A Pattern of Madness

Neville Symington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367105228
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429910418
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Abnormal Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Author of many respected psychoanalytic works including Narcissism: A New Theory, Emotion and Spirit, Making of a Psychotherapist and Spirit of Sanity, the distinguished psychoanalyst Neville Symington's latest book expands, refines and deepens what has become an ever more impressive, far-reaching and absorbing inquiry into the nature of madness and sanity. It is Symington's central contention that the core psychopathology of our times can be identified and designated as narcissism, although self-centredness, egoism or solipsism might serve equally well. Critical of psychiatry's mere symptomatology, and of much psychotherapeutic practice as superficial and sterile, the present volume probes compellingly into the narcissistic pattern in an effort to delineate its structure in all its complexity and thereby gain a measure of perspective and distance from this most intractable of psychic states.

Part I
The Pattern of Sanity

A fatuous passivity towards the present springs from an infatuation with the Past.

Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (1962, p. 261)

To be mad is to do something that destroys happiness, restricts freedom, and prevents emotional giving. Madness is mad because it is self-damaging. There are diverging views on what happiness consists in. There is the utilitarian view that happiness consists in forging a path that achieves the maximum degree of pleasure and the minimum of pain. Freud’s view on this has governed very largely the outlook of most schools of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, but also of psychological understanding more generally. The quote at the start of this chapter is an invitation to rouse ourselves into a state of renewal. In other words, I am inviting those in the social sciences to consider a different basic assumption: to consider that the utilitarian view might be wrong. A stark exception is logotherapy as devised by Victor Frankl (1959). Another exception is Wilfred Bion, though this has not been generally recognized. The other view is that of Kant, who believed that our duty is to pursue the “just act” and that happiness, should it arrive, is a fortuitous by-product. I disagree with both these views. The first is based too heavily upon what may be called a sensual or contingent estimate of happiness, and the second is not sufficiently rooted in the individual’s own creative capacity to produce happiness. Although Kant stressed the mind’s creative function so emphatically, yet when he crossed over from “pure philosophy” into the field of ethics, he invoked the “categorical imperative”, which is a philosophical euphemism for “act according to God’s commands”. In other words, once you cross into the ethical arena, just do what you are told and don’t use your own creativity.

In this first part, therefore, I have found it necessary to attend to the very foundation out of which I believe human beings, the animate world, the inanimate world, and the whole universe are constructed. I have tried to outline this in the first chapter, which I have entitled “Ontology”. In the second chapter I have put forward my contention that what human beings aspire to is freedom, and that madness is an obstacle to its achievement. The third chapter concerns the nature of emotional acts. These three chapters form a background illuminating the motivational principles of all emotional behaviour. One might see them as the light against which madness, as a darkness, is silhouetted.

Sanity

While going down a slope, Zorba kicked against a stone, which went rolling downhill. He stopped for a moment in amazement, as if he were seeing this astounding spectacle for the first time in his life. He looked round at me and in his look I discerned faint consternation.

“Boss, did you see that?” he said at last. “On slopes, stones come to life again.”

I said nothing but felt a deep joy. This, I thought, is how great visionaries and poets see everything—as if for the first time. Each morning they see a new world before their eyes; they do not really see it, they create it.

Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Creek (1972, p. 140)

The pattern of madness is sketched out in Part II. If there is a pattern of madness, then what about a pattern of sanity? I shall try to sketch this out in this first part.

In the most general terms, the sane person is the one who is in touch with the real world, whereas the mad one is divorced from it. Therefore the real seems to be the touchstone that separates the mad from the sane. It is the diagnostic indicator. But, at the same time and for reasons that, will, I hope, emerge in this account, madness is destructive to the individual’s life and development, whereas sanity enhances it.

For some reason,¹ when people talk of “the real world”, they usually think first of the non-human and even the non-living world. Only after some thought may there be some readjustment of sights so that the human world comes into focus: a human world with all its variety and changeableness. We take the view that judgements of human beings like:

“He is a real person.”

Or:

“She is genuine.”

Or:

“I have never known her not to be truthful.”

Or:

“He is a very caring person.”

Or:

“She is very loving towards all her children.”

Or:

“He is a man of great courage.. !’

are primary. They are the first emotional judgements, and they are the template through which we see the inanimate world. This view is the opposite of that held by determinists and those scientists of a positivist disposition.

So, just as there is a constellation of madness, so there is also one of sanity. The sane constellation is made up of the Real and Truth, of which the following elements are components:

• goodness
• love
• acceptance

Again the principle of inclusion (see Appendix) applies in that in each are included all the others. As sanity and madness are distinguished according to what is real, then this is the factor that needs to be understood. The first thing to realize is that when we say that someone is in touch with reality, we do not mean that there is a something out there that the person perceives but, rather, that he has constructed things in a way that leads us to say that he is in touch with reality. If a person comes and says that his parents hate him but within a few sentences he mentions that his mother had sacrificed a holiday in order to look after him when he had ‘flu, then we might question whether he is in touch with reality. In other words, his statement that his parents hate him does not seem to represent what is really the case. We must, then, declare his judgement to be delusional or mad. In a judgement there is a scale of madness, but here we consider just the two categories, without their intensity. We need to examine which qualities require us to name the judgement or perception to be mad rather than sane.

This matter is also covered in Chapter 6, so some of what is said here is repeated there but in a different context and therefore changing it somewhat. When the person says:

“My parents hated me …”

he describes his persecuted state. This statement, which is treated as an unchallengeable fact, is persecuting and restricting to him. Schematically, let us say that there are two sets of feelings about this person’s parents:

1. a good feeling imbued with warmth and affection.
2. a bad feeling imbued with hatred and bitterness.

In both cases the mental outlook has powered a selection of memories that support the feeling. The good feeling selects memories of parents being kind and loving; the bad feeling selects memories of parents being cruel and negligent. Let us say that the Real demands that the psyche embraces an apprehension of both sets of memories. The question, then, is: what is the feeling that governs such a state? The answer to this question is that it is not governed by a feeling but by an emotion that generates acceptance. The apprehension of the Real demands a psychic act, whereas the two stated perceptions rest upon a fundamental selection that requires only a passive registration. Frequently the good feeling imbued with warmth and affection hides the bad feeling that is imbued with hatred and bitterness. I have written about the way a psychotherapist may be seduced into changing the patient’s attitude from mode one into mode two (Symington, 1996, pp. 110–115). In such an instance, the psychotherapist has not wrought any change at all.

The Real, then, requires the psychic act of acceptance. This needs a bit more explanation. It is the view that a statement like:

”My parents hated me…”

restricts emotional growth and derives from a selection and implosion. In Chapter 6 I differentiate between what I referred to as an introjection that is “photographic” and one that is creative. It should be clear from what has been said above that both modes one and two are different manifestations of the “photographic”, and that neither is true because they are based on a selection that obliterates a series of memories that do not conform to the philosophy of that selection—like the editor of a Communist newspaper who selects only those facts that support his ideology.

What is being claimed here is that the Real requires a psychic act of acceptance, whereas madness results from an act of condemnation. What drives the statement;

“My parents hated me …”

is a condemnation that is legitimated through the memories selected to support it. The sense of it is:

“My parents hated me, and this justifies my condemnation of them.”

What is being said here is that the presence of persecutory figures within that restrict the growth of the ego and strangle creativity is consistent with a mentality that condemns, and therefore this latter psychic act is what fashions madness. Condemnation spawns madness, whereas acceptance generates sanity. Condemnation issues from an ego that is under the direction of god. Condemnation that always includes expulsion of parts of the self is inherently destructive because parts of the self that are necessary to enable creative functioning are not available as a resource within.

It needs to be said here that when I refer to the act of acceptance, it is fundamentally an act that is tolerant of an entity in the self that enables the self and the parents to be seen as they are. So either the statement that my parents were bad and cruel or the statement that they were loving and good or both are false.

The diagnosis of what is mad as opposed to what is sane rests upon a value judgement for which there is no rationale. It arises out of a basic human conviction. It is as basic to the structure of the human sciences as the statement

”The shortest distance between two points is a straight line”

is basic to geometry. What we know is that madness and sanity are differentiated according to the two processes of condemnation and acceptance but why the latter is valued whereas the former is sanctioned can never be explained. Attempts to explain in terms of either a contract theory or the survival of the individual ultimately fail because we have finally to ask why is the maintenance of this communal structure is so valued. As the human community has put such weight upon this distinction, I want to examine the architecture of these two emotions.

The core difference between condemnation and acceptance is that in the former the negative qualities in the personality are hated and expelled from it with violence. The entity is expelled violently into a receptive host within either the micro-social or sometimes the macro-social environment. Acceptance, on the other hand, receives the negative quality, and through that very act the quality becomes endowed with a positive valence and becomes a source of strength in the personality. It is a principle that anything that stays in relation to all others is good, whereas if it becomes separated or isolated, it has a corrupting effect upon the personality. The strange paradox is that an envy that is hated damages the personality, whereas an envy that is recognized and accepted becomes a source of strength in the personality. According to the Zohar, moral evil is always either something separated or isolated or something that enters into a relation where it does not fit (Scholem, 1995). Sanity, therefore, consists in the acceptance of all parts of the personality, and madness consists in hatred and non-acceptance of large parts of the personality. What needs to be emphasized is that in the act of acceptance it is the act itself that structures both our system of perception and our beliefs. When the inner act is one of acceptance, we call our perceptions real and our beliefs sane; when the inner act is one of condemnation, we call our perceptions delusional and our beliefs mad. The claim here is that the inner act structures our perception and our beliefs, and this needs further examination.

* * *

We turn our attention first to the perceptual system. We are saying here that the perceptual system is driven, as it were, by a template of inner emotional acts, and therefore when the act is one of condemnation, it selects what we see, hear, and touch according to that act. So when I see or hear loving acts in parents whom I hate and condemn, I obliterate the sight and sound of them and intensify my sight and hearing of cruel acts. The judgement that follows is mad in that it is based on a perception of certain facts and on the obliteration of others. On the other hand, if the inner emotional act is one of acceptance, then cruel acts and loving acts are perceived and a judgement follows that we call in touch with reality or sane. What has been said about the perceptual system also applies to memory.

Contrary to the usual view that we perceive the inanimate world as if it were being processed through a perceptual system divorced from emotion, our view is that the templates that govern our perception of the human world also colour our perception of the non-human world. I had a striking example of this. A young man realized that he had never committed himself to any project, whether it be wife, children, or career. He said:

“That is an awful thought—it’s so basic; it’s such a basic thing not to have that capacity in me.”

I had a conflict in myself at that moment. I was tempted to say that this was a thought he could not bear, but I realized that I would be repeating what he had said and also that it would reinforce a negative perspective, whereas this realization was proof that a capacity was coming to birth in him. So, struggling between the dark and the light, I said to him:

“You are building that capacity for commitment now.”

There was a silence, and then he said:

“A most extraordinary thing happened when you said that a few moments ago. When I came into your room, I looked at the branch of the tree outside your window and was struck by the fact that it was bare. When you said I was building the capacity for commitment a few moments ago, I suddenly saw that the branch had leaves on it…”

I think that the negativity that I was tempted into was in him, and that it was responsible for his perception of the branch of the tree without leaves. I believe that at the moment of my interpretation, the inner template changed, altering his perception. What the template now included within it was the building of commitment that was at work. The leaves were young ones in late winter, on a deciduous tree. I believe that this is a dramatic instance of a perceptual process that is much more widespread.

We turn now from the perceptual system to beliefs. When outer facts are structured according to an inner template, we refer to this phenomenon as a belief. The belief is the inner correlate of the human value judgement. Why we value love rather than hate is mysterious. Although I believe that it is profoundly reasonable, yet that reasonableness is inextricably linked to a belief. The belief and the reasonableness are partners. One has what the other lacks. Belief motivates me to act, whereas reasoning makes sense of the act. Belief always requires reasoning to support it, so a sane belief and a mad belief will always have the support of reasoning. In the former case we call it “reasoning” and in the latter “rationalization”. However, the belief is the engine that drives the machine, as it were. The key to the reasoning that underlies the sane belief is contained in Chapter 1. The concept of existence as a unity includes all reality and excludes nothing. The act of acceptance, the integrative act, is the template that underpins the sane belief, whereas the act of condemnation, the hated expulsion of parts of the self, underlies the belief that is mad.

The integrated self is able to fashion a perception that we call real or a belief that we call true. A damaged self, however, does not have this capacity and is only able to fashion a perception or belief that is faulty or what we would call delusional or mad. The real and the true, then, are determined by the state of the functioning self.

A good action as we...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• Introduction
• PART I The pattern of sanity
• PART II The pattern of madness
• PART III The subjective experience
• APPENDIX Principles of action
• REFERENCES
• INDEX