Written by Amanda Smith
On the evening of April 23rd, the last lecture of the Mysterium Hunanum Studies on Madness commenced. Presented by Craig Vasey was the series last topic: An Existentialist Approach to Madness.
Vasey started off his presentation with the word “madness” asking the audience what does the word mean exactly, if we could put one single definitive definition to it. He explains that it’s just a word, it can cover an array of things from physical imbalances or disturbance in the mind. He further explained that it can’t be but into a single definition, he says describing the madness is like describing what love means. It’s hard to determine a significant single meaning for it. He jokes adding, “Madness is a linguist black hole.”
Vasey then goes into an overview of his main point about the research he found on Freud theories looking at literary works made by Freud’s colleague, Michael Thompson. Thompson wrote “The Truth about Freud’s Technique”where we explore the idea that there is no such thing as mental illness because it is not a proper medical condition, or as Vasey says, “mental illness is a metaphor, a mapping of medical talk and values (concerning physical suffering and its cause) onto behavior, feelings, thought, consciousness-experience” In culture today, he explains, that mental illness is just a term we have accepted. That we as a society want to make it seem that there is a cure to mental illness, that it something we need to find a solution to. But in reality, we are only helping someone who is suffering, suffer less. Whether it be throughs medically prescribed drugs or therapy. Overall, showing us that the medical field is in charge of mentally ill individuals.
To introduce the findings of Freud’s time, Vasey gave a brief background but how 1780’s the idea of moral treatment came along, a “remarkable step forward in treating such people as human beings who need help from society,” Vasey exclaims sarcastically, meaning that instead of treating mentally ill people as criminals, entertainment, and animals, we treated them like humans that need help. When psychoanalyst started to treat these individuals they thought that the body or mind was intervened by the gods of evil spirits, had a failure to control appetites and desires, or possessed by the devil. These ‘findings’ were then resulting in private institutionalization because they were too much too handle or states were sponsoring warehousing to try techniques to control these mental ill patients. But then came Freud.
As Thompson had put it, “Freud believed people developed hysteria and neurosis because they have been traumatized by unrequited love in their childhoods. He was the first to recognize that our parents, in fact all our relationships, have on us and our capacity to love is also the source of the most profound suffering.” From then on, Freud would consider this notion with tests and therapy sessions that would, as Vasey says, reach the repressed memories or thoughts that are causing the suffering by paying attention to the patients concerns in order to help them. Vasey explained that in repression, one is not aware of the memories, and that the mind is actively working to keep those memories repressed.
Though this concept was hard to grasp for the audience, we all were astounded by the evidence found in Thompson work. Thompson wrote, that there was a woman who was temporarily blind, paralyzed, and would not drinking water and was very unhealthy due to the fact. After Freud had put her under hypnosis she grumbled about her english lady companion, saw the lady’s dog drinking out of her glass, but didn’t want to be impolite so she didn’t say anything, she asked for a drink of water, and then woke up with the glass to her lips and never was disturbed again by this experience.
From this, Vasey would explain the difficulty of a psychoanalysis. Which can be explain with the “three humiliations of human narcissism at the hands of science.” Those three concepts being: cosmological, biological, and psychological. cosmological is the past time revelation that we used to think the earth was the center of the universe and god put us there. But was it’s actually true is that the sun is the center, thanks to Copernicus. Biological humiliation was when the human race thought they were a supernatural being, but Darwin provided a different opinion, evolution. Finally, what this lecture is focused on is the psychological humiliation. We think that we are in control of our mind, but according to Freud and Vasey “you’re not the master of your own house and the ego cannot control its drives.” The mind represses things, and they may come back to torment you, but overall we are not in control.
Vasey then extend is notion, that we don’t control our thoughts, and ties in the beliefs/themes of existentialism. One of these themes was anxiety. We have so many anxieties that we repress, because we are a race that is aware of ourselves, cares we exists, and knows that we will die. Amongst these fairly important anxieties we also carry around the question of life: what is the meaning of human existence? What kind of being is human being? We have heightened our awareness of our existence, that we developed the distractions of everyday life. Whether it be through tasks or through keeping busy with multiple activities, we absorbed ourselves in things, to keep our minds away from the anxieties, which is an understandable reaction, it’s not a mental illness, it is a part of life. Vasey calls this repression of anxieties, ontological insecurity. Vasey also briefly pointed out that we have become a generation of understanding of everyone’s weirdness, because we all have troubles.
The final conclusion of Vasey’s lecture was that Freud findings makes sense. We all really do repress our memories and anxieties, there is a subconscious we cannot access directly, and that being like this is not medically related at all, or as one student suggested, “we are all mad here.”
