"The Discovery of the Unconscious" by Ellenberger

The Henri Ellenberger book, “The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry,” has been very useful to me in my attempt as an adult to understand the oldest, deepest, largest, strongest part of our minds. I can not remember where I heard about the book but I know it wasn't until my seventy-fifth year on this planet.

Ellenberger's history of hypnosis is deeper and more comprehensive than anything else I've read, relating it's central place and context in the search for understanding the subconscious. I mention hypnosis particularly because my own study and practice of it created the path through dreams and fairy tales that enabled me to slay dragons and discover their hoarded gold in their caves and bring the inhabitants of the castle and town back to life, and the leaves to come back out on the trees.

Here (p. 207) he quotes Carl Gustave Carus (1789-1869):

The key to the knowledge of the nature of the soul's conscious life lies in the realm of the unconscious. This explains the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of getting a real comprehension of the soul's secret. If it were an absolute impossibility to find the unconscious in the conscious, then Man should despair of ever getting knowledge of his soul, that is a knowledge of himself. But if this impossibility is only apparent, then the first task of a science of the soul is to state how the spirit of Man is able to descend into those depths.

One of our most important struggles in life is surely to “know thyself,” to achieve a realistic, universalistic selfhood that enables us to coordinate our actions with others and to construct courses of action that work for everyone. And yet, I invariably reflect upon reading something like Ellenberger's history of how rare it is that we even hear once about such a book. All those years of school, university, graduate school, continuing education, self-education but finding the really good stuff like this is pretty much a matter of sheer luck. I suppose, yes, that a whole lot of intense labor, searching, criticism, preparation, failure and experience is absolutely necessary to get anything out of Ellenberger as well as his protagonists like Charcot, Janet, Freud, Jung and the others. It's probably a miracle that as many of us do get the minuscule bit we do get, given that most of us have all we can do just to survive, never mind to raise children, to work, and to get some sleep.

It feels like an infinite luxury to have the circumstances to be able to work on a book like this. But it also feels like a complete sacrifice of one's life! It's like that corn of wheat that must fall into the ground and die.

Predatory Professionals

The social theme that touches my spirit most deeply these spring days in Dayton, Ohio, 2016, is the corruption of the professions and the professionals.

Thomas Frank writes about it in his “Listen, Liberal, or Whatever

Happened to the Party of the People?” which is the best thing I've read on the subject. So I thought I would share a couple quotes from it with you:

p. 27: But generally speaking, the system of professionalism was long ago subverted and transformed into something different and more rapacious. Today we live in a world of predatory bankers, predatory educators, even predatory health care providers, all out for themselves. The corruption of the professions...

And there is this from his chapter "The Blue State Model," which is about Massachusetts, particularly Boston, as being representative of what is wrong:

p. 183: ... Boston is the headquarters for two industries that are steadily bankrupting middle America: big learning and big medicine, both of them imposing costs that everyone else is basically required to pay and yet which increase at a pace far more rapid than wages or inflation. A thousand dollars a pill, thirty grand a semester: the debts that are gradually choking the life out of people where you live are what has made this city so very rich.

 My final quote is from a central chapter, The Defects of a Superior Mind, which struck particularly deeply with me because I have long held, but now more than ever, that clever, well-graduated, bright, intelligent people come a dime a dozen and are much more likely to harmful than not:

pp. 172-173: “One of the challenges in our society is that the truth is kind of a disequalizer,” Larry Summers told journalist Ron Suskind during the early days of the Obama administration. “One of the reasons that inequality has probably gone up in our society is that people are being treated closer the way they're supposed to be treated.”

“Remember, as you let that last sentence slide slowly down your throat, that this was a Democrat saying this – a prominent Democrat, a high-ranking cabinet official in the Clinton years and the man standing at the right hand of power in the first Obama administration.”

I don't think this one is going away - too many people are suffering and more will be suffering for it to "go away." Nothing is "set in stone" or "inevitable" when it comes to human beings and what they think, but there are realities that have to be dealt with successfully, like the melting of the ice caps and subsequent rising level of the oceans. This problem of an oligarchy by the highly-paid people whom Frank calls “the well-graduated” seems to me to be one of those problems that has barely begun to be recognized.