they caught or the berries they picked. The Rattus always wanted more from Nature. They were lazy too, and tired easily of having to search for food and shelter. The Rattus began to experiment with ways to make Nature work for them. They planted seeds of their favorite plants so they would not have to search for food. Rather than hunt, they imprisoned their favorite game, and fed the animals until they were fat and worthy of slaughter.
Nature was not at all happy about these changes. Sometimes she would play tricks on the Rattus, showing them they were not nearly as intelligent as they believed themselves to be. Her favorite trick was to withhold the rain so the crops would fail. She also enjoyed giving diseases to their livestock. This made the Rattus very angry at Nature; they were too vain to see She was simply trying to teach them a lesson.
Because the Rattus had not developed their hearts, they were emotionally like toddlers and threw tantrums in response to Nature’s retributions. They became destructive, and tried to show Nature they were the most powerful. Sometimes they would succeed, but Nature would eventually regain the upper hand, and once again the Rattus would be consumed with childish anger.
Blinded by their emotions, the Rattus men started to hallucinate that the women in the clan were Nature’s handmaidens. They began to take out their frustration and anger on the womenfolk and the children. They would beat the women and children much like they thrashed the wheat in harvest. This made Liberia very scared, and when her father came home at night from working in the fields, she would run and hide in the forest. From watching her mother and the other women in the village, Liberia knew too much abuse would destroy her precious heart. While in the forest, Liberia would dream of a world where women were safe and men had hearts. She prayed for these things to the moon. And when Liberia would pray, Gabriel would wake from his sleep, gaze at the moon, and feel his heart grow stronger.
The men of the Rattus clan tried to fool Nature into believing they had hearts. They took lovers, believing lovemaking with their mistresses would make amends with Nature. But Nature knew everything and thus knew that the men who made love to their mistresses were the same men abusing their wives and children. Nature became even more furious. She decided to put a curse on the Rattus until they found heart. She unleashed all of her powers. Great storms, earthquakes, floods, diseases, infestations, and droughts wreaked havoc on the Rattus’s way of life. Every attempt made by the Rattus to control Nature was met with even greater calamity. The Rattus grew greedier in response to Nature’s unpredictability. They decided their wheat fields were not enough and began to tear down the dark forest where Liberia kept her heart.
In desperation, Liberia pleaded with the Rattus leaders to spare the forest. This made the leaders suspicious of Liberia and what she might be protecting there. The leaders began to interrogate Liberia, who they sensed had something they did not. When they discovered it was her heart that she was hiding, they felt betrayed, just as they felt Nature had betrayed them. They imprisoned Liberia in a chamber located at the very top of a wheat silo.
In her tiny quarters there was a small window, and Liberia could see the moon. At night, she began to dream of a man with the moon on his shoulder. Just as Liberia began to have these dreams, Gabriel was going through his initiation rites with the Amazonia. These rituals deemed him a man with mind and heart, ready to venture into the world. In the vision quest that marked the end of his rite of passage, Gabriel saw his future as a healer of the people. He also had a vision of a woman with wheat in her hair, and knew this woman would be his partner in life. The day after his rite of passage was completed, Gabriel set off to create his destiny.
Meanwhile, Liberia became very bored and lonely in the silo. She began weaving pieces of wheat together to pass the time. She first made herself a mat to sleep on. When she slept on the mat, she had fantastic dreams of adventurous journeys to far away lands and making love with the man with the moon on his shoulder. The dreams would always end the same, with an image of wheat weaved into a long strand. During the day, Liberia would reflect on her dreams and what they meant. To pass the time, she would weave the wheat together as she had seen it in her dreams.
One day, after many nights dreaming and many days reflecting and weaving, Liberia hit her head on the low ceiling in the silo. The blow to her head seemed to shake Liberia from a trance. She looked around her and realized she had weaved together a very long rope. She decided to escape through the window in the silo on the next night of a full moon and make her dreams come true.
Liberia had no difficulty escaping. The Rattus had forgotten about Liberia in the silo, just as they had forgotten about their own hearts. Liberia, however, did not forget her heart, but she did not forget her mind either. She realized to make all her dreams come true she would need to be equipped with great knowledge. She also wanted to have both mind and heart, for she knew the man with the moon on his shoulder would have these too.
Liberia studied very hard and travelled the world. She became enthralled with her freedom and life outside the Rattus tribe. Her dreams began to change. She dreamed less of the man with the moon on his shoulder, and more about the moon. What was it made of? How could it stay suspended in the sky? What would it take to journey to the moon? Many of the questions Liberia asked caught the attention of the elders she met along her journey. Yet rather than punishing her for her mind like the Rattus tribe punished her for her heart, they rewarded her for her ideas, and sent her to a special place for very curious people.
Gabriel was already at this place and doing well with his mind, but his heart was restless. He had been searching for the woman with wheat in her hair, but could not find her. He was losing hope.
Meanwhile, Liberia was elated to find a clan that valued at least parts of who she was. She packed her things and found a small place to live and settled in, waiting for the Festival of Curiosity to begin in the fall. She liked to take her books and read in a local eatery and dream of the fun she would have sharing ideas. Caught up in her studies, Liberia could be quite messy, and one day a strand of pasta got caught in her hair.
Walking home late that night from the eatery, Liberia noticed there was a full moon, and she began to reflect on her past and her old dreams of the man with the moon on his shoulder. Crossing the bridge that led to her small place, she noticed the moon reflecting in the water. Not paying attention to where she was going, she ran directly into a man, who happened to be Gabriel!
Gabriel grabbed Liberia’s shoulder to keep her from falling. When she looked up to see who this man was, she could not see his face, only the glow of the moonlight behind him. Gabriel saw the pasta in Liberia’s hair and wanted to remove it, but thought this would be too intimate. Yet he felt like he knew this woman forever. Liberia also felt like Gabriel was someone she had known for a very long time.
Liberia and Gabriel both fell silent. Breaking the silence, Liberia fumbled an apology. Gabriel claimed it was his fault. They laughed, introduced themselves, and learned they lived very near one another. From that day forward, they began to fall in love, interlacing the dreams from their pasts with the reality of their present lives. To this day, they continue to love one another, weaving together their hearts and minds.
