Expat in Norway cries about America

Dear Joe,

One score and seven years ago my Norwegian girlfriend and cohab, Aud, then studying preliminary psychology courses said, "Evan, you should study psychology! You've got a varied background and some social intelligence." Back then I split my time between painting (the house kind) on the one hand, and social science studies, specifically social anthropology, on the other. "Fuck that shit!" I said, "All those guys do is glue together those poor bastards getting fucked by the system. Emancipation ain't gonna come from there!"

Well, though my next five years entailed immersion in macro economics, comparative politics and education, and -- like any rebel too burdened by egocentric causes to actually embark on social rebellion -- overindulgence in local spirits (Aquavit) and German beer. Guess what? One score minus five years ago I became a clinical psychologist. Irony? Hell, yes! Laziness? Apathy? No doubt. Once in the "school," nothing could be easier. My toil since has for the most part been with/for/about the sickest of the poor bastards. Certainly, organic pathology plays a role for some, yet for them, too, the road out of insanity/implosion lies within the context of the real human relationship with a real human being.

R.D. Laing and so many others, from Foucault to Peter Breggin (Toxic Psychiatry), have expounded on dehumanization and what I now see as a universal form of cowardice amongst power-holding system "professionals." Good people, good psychologists amongst my friends meet their makers and cower at the very moment they achieve administrative system responsibilities (all very reminiscent of this painful scenario of Obama and his righteous trek to nowhere. Well, painful for those who let "hope" into their hearts in the first place).

I'm an expat. An "Amurikin," Joe, and I'm crying inside, ranting outside and no amount of self-medication can take me away from this and other excruciating issues towards which your energies and competence have flowed these last years. So good to have discovered your work, since you have -- you dumbass! -- ironically served to validate and sooth my individual "self" enough to enable further existence within these ridiculous confines. Ha! Joe the Therapist!

I can tell you from the inside: you have indeed a valid comprehension of my field and this perpetual situation, and the beneficiaries of the "commodity of misery" (us/me) will hang on to these goodies til death do us part. Nobody is against "evidenced based practice" in medicine (The Golden Rule, borrowed from corporate gobbledygook and "Taylorism," the application of scientific methods to the problem of obtaining maximum efficiency in industrial work) but human consciousness/emotion and meaning -- or what you've been alluding to more and more as our "spirituality" -- can only be soothed and healed through the inversion of all this implied and imperial rationality, that is to say, by the perspective from within the realm of our commonality, our thrown-into-ness, our ultimately unfathomable conscious bioexistential Dasein. That's right, the Master of all Existential Puppets, Martin Heidegger, identified decades ago Western civilization's crisis as "mass forgetfulness of being." So damn straight! You got that right!

I like to think I help my patients. I know that for some "changing" ain't the issue, just getting a "little better" is good enough for rock-n-roll. Most often thanks come not for the application of the prefab "cure," but for being "real." I know for sure I ain't "neutral," and I strive no longer to pluck symptoms like petals from the flower. Our field, historically insecure and interminably emulating the natural sciences, aspiring to be "real" like atoms and ants, is miserably lax in metaphysical appreciation, sociological perspective and nearly inhumane in its repulsion of all things "moral" or "ethical."

Things being always bigger, better and more poignant in Amurika, the American Psychological Association effectively threw itself out the door along with that stale frozen ectoplasm they kept in that giant psycho-freezer in the cellar. Mind-boggling, or not? Unfortunately, the Empire Speak and its alluring accoutrements, as you've been articulating over time, is a contagious fad, one hard to dirty or undress since it appeals to central aspects of our inherited Western sense of self. So, my last 30 years here in Bergen, Norway, inform me, and the impact of "Americanism" ain't a pretty sight. It's in the streets, permeating all those minute open spaces all cultures need, nurture and perhaps even effuse, like nano-particles frantically gyrating, usurping local aromas and nuances. Even Norway has become less sympathetic, less "healthier," to use your term.

You're spot on to crave some inkling of some meta-analyses from within the ranks of psychology itself that speak to the aggregate effect of "gluing those poor bastards back together." To be fair, there is a "recovery" movement within the psychosocial rehabilitation movement, alas, often driven by ex- "users of services" rather than prominent professionals.

Outside of the field, you will find much more within which to sink your teeth. Cushman, P. (1990). Why the Self is empty. Towards a historically situated psychology; Furedi F. (2004) Therapy Culture: Cultivating vulnerability in an uncertain age; Prillensky, I. I. (1989) Psychology and the status quo; Rose, N. (1996) Inventing ourselves: Psychology, power, and personhood; Barber, B.R. (2007) Consumed: How markets corrupt children, infantilize adults, and swallow citizens whole; Bourdieu, P. (1998) Acts of resistance: Against the new myths of our time.

You never told me how old you were, only eluded to your decrepit state. Then, I read that you're 62! Hell, with a little luck and help from your Hopkins Village Managed Medical Care System, I got 30 more years of therapy coming my way.

Keep on squatting and swatting,

Evan

Bergen, Norway

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Evan,

You are one wonderfully scary guy! Clear eyed, savagely unflinching in observing life. Funny as hell too. 100 proof stuff. All of which means I must immediately either destroy your email or steal some of your gonzo licks and style. But I am at least comforted that it takes truly a madman (a seer in the tradition of Diogenes) to perceive things as you do. Which means there is hope for me yet.

 

That essay, "A Commodity Called Misery," drew much response and continues to do so, mostly in agreement. In many cases of course, there is the usual hair splitting, which one can expect when he paints everything not just with "a broad brush," but a goddamned 16 horsepower high pressure industrial paint sprayer. ("But you didn't mention the writings of so-and-so, who wrote about all this years ago," or that "there are some very good mental health professionals who acknowledge in their way of practice these societal factors as causing individual malady").

About the only way I can respond is to point out two things: (1) an essay is not a doctoral thesis, and (2) my writing involves no rationality or critical thinking whatsoever. I just sort of fiddle-fart and shamble around a notion, eyeballing it, speculating on it, and then cough up some sort or musing -- mostly mental phlegm – onto the keyboard and hit the send button. Sometimes without even showing the common courtesy of using spell check or even rereading it. Which makes me either an arrogant old prick or just a slob. Probably both. Anyway, this stuff ain't literature, just shared electrons in the ether. To my mind, the general purpose of such essays, and even calling them that is a damned far stretch, is to share thinking on a subject, and maybe even stimulate a little more thinking.

Anyway, one of my favorite responses to the piece was sent in by someone who picked it up off a comment string under the article. It was from a therapist who lives near my hometown of Winchester, Virginia. He said I was obviously depressed and if I contact him, he will treat me for free. Said I appeared to have "a history of depression," yada yada. Hell, the incidents I wrote about were thirty damned years ago! I can't even remember the details now, I am so deeply scarred. As to "having a history," I also have a history of sucking on my very own mother's titties, too. But I overcame it at age one and have managed to resist it ever since (at least my mother's). I also whipped the tragic vice of beating off to the Playboy centerfold in my corrupt libidinous youth.

As to a person's "personal history," and I'm not nuts about that term, because it can be too selectively used by anyone "professionally" authorized to particulate it out for some rather dubious purposes. (In other words, I've got a lot to hide; but fortunately none of those kids look like me.) Anyway, I don't think ya can break one's life down into a couple of key historical parts that supposedly account for what's happening at the present moment. Especially since life is experiential and one big ever manifesting "now," that holistically includes all of its parts, every moment, not just its lowest points. Nor apexes, for that matter.

In truth, I've seen prayer and meditation be more efficacious than the psyche biz. And when I look around in the so-called "third world," (which is reality the majority world, although we Americans are afraid to call it that because it means we are so fucking outnumbered), prayer, meditation, and possibly even the World Psychic Hotline, are helping more of humanity than the entire American psych industry. Which of course does not make psychology bogus. Practiced with compassion, insight and appropriate humility (such as your own by the way) it can and does work in a positive direction for us westerners.

I believe that the American psychological movement was once much closer to the profound core of humanness (well, maybe some of ain't too profound at the core, I dream about snatch a lot), somewhere back before, as you so aptly put it, "the American Psychological Association effectively threw itself out the door along with that stale frozen ectoplasm they kept in that giant psycho-freezer in the cellar." The reason I believe psychology was once closer is because during the Sixties I was a heavy user of LSD, in the sincere tradition of inner exploration -- proper set and setting, etc. Hell, the stuff was even legal the first couple of years I used it. Since then – though not for years -- I have occasionally used ayahuasca (the Amazonian "vine of the dead") and a few other natural psychotropics in the same earlier spirit and fashion of consciousness exploration. I quit because, as Ken Kesey once told me about psychotrophics, "When you get the message, hang up the phone!"

In any case, I found numerous confluences during those deepest possible inner journeys – confluences between the earlier western psych discoveries and the "psychedelic" experience. By the way, psychedelic is another term since corrupted, and mockingly rendered trivial by the same folks who transformed the term liberal into meaning a "weak-kneed, wishy washy chardonnay soaked political pussy." They were then and are still afraid of anything that operates on more than two brain cells simultaneously.

But getting back to those confluences: Naturally, there is the chicken-and-egg question, as to whether western the psyche, simply being a western man, caused them. But no matter. One doesn't quibble when granted the sublime privilege of seeing the unarguable connectivity of all things. Not one is ever quite the same again. At least not the serious ones, the true seekers who actually made the journey.

 

Now look what you've done! Got an old man all worked up about an era. Never a good thing to do sonny boy! So, as your punishment, tomorrow morning I'm gonna post a long section, stuff from my personal notebook, sort of an essay in itself. There will be a quiz afterward.

It's not the sort of thing I'd post on any of the websites that are kind enough to display my work. But maybe some old hippies and that handful of young'uns interested in the Sixties consciousness movement might enjoy it. Or not. I can never tell how many fellow consciousness mutants are lurking out there. Anyhoooo, tomorrow morning's post has been assembled and/or adapted from old notes written during the Sixties and early Seventies, with a few small bits from works published then. The piece meanders a bit -- what have I written that doesn't? -- but not entirely off the cliff from the theme.

Stay strong.

In art and labor,

 

Joe