I really appreciate these two posts; they meet with what I’ve always sensed about modern pharmacological prisons for the mind.

Such a far cry from the extraordinary C. G. Jung, his explorations of the personal and transpersonal unconscious!

Perhaps it was B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism that wrenched psychiatry from its natural focus, the realm of mystery, and into listing categories of “behavior,” “normal” and not, the labeling of which, of course, changes over time.

Or perhaps it was the religion of 3D science itself, scientism, that did the job, with its insistence on evidence, parameters, closed experiments, (pretended) “proof.” After all, psychiatry, as a branch of modern industrial medicine, had to fall under the same rubric.

But of course, actually, it’s the profit-motive, capitalism, run amuck, with one of its byproducts so-called pharmaceutical “cures” for “symptoms” of bodies or minds that are deemed “abnormal” in some respect or other.

One of my sons would have been labeled hyperactive, had I allowed him to be tested. I did not. The one time I myself went to “see a psychiatrist” was when I wanted my first husband to go into counseling with me, and he wouldn’t, said I must be crazy, please go see a shrink. So I did! Walked in there and grilled him about his assumptions, his training, his view of the mind and the spirit. Noticed that as the hour went on he kept backing his chair up further and further until it finally hit the wall at the same time as he hit the wall internally. Couldn’t stomach my presence even one more second. Told me that I was “fine,” “normal,” didn’t need to see a psychiatrist. Hilarious!

And then, of course, I read and re-read Ronnie D. Laing, the bete noir of psychiatrists, the one who actually listened to so-called “schizophrenics” describe their experience as if it really was meaningful and not crazy. That changed everything for him, and for many of us back in the ’60s when we woke up and recognized so-called “sanity” as relative, a social construction. The “sanity” (the conditioning process) advocated then and now was/is Cartesian, splitting body from mind, mind from spirit, earth from heaven, and all of us from each other.

Fuggetaboutit! Not my cup of tea. And yours?

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