Where all crime, all violence, and yes, all psychiatry come from.

Here's where the Simple Science Of Sanity bites.

I’ve been posting on the Critical Psychiatry Network again. In particular one doctor, I’ll call Rz, takes hot exception to the notion that I can ‘know’ anything more about psychiatric disease than anyone. He didn’t like my two basic assumptions in my last post, and even suggests I was wrong to post them on that network.

I wrote as follows –

To me, your contention that I’m wrong to assert that “childhoods are over” defies legal reality. In this country, prior to the age of maturity – whether 16, 18 or 21, the law regards you as an “infant”. Thereafter you are an adult, at least in law – your infancy is then legally ‘over’, whether you like it or not.

More, my suggestion that emotional reactions though valid in infancy are obsolete and pathogenic in adulthood seems to fall foul of your “cognitive, dualistic assumptions alien to trauma” . . .

As before, it might be wiser for you to respect the line I proposed we draw in the sand between us, and as you say, merely delete my posts unread, if that is your wont.

Since I doubt you’ll check the texts yourself, I quote here the point where Freud himself agrees he still fears his father, though he was 81 at the time, and the source of his threats had been dead for 41 years. To me this is unreal, illogic, or irrational, even non-cognitive – I don’t follow why it isn’t for you. (It’s those frontals again.)

“He must be admired, he may be trusted, but one cannot help being also afraid of him”.

This appears on page 174 in my copy of Moses and Monotheism (1937).

In 1986 (for the first time for me), I allowed a patient to also fear her father. In her case, he had been dead for 4 years. Serendipitously I’d known him – he had been in my family medical practice. It didn’t make logical sense to me, a view I invited her to share, which, in due course she did.

I don’t expect you to check the textual basis for my assertions, so again I’ll spell out the point here. Thus on line 37, in my dialogue with my star pupil, Lenny, I also invite him to agree. I say –

37:   Do you find that surprising, that you find it difficult to tell your mother you're an adult?

Here, to me, is an example of a clear carry over from infancy – Lenny was 43 at the time, and no longer needed to fear anything that had happened (and had stopped happening) 3 decades ago. I welcome the illogic of this – I invite those afflicted to review it, to acknowledge it, and thereafter to benefit from the acknowledgment. However, if they don’t, then that’s their choice (and my failure).

Where I can persuade them, then in total defiance of your ban, (and I presume, Bion’s et al) I do indeed claim to know more than they do – I “know” (with 100% immovable conviction) that they are no longer infants, and I make the assumption this makes a difference which, up to that point, they are ignorant of, as Freud was all his life. Contrary to his stated position, I cognitively set out to help them NOT be afraid of him/her. (Descartes notwithstanding.)

When they agree, and not before, they smile, relax, and stop wanting to kill people. For you to assert that I’m being coercive, non-consensual or fascist is plain rude.

So Rz, my posts clearly upset you – please take my advice – don’t read them. And in particular, DO NOT READ the PS which I now have the temerity to add below.

OK?

Yours regretfully,

Bob

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Here’s that PS for non-Rz readers only –

Now that we’ve got a Rz-free zone in this Post Script (I take no pleasure from rattling his chains), I can tell you what I really think.

Shortly I’ll be 90 – so though I’m full of exciting ideas, my energy levels decimate daily. So though I float off these notions, what happens to them is then up to others, not up to me – my task is to communicate, as best I can. (A full list of my copious papers is included on my earlier Substack pages.)

So let’s review a few obvious facts. Ask someone with psychotic symptoms why they’ve got them, where their symptoms come from, and they'll look at you as though you’re mad – they don’t know, and we don’t expect them to know. They may give you lots of ‘answers’ but none of them add up – in a word, they're ‘Guff’. So that’s why I relabel psychosis a Guff Disease.

OK so far?

What we normally expect from homo sapiens is that they use their frontal lobes to solve their problems – look at technology and be amazed. But come psychosis, and this doesn’t happen. Guff is what you get, not solutions.

This is the third obvious fact – (1) we have minds, (2) childhoods are over, (3) when our minds go ‘sick’, we talk Guff.

Now hold on to your hat, because I’m about to extend Guff Disease. It’s everywhere. In my view, it comes from past trauma cutting off the frontals – but you’ll have your own ideas as to aetiology – just agree that Guff is what comes out when the mind is on the blink.

But it also comes out when you ask murderers why they’re violent – they don’t know – they give you Guff, not sense. Same with warmongers. Same with every criminal you can get to ask. So I conclude that Guff is not a side-issue – it’s the very heart of the disease itself. Find out where the Guff comes from and you’ve found where all crime, all violence, and all psychiatry go wrong.

Well, of course, if you already have half an idea for forensics, violence and psychopathology in general, then there’ll be little room left, for a notion as ubiquitous as Guff Disease. Especially if you’ve spent decades, tirelessly scraping through endless tomes, endless ‘thinkers’, to find something that works everytime, and that makes sense. Guff doesn’t.

Even that colossus Freud had a ‘no-go’ area in his mental furniture. If your problem was fear of your father, as mine was until I was 49, then there’s no point in asking Freud for help – he couldn’t help himself there either. Nor could I, until a whole series of serendipities, quite outside my career-plan, enlightened me. Thereafter, I could, and did.

So why turn the tables and welcome Guff as a central feature? Surely the incomprehensibility of insanity, of anti-social crime, and especially nowadays of war, just confuses matters – who can possibly explain them? The perpetrators certainly can’t. “Ukraine is part of Mother Russia?” Oh, grow up Putin. Stop killing people because you think Guff.

BUT once you grasp the overriding significance of Guff, then you can do something about it. For what the mind is really for, is socialising – yes, we’re a social species, we don’t have fangs, wings, nor fleetness of foot – we have overgrown frontals. And when these get blocked, it all goes mad. SNAFUs, though ubiquitous, are also frontals-based. And if you can deploy social delight to defeat social harm, then they all evaporate – all crime, all violence and yes, all psychiatry. But don’t take my word for it – work it out for yourself and then see if you agree with me, or, alternatively side with such as Rz.

Living in ‘interesting’ times can be nerve-wracking. . .  . .

Thanks for listening,

Rock on

Bob