It’s in the eyes. I know the doctor who was ‘ordered’ to snuff me was getting off on the fact he had the power to have 15 people restrain me while he did it…… and it was in his eyes.

I can still see it to this day that he was going to enjoy it…… and then he was rudely interrupted, taken away and the drugs he was going to use taken and put behind the curtain so no one else could do the deed. That change of look from killer to pathetic puppy makes me laugh to this day.

Promoting him to head of the doctors union was a good move. I assume people understand having such a resource in your pocket.

Not so good when I turned up in a Police station with the documented proof of the motive for him to do the deed, resulting in Police needing to threaten and intimidate anyone who had seen the documents. Obstructing and perverting justice the only option at that point. At least we know he will do as he is told when required….. won’t freeze at the “moment of truth”. Though a bit cowardly needing so many others to hold his victims down while he does it. And the State happy to “edit” the documents after the fact.

And it makes me smile to hit the “click to edit” button. Imagine how I feel knowing that others know the truth and have enabled the concealment of it? And you pose a question about why in the above article? Not a good look that the E.D. is being used as …… well, it’s ugly…..enough for the Congressional Medal of Ugly (to use a term from Full Metal Jacket, another of Stanley Kubricks films)

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSofqNSuVy8

“War is too important to be left to Generals. But today, war is too important to be left to Politicians. They have neither the time, the training, or the inclination for strategic thought”. Replace War with Human Rights and Generals with Psychiatrists and ….. lol

Lost their minds, and are concerned about the contamination of their precious bodily fluids.

I also got to thinking about Rush (the father of waterboarding? Which I think is being chemically explored in ‘modern times’ by doctors with “No National Standard as to what constitutes a chemical restraint”. Police making ‘referrals’ for ‘treatments’)

But I wonder about the opposite with the likes of Ignaz Semmelweis? Insisting that he is right resulting in him being labelled and killed by his ‘colleagues’. There’s reason there to go along with the madness of Jack D Ripper right? He’s the one with the gun.

Always enjoy reading your articles Dr Levine

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Karl, I think what I think because to me you sound like an apologist for psychiatry.

To wit: you yourself said that you believe the problems with psychiatry are not with psychiatry itself but in the way it is practiced which tells me you have yet to fully grasp that cruelty and indifference are psychiatry’s defining features.

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Why in the world would I consider some people’s lives expendable? You are certainly reading words or thoughts into me that are not a part of me at all.

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Steve – after re-reading my comment, please allow me to correct/clarify: I agree that “[i]t sounds like they are training sociopathic traits into people” NOT that I agree with training sociopathic traits into people (which I do not).

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Birdsong: Once again you seem to think I am making excuses for psychiatry’s cruelties when I am not. Postulating a mechanism of action is not saying that mechanism is right. Cruelty and indifference are wrong, as are methodologies that produce them

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Steve I like how you think! I agree about training sociopathic traits into people and that using empathy and letting down barriers (while maintaining *appropriate* boundaries) is the most appropriate thing to do

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The 19-year-old patient whom Jung raped at the Burgholzli clinic in Switzerland was Sabina (not Sylvia) Spielrein. My mistake.

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Tom, I don’t share your adulation of Carl Jung or his abstruse metaphysics. Rather than going into a long-winded critique here, I suggest that you read “Against Therapy: The Myth of Emotional Healing” by Jeffrey Masson, who exposes Jung’s dubious role in Nazi psychiatry during the 1930s. Are you aware that Jung contrasted the Jewish and “Aryan” collective unconscious? Did you know that he was dismissed from his position at a Swiss mental hospital because he had inappropriate carnal relations with a Jewish patient named Sylvia Spielrein? I see no reason why Jung should be considered an ethical or scientific authority in view of his self-serving opportunism and sexual abuse.

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—but it seems to me you consider some people’s lives expendable…

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CORRECTION: There are good reasons why so many people have psychiatric horror stories and these reasons are why MIA has existed for TWELVE years:

PSYCHIATRY. RUINS. LIVES.

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Clarification: Psychiatry stands apart from other medical specialties because unlike other medical specialties, it is not based on objective reality, it is based on junk science and wishful thinking. Just look up “Thomas Insel” to see for yourself.

Even calling psychiatry a “medical specialty” is dubious — that is unless you consider drug pushing a medical specialty.

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Joel, just about anything I have read by or about Carl Jung suggests to me that, like any other great spiritual teacher, he sought to empower people to find the Light/Kingdom/Freedom/God/Consciousness within themselves rather than following others, and not to profit from anyone’s ignorance, as false “gurus” may do.

It seems the very word “guru” comes from the Sanskrit for “weighty,” “grave,” but enlightenment may be expected to cause a lightening up, laughter and humor. Certainly, the elder Jung, at least, seemed to have a perpetual gleam in his eye, as though he realized and accepted that the joke was on him, and on all of us, and that “God is comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh,” even if Jung never put it quite like that.

“Matter of Heart:” https://g.co/kgs/5wgFjYz

“There is no coming to Consciousness without pain,” I believe he realized.

“Enlightenment is the end of suffering,” I believe Buddha realized.

“If you had not suffered as you have, there would be no depth to you as a human being, no humility, no compassion. You would not be reading this now. Suffering cracks open the shell of ego, and then comes a point when it has served its purpose. Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary.”

Eckhart Tolle, in ” Stillness Speaks.”

https://youtu.be/Deq_1lg9Dlo?si=zkI0hACs55CKT7Cn

I believe Jesus’s central message, for the most part so desperately and disastrously misunderstood until now, was the same, and that no matter how he phrased it, most folks, and almost all MEN, just couldn’t, wouldn’t and didn’t get it:

“Deny thy [false, ego] self!”

“You are the Light of the World [presumably what we now call ‘Formless Consciousness’]!”

“The Kingdom [of “God”/”the Father”/”Heaven”/”the Heavens – presumably meaning, just as Tolle suggests, “the realm of formless consciousness” ] is within you!”

I am not familiar with the work of the others you mentioned, Joel, but feel I must just suggest that I know of no grounds for suspecting that Carl Jung wished to be seen as anyone’s guru, but to the contrary.

I have searched for but not yet found a letter he supposedly wrote in which he self-effacingly pointed out that the content of his own visions (or spiritual experiences) was not important – to each his own, kind of thing.

Instead, I found the following about a fascinating letter he wrote a fellow countryman of mine which supports my opinions about the great man’s genuine humility, and his humor about his own limitations.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/02/02/carl-jung-ulysses-james-joyce-review-letter/

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”

I see Jung as having become that candle, or, rather that flame of Consciousness which, when it comes into contact with a person who has suffered enough to be ready for transformation, can so ignite the other as to bring about their alchemical transmutation to Consciousness, also, along with her/him – certainly not as some mere sheep or follower in her/his shadow, but as that student who should always exceed their erstwhile teacher.

“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” – Carl Jung.

“Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.” – Gospel of John, 14:12.

I don’t see Jesus as having tried to establish any religion, either, any more than Jung or any other great teacher did or does. Rather, I attribute the foundation of Judeo-Paulianity to Saul/Paul, and to the Emperor Constantine, at Nicaea.

Rather, I see Jesus, like Jung and all the great teachers, wishing we would each become our own guru, much like Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, for example.

“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” — Carl Jung.

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” — Carl Jung.

“Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.” ― James Joyce, “Ulysses.”

‘“But why on earth,” you may ask, “should it be necessary for man to achieve, by hook or by crook, a higher level of consciousness? This is truly the crucial question, and I do not find the answer easy. Instead… I can only make a confession of faith:

I believe that, after thousands and millions of years, someone had to realize that this wonderful world of mountains and oceans, suns and moons, galaxies and nebulae, plants and animals, exists. From a low hill in the Athi plains of East Africa I once watched the vast herds of wild animals grazing in soundless stillness, as they had done from time immemorial, touched only by the breath of the primeval world. I felt then as if I were the first man, the first creature, to know that all this is. The entire world round me was still in its primeval state; it did not know that it was. And then, in that one moment in which I came to know, the world sprang into being; without that moment it would never have been. All Nature seeks this goal and finds it fulfilled in man, but only in the most highly developed and most fully conscious man.’ (CW 9i, §177).

I like to believe Jung may have learned towards the end that, even without any dream interpretation or anything else, his sheer, intent, compassionate, deep, listening presence, alone, had the potential to enable anyone (willing) to heal themselves of virtually anything psychic/emotional/physical – and that we all share that same potential, but only once we cast aside all judgment, at least for then.

Joel, I hope you understand: I just could not let Jung be seen as anyone’s guru – possibly any more than you could!

Best wishes.

Tom.

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“…I have heard that psychiatrists and medical doctors in general are told to keep extreme emotional boundaries with patients as a way of protecting themselves.”

Karl, once again you seem to be making excuses for psychiatry’s cruelties.

There are good reasons why so many people have psychiatric horror stories, and they are the same reasons why MIA has existed for the last fourteen years.

I suggest you imagine yourself in your patients’ shoes. Maybe then you might learn that good intentions are not good excuses.

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We humans slaughtered one another in vast numbers in France on that “longest day” 80 years ago.

We are still doing it, and often still for religious/ideological differences as well as for money.

It’s been said that the difference between religious and spiritual people is that the latter don’t kill each other.

It’s also been said that, while the former fear hell, the latter have been through it.

Perhaps when we have all suffered enough will we all lose any appetite for any suffering or for inflicting any suffering on other creatures?

Perhaps then we will no longer see us and them, but only us?

Psychiatrists who seemed to lack an understanding of themselves seemed to see me as so different from them that they caused or allowed all kinds of immense and lasting harm to me.

If I still cannot see that they, those psychiatrists and those who did their bidding, even when clearly against the law, are essentially no different from me, I don’t see how I can truly help them – and that is to say, help us.

And for as long as I fail to comprehend that we are all in this together, what good can come from all the injuries visited upon me, or any of us?

“For we are all as God made us, and many of us much worse,” said Cervantes’s Sancho Panza.

“No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.” – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

Either we are indeed all absolutely equal or we are not, as I see it.

I believe we are, and that being a human being is a desperately, desperately difficult task for everyone, and that, ultimately, and however many human lifetimes it may take any of us, we must all suffer equally until we suffer no more.

Perhaps the most glaringly obvious errors and excesses of some of us have been necessary for all of us to question ourselves?

I believe the sooner we appreciate this, the sooner we can all quit suffering, and causing others to suffer.

And it’s a long, long time now since Thomas Szasz so clearly pointed out some incontrovertible, if perhaps too-obvious-to-be-seen facts about coercive, state-sanctioned psycho-pharmacology.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvpkLvxsspg

Peace and prosperity, comfort and joy, love and laughter.

And thank you for yet another most remarkable essay.

Tom.

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It sounds like they are training sociopathic traits into people!

The only thing that made me effective as a therapist was my willingness to let down my barriers and feel what the client/”helpee” was feeling. That is completely what guided how I would intervene. If a person can’t do that and still “maintain boundaries,” they have no business trying to help anyone emotionally. They need to get their own help first!

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Larry – I think that many or most of us who work in mental health have either a bit of mental health issues of our own, or have had people very close to use with mental health struggles. Lots of ADHD, lots of personality disorder.

Specifically in psychiatry training, I have heard that psychiatrists and medical doctors in general are told to keep extreme emotional boundaries with patients as a way of protecting themselves from emotional entanglement, to a degree that can at times seem dehumanizing to the patient. Reading stories of patient harm, and having patients tell me that no provider has listened to them or tried to consider their preferences in 15 or more years of treatment .. I am not sure what to say about that. It certainly sounds like sociopathy. People with sociopathic traits are more drawn to fields with money, power, and prestige … like medicine. I hope deep inside of me that doctors who have watched their patients suffer or die do not do so with glee, although indifference is just a lesser degree of the same

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Absolutely!!!

I think there’s something’s seriously wrong with people who aren’t profoundly alarmed by what can happen in the name of ‘mental health’.

But thankfully, more and more people are finally learning how psychiatry’s been taking them for a ride and choosing to leave it before finding themselves in a ditch.

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