Saturday 14 December 2013

Recovering through shamanism

Don't be so hard on yourself.   That you are searching for a cure does not mean you are trying to escape something.  If you get rid of the punitive level of self-accusation regarding something so natural as searching, you may be able to make some headway.

Bear in mind that a lot of psychoanalysis is firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian mores, which maintain a dogma that one's goal in life HAS TO BE to serve the community through conforming to its mores.  To have to be in a position to do anything other than this is viewed as gross immaturity and narcissism.  But, this perspective does not take into account that those who are thoroughly immersed in the community and who are mostly deeply conforming to its mores are often the most immature and narcissistic types around.   Far from being the selfless types they would like us to believe they are, they adopt the principle that there is safety in numbers.  In fact, whatever the mass of people do, they will follow along, because  in that way they are able to hide.

When writing my thesis, I was really confused by Judeo-Christian mores, because I thought they had some real substance to them.  I thought that "infantile" states might really be narcissistic, or indeed as Lacan puts it, "psychotic".  But in fact the defining factor of an infantile state is an openness to experience.  Even the logic of maturation as a process should make this obvious.   When one is uncertain, one reverts to a state of being more open than before about what reality might be.   That is the healthy response to not knowing something -- one expands the realm of possibilities, so that one can take in more information of the sort that might prove useful, without at this stage knowing what the nature of that information might be.

The unhealthy narcissist is the Christian himself, who is afraid of taking in any new knowledge.  True infantilism shouts that one knows all there is to know, that there is nothing more that could be possibly added.

The Judeo-Christian ideology, which is reflected in Freud, also  maintains a certain line of thinking that a theorized pure state of being -- for instance, a perfect "soul" -- is inevitably damaged and sullied by sin or corruption, thus wrecking it.  The older you get, the more things can go awry, in their natural course, leading you to be wrecked by sin and corruption.  Thus the therapist can't really cure you but can put on a straitjacket over the mind, to keep your psyche in a splint.

But that is making so much nonsense out of reality, which is actually not based on such metaphysics, but is organic nature.  The thing about organic nature is that, left to its own devices, it will almost always heal itself, just as the body repairs itself from physical damage.

In an overall healthy, organic psyche, projection and infantilism are ways that the psyche heals itself.   It may be damaged and confused, but it can still heal.   But in the case of a Christian who has already accepted a straitjacket over his mind, nothing more can be done.   His projections will inevitably not help him, but will make the situation worse, and his infantilism will not help him to regenerate, but will just express a limit to his existing psychological state.  Buyer, beware.

Here are a couple of pages from an anthropological text on traditional shamanism:

http://musteryou.wordpress.com/2013/12/15/the-strong-eye-of-shamanism/

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Cultural barriers to objectivity