posted April 13, 2013 01:51 AM            

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All of a sudden and out of nowhere a child shows who she is, what he must do.

These impulsions of destiny frequently are stifled by dysfunctional perceptions and unreceptive surroundings, so that calling appears in the myriad symptoms of difficult, self-destructive, accident-prone, 'hyper' children - all words invented by adults in defense of their misunderstanding... I want us to envision that what children go through has to do with finding a place in the world for their specific calling. They are trying to live two lives at once, the one they were born with and the one of the place and among the people they were born into. The entire image of a destiny is packed into a tiny acorn, the seed of a huge oak on small shoulders. And its call rings loud and persistent and is as demanding as any scolding voice from the surroundings. The call shows in the tantrums and obstinacies, in the shyness and retreats, that seem to set the child against our world but that may be protections of the world it comes with and comes from...

The War Against Children, as Peter and Ginger Breggin entitle their recent book, threatens American children with an epidemic of troubles caused by the methods that would cure them of their trouble. The familiar evils of other ages reappear in the guises of helping programs... As in colonial days, drugs to ease the coolies’ pain and increase their indifference will be provided by those who cause the pain.

Children have become the sacrificial victims of Saturn-Moloch, as in the ancient Mediterranean. They are also the scapegoats for scientific fears of the anomalous, of the excessive, and of the paradigm-shifting movements of imagination that first appear as new -- that is, in the young. What is already taking place in our "mental health facilities," where drugs are dispensed with less shame than condoms, would have benumbed during their childhoods probably every one of the extraordinary people told about in this book.

The vicious inadequacy of treatment is not intended by practitioners, who mean well. It results willy-nilly from the inadequacy, or viciousness, or theory. So long as the statistics of normalizing developmental psychology determine the standards against which the extraordinary complexities of a life are judged, deviations become deviants. Diagnosis coupled with statistics is the disease; yet diagnosis coupled with statistics is the very name -- Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (or DSM) -- of the universally accepted guide produced by the American Psychiatric Association and used by the profession, the health care providers, and the insurance payers. Yet the whole of that thick, heavy, and lightweight book provides accounts of the various ways the daimons affect human fate and how sadly and strangely they often appear in our civilization.

This book prefers to connect pathology with exceptionality, exchanging the term "abnormal" for "extraordinary" and letting the extraordinary be the vision against which our ordinary lives are examined. Rather than case history, a psychologist would read human history; rather than biology, biography; rather than applying the epistemology of Western understanding to the alien, the tribal, and nontechnological cultures, we would let their anthropology (their stories of human nature) be applied to ours.

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posted April 17, 2013 12:43 PM            

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Extraordinary people excite; they guide; they warn; standing, as they do, in the corridors of imagination -- statues of greatness, personifications of marvel and sorrow... They give our lives an imaginary dimension... Without these exemplars of the daimon, we have no other category of the extraordinary except diagnostic pathology. These personifications of heightened imagination burn right into the soul and are its teachers. Not only the hero... but tragic figures too, beauties and comics and crones and handsome leading men. The stagy exaggeration of character traits displayed by extraordinary people belongs to the Roomantic tradition. When the tradition of Romantic grandeur, with its cast of lunatics, lovers, and poets, is down-sized by egalitarianism, deconstructed by academic cynicism, or labeled grandiosity by psychoanalytic diagnostics, then the vacancy in the culture is occupied by pop-star squatters... By psychology's "mortal" sin, I mean the sin of deadening, the dead feeling that comes over us when we read professional pychology, hear its language, the voice with which it drones... Grand motivations are lost to psychological categories like grandiosity and inflation, while the adventure of ideas is cut to fit experimental designs... By looking at ourselves as examples of calling, at our destinies as manifestations of the daimon, and at our lives with the imaginary sensitivity we give fictions [we might find that] beauty is itself a cure for psychological malaise. That longing in the human heart for beauty must be recognized by the field which claims the human heart to be its province... The Romantics grasped this essential truth. Their exaggerated overreach toward cloudy glories meant to bring into this world forms of the invisible they knew were necessary for imagining what a life is... The daimon's "reminders" work in many ways. The daimon motivates. It protects. It invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when it is neglected or opposed... It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns... It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition... It is slow to anchor and quick to fly. It can't shed its supernal calling, sensing itself both in lonely exile and in cosmic harmony. Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind...

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