posted April 13, 2013 01:42 AM            

Exchanging Biology For Biography

quote:

---

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 epistomology 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.

~ James Hillman, The Soul's Code:
In Search of Character and Calling

---