‘“They’re called frontal lobes”.
I laughed but he did not. It was a simple fact, he said, that the brain had evolved in stages and the parts fit together badly. Thinking caused anxiety the way walking upright caused backache. Our ability to remember the past, imagine the future, and use language, all recent acquisitions, did not mesh well with ancient regions of the brain that had guarded us for eons, knew only the present, and did not distinguish between imaginary fears and real trouble.
Fair enough, but why was it my frontal lobes’ fault if the primitive portion of my brain was too drunk on limbic moonshine to distinguish between real and imaginary monsters?
Because, he told me, there is no difference between real and imaginary monsters, just as there is no difference between the past and the future: neither exists. […] I had better realise that the brain isn’t an intellectual, any more than the stomach is a gourmet. The brain is the body, and the body lives in the present, which is all there is.’
There’s so much thinking and writing about this book I would like to do. It’s quite an achievement, the range of aspects brought together pertaining to the politics and perception of mental illness across decades in the United States. He combines philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, theology, literature, academia, sociology, among many other things, all woven into a story of a friendship. It’s quite astonishing. I’ve not finished it yet, my mind is spinning. It’s a slow read as I am needing to really focus. It’s breadth has had me wondering whether I can keep up at all. It’s in no way dry, Rosen’s language is captivating and memorable, maddening at times until it’s revealed as the perfect preface to the next paragraph. I’m gutted I’ve borrowed the book from the library as I’ve been unable to annotate and I’m sure there are important quotes I wanted to record here. I may have to buy it and skim through it again.
This book has helped more than anything else I’ve read to really understand postmodernism.
‘It dawned on me slowly that modernism meant the whole modern show – including the Enlightenment, empirical science, and rational thought – and postmodernism, which was sometimes called poststructuralism, was its refutation and replacement. […] The beauty of postmodernism was that it erased the world with one hand while rewriting it with the other, allowing you to inherit the authority you discredited like a spoil of war.’
The complexity of people and ideas – Foucault, for example, considered “madness’ a social construct, an excuse to demonise non-conformists, while at the same time considering organic illnesses like AIDS also as social constructs. There’s an equilibrium position here somewhere! And how relevant and important this question is for today’s society. Are societal issues forever confined to a pendulum swinging, with only the outer clock case changing?
Postmodernism and the impact on mental health provision; the influence of the rise of psychoanalytic thought and how quickly, and at the same time so slowly, these ideas influence aspects of society without time for evaluation and modulation at all. Quick in implementation, slow in consideration, perhaps absent in consideration at all until the damage is done.
It’s helping my thoughts to coalesce around the conflict between individual freedom and restraint, and how this is applied in cases of mental illness.
‘[…] the madness in Madness and Civilization wasn’t a medical diagnosis, but a “social construct”, devised in the seventeenth century to enforce the rule of reason by demonising anyone who strayed beyond the boundaries of convention.”
‘I was unclear how you could tell what was real and what was phony if the world was “completely absurd”.’
What I’ve gained most of all is a greater appreciation of the role of arts and literature in accompanying these transitions. How would any reflection be possible without them? It exacerbates my fears regarding the reduction of arts teaching in schools and the consideration of AI-generated image as a legitimate art. What the heck will this do to the pendulum? Stop it altogether, I imagine.
To end on a personal note, I am finding this book at a time following two bereavements and loss of my old ways of coping. My use of fantasy, ‘the magical other’, those mind tricks a therapist helped me to appreciate for the coping strategies they were, and helped me channel them into art-making – well, those mechanisms have gone now. I definitely rode a wave of exaltation from my newfound passions. They are still there of course, but the old wounds do persist and take the shine out of things from time to time. Of course I’ve made too much progress and treasure my creative freedom so much that I know there is no going back, but I have to say that fear of death is ever more present and occasionally I miss the vitality that the magical other gave me. I am glad I was able to record some of that time in poems and pictures.
‘Michael’s madness, woven out of fragments of sanity, had a weird vitality; his recovery, on the other hand, seemed full of pain and sickness. The fragile sanity he left the hospital with felt like an aspect of his illness, a force running counter to the main valence of his mind. The more his head cleared, the more alienated he appeared to be not just from psychosis but from his natural self, so I sometimes felt his medicated lucidity was just a guest inside his schizophrenia […]. Everyone said insight was the key, but the more insightful Michael got, the sadder and lonelier and angrier he became.’
