Status Updates From الحكمة والجنون والحماقة : س...

In a recent seminar... I gave to a group of psychoanalysts, my audience became progressively aghast when I said that I might accept a cigarette from a patient without making an interpretation...
'And what if a patient asked you for a glass of water?' one of them asked...
'I would give... her a glass of water and sit down in my chair again.'
'Would you make an interpretation?'
'Very probably not.'
...'I'm...lost.' 143

These two requests seemed to express perfectly what other people wanted in therapy with me. They wanted to enact some sort of drama, with me there but not interfering, not stopping them, or trying to change them by 'making interpretations'. hypnosis, or other techniques designed to change them... (131)

But these women in the refractory ward brought back to me Homer's description of the ghosts in Hades, separated on their side by the width of the Ocean, and, on the part of the living, by the Rivers of Fear. (112)

The politics of the basic human bond itself. The politics of love. I saw love as crucified. But I could not see its resurrection. That was my nightmare. (89)

There was a passage from Thomas Traherne (somewhat changed from the original) I kept repeating to myself. This is how I remember remembering it:

He knows nothing as he ought to know, unless he knows its relations to God, angels and men, time and eternity.

(87)

At the same time I believed that what I or anyone ‘believed’ was somehow vitally important… What one believed our life and death to he was, in all senses, truly a matter of life and death.
I read the sceptics, Epictetus, Montaigne, Voltaire, Marx, Nietzsche; I became a sort of nihilist, atheistic, dialectical, historical, materialist, Freudian, communist anarchist. (63)

The ability truly not to understand what is taken for granted is the beginning of scientific or philosophical sagacity. It is a pity its manifestations are often greeted with ridicule, impatience, contempt, punishment. (45-46)

Generally speaking, the type of psychiatrist I was trained to be seldom sees anyone who is in a different state for longer than it takes to decide whether to let it go on or to put a stop to it. The detection of the existence of certain condemned states of mind is sufficient reason to end them. The psychiatrist is condemned to know next to nothing of what he is putting a stop to. (18)

There are many people who have been psychotic—in their own estimation as well as in that of psychiatrists—who want people to know what it is like to be completely out of the ordinary... shared world, and into some other hell-world of sheer horror... There is no doubt that there are enormous differences between states of mind... The question is: what sort of difference does this sort of difference make? (7)