From: "Chris Lofting" <ddiamond@ozemail.com.au>
To: <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: Children and psychosis was: HEA report on religion and mentalhealth
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 03:52:06 +1000
In-Reply-To: <3805F6D7.990DA1AA@pacbell.net>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk [mailto:fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk]On Behalf
> Of Bill Spight
> Sent: Friday, 15 October 1999 1:29
> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Subject: Re: Children and psychosis was: HEA report on religion and
> mentalhealth
>
>
> Dear Chris,
>
> Chris:
>
> "Fundamentalist thinking is child-like, and so is psychotic thinking.
> Jamestown etc suggests a severe mental problem in fundamentalist groups
> (heaven's gate (?)as well).
>
> In this sense all children are born psychotic"
>
>
> That is just a touch different to the way you reformatted it to
> become an absolute assertion with no context. Very 'totalist' of
> you :-) What 'nerve' did I touch?
>
> Bill:
>
> What I quoted was, "all children are born psychotic".
leaving out the qualifer "In this sense"... perhaps this is too subtle a
distinction for you to see the difference? I doubt that you would miss this
Bill so all I 'see' is a manipulation. Or am I 'wrong'? :-)
<snip>
>
> No one here has complained about my quoting style, but perhaps
> their irritation just did not reach the threshold of complaint.
> So my question is, how do you like it (or dislike it)? Should I
> quote more extensively? (It would be hard for me to quote less. ;-))
>
Bill, the above (most of it snipped out) is what I call 'smoke' :-)
If you want to quote then try and ensure that you keep the context. IMHO You
didnt. you got sprung and so out comes the smoke screen, the distraction :-)
you give history and go 'general' as in 'no one here has complained about my
quoting style' -- so what? I could not care less if they did or didnt MY
concern was you taking something out of its context and then asserting it in
a manner that can be read as 'absolute'. I will 'pick' you on this as I am
sure you would pick me :-)
Now, to get back to the original email, what nerve did I touch? What is it
that disturbs you about the fact that basic characteristics of child-mind,
fundamentalist-mind, and psychotic-mind all share the same space? Do you
understand that the neurology does not know if it is psychotic or not? DO
you understand that the natural state has characteristics that society
interprets as psychotic? Do you understand that it is feedback that goes to
modify these behaviours?
The psychosis-fundamentalist-childmind perspective is still current but with
more backing from neurological analysis. We can review
Freud/Lacan/Klein/Jung/Skinner/Maslow/NLP/"New Age" etc etc in a new light
and that light does validate to some degree the intuitive work of the
'pioneers' of the study of psyche even if some of their justifications for
the behaviour were at times 'fantasy'.
The traits of object oriented thinking are traits we see in the child-mind
as well as the psychotic mind and in this sense the child is born psychotic,
the child is born fundamentalist, the psychotic 'becomes' child-like, as
does the fundamentalist, and the fundamentalist is also psychotic! (how
about we call them all 'reptilian'? :-))
Perhaps you would prefer:
(1) the child is born object oriented.
(2) the fundamentist is object oriented.
(3) the psychotic is object oriented.
and so (1) - (3) share the same space. Thus I explicitly disentangle
psychosis from child but *implicitly* retain a link. Is that 'better' for
you?
All of (1) - (3) dont like change, believe in miracles, are very 'us' vs
'them', go off into their own little worlds (encapsulation). Neurosis is
different in that it has relationships and so the barrier, the object
boundary, has holes in it that allow for connections to others. Any form of
withdrawl leads into object-mindedness.
In the sense of formal categorisation it is the context that actually
determines the difference, in other words the object oriented frame of mind
is invarient (genotype), it is the combination with a context and the
resulting expression (phenotype) that leads to a formal categorisation; as I
pointed out in the last email, urinating in a queue will get you
categorisated as psycho UNLESS you are a child. The natural state is NOT
context sensitive but the sociological state IS. Fundamentalism is a form of
group objectification and so we see a change in context sensitivity and this
reflects the child-mind, as does psychosis.
There are both negative and positive aspects of object-mindedness, perhaps
you think I was being all negative? no -- I was simply asserting some facts
that we need to take into consideration when we analyse religion etc etc We
talk of religion as if it is 'fundamental', it isnt it is a metaphor used to
try and describe humanity's spirit. If you objectify it then you enter
object-minded space and so take on those characteristics that include
exposure to psychotic behavioural traits that include the killing of others
for an idea or for fun.
There IS a definite 'sharing' of the same mental space in
child-psychosis-fundamentalist, it is context that then particularises the
distinctions, the neurology couldnt care less where it is, it just
'functions'.
best regards,
Chris.
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