But then Luther also took it upon himself to start his own religion. Maybe an on-going attack creates a Godzilla-sized protector.

Erickson wrote a book about him: Young Man Luther. It's pretty good.

Whenever I see someone new to the boards posting, despondently, about solipsism my gut-reaction is that this is someone who has been deprived of someone to trust and is looking less for philosophical engagement, than reassurance that there is no outside world — csalisbury

I like this interpretation. It helps me make sense of what is going on. Maybe I've misread some of these threads as a kind of game of concepts driven by the imp of the perverse. 'Prove to me that you are there.' 'Prove to me that I exist.' Then the perverse solipsist can neutralize all of the usual retorts with a kind of stubborn cleverness. In some ways it's trollish. It pokes the bear. In other ways it's the parade of vigilance. Belief is vulnerability is sin.

I would add recognition to the reassurance sought. The denial of the outside world asks the outside world to admire and confirm it. For me this relates to what is questionable about the alienated and isolated 'I.' It is always already directed outward toward the world of the we. It speaks the language of the world and the we in the possession of/as its utmost and ownmost secret 'self.'

But I should also be fair to the experience of isolation. One can wrestle with the most terrible thoughts and feelings while others are smiling and playing outside the window.

I think its often less about any particular therapeutic modality and more about the relationship itself. — csalisbury

This makes sense to me. I can't look at the other as a machine to be fixed, even if that is part of the situation. There is a religious aspect of friendship that I have in mind connected to forgiveness of sin. I think I would find it off-putting if a therapist presented a kind of above-it-all invulnerability. On the other hand, that may be exactly what a client wants him or her to project.

But I can imagine highly intelligent and critically minded clients seeing only confirmation of their general sense of the world as a stage of fakers in such a pose. To be above it and invulnerable is to longer be humanly present. Theories might be great, but maybe a certain kind of client wants exactly some kind of genuine connection, even if this connection is muddied by commerce. Perhaps a good therapist isn't really doing it for the money (while still needing to make a living.)

Neither was actually what I figured set him off, it was because I am of the poor and casually swear a lot, and I said that he was being "effing unreasonable", and he interpreted the swearing as aggression, and responded by getting red faced and yelling.

I had spoken twice to him, that was the second time, the first time for like a hour, and the second for maybe ten minutes. It was the first discussion, in which I went over my experiences, including gender issues and stuff where his disgust was apparent to me. I could also, and still be wrong about that interpretation, but you read more into what I said than what was available.

But I can imagine highly intelligent and critically minded clients seeing only confirmation of their general sense of the world as a stage of fakers in such a pose. To be above it and invulnerable is to longer be humanly present. — sign

Yeah, this was me my first couple years of therapy. I imagine I was very frustrating to work with. I had a theory of what was ailing me. I think the idea I had was that the point of therapy was to 'say' what the problem was. Once it was said, brought to light, the therapist would be able to produce an instantaneous cure. I would rigidly control the process because I thought the therapist would be liable to go down the wrong path, and so take us away from the moment where all would be revealed and the cure would descend.

I think what was really happening is that what I saw as 'dead ends' or inessential avenues were in fact questions about stuff that I wasnt able to fit into my neat theory. In other words they were threatening. They threatened the idea that I could get better without confrontation.

That was the first phase. In the second phase (which I'm not totally free of) I was aware that this was the problem. Instead of dismissal of difficult questions I would 'dissociate.' My mind would literally go blank - or, not quite. All I would be aware of was the other persons presence as somehow requiring something of me that I could not give. It was like being spiritually hunched over in front of another. It was protective and entirely isolating. I would also find that if I tried to talk, I would be talking in the 'fake' voice from the first phase. In other words, I'd be trying to manage the process from a distance - not lying exactly - I tried to explain it as 'lying by telling the truth.' It was - and still sometimes is - a double bind. Either remain hunched and silent or try to talk and tell 'lies'. The feeling was frustration and anger. and despair. I felt like this was a prison I was trapped in that couldnt be conveyed. I tried to describe it as being like the astronaut in 2001 with HAL making sure i couldnt escape. part of what I like about the Kalsched quote from the OP is feeling like someone beyond me understands. It deprives 'hal' of his pretensions to invisibility and omnipotence.

I still fall back into both phases sometime. I'm not sure whats changed so that sometimes I move past these defenses. Which is probably good. Im not sure I want to 'know'

Tho actually - I think that this:

There is a religious aspect of friendship that I have in mind connected to forgiveness of sin — sign

is at the heart of it, what lets you move beyond. I remember at one point while i was deep in 'phase ii' geting drunk and scribbling down 'god cant forgive what he doesnt understand'

What i think i was missing is the hubris in thinking that 'god' wouldnt understand my suffering and 'sin'. It was really me saying - 'i can still hide what i need to' camoflauged as an anger at being failed by others

But saying he was being fucking unreasonable is aggressive, no matter what your background. His response does sound aggressive. Like I was saying to wallows, an ideal psychiatrist or therapist would be able to withstand aggression and respond calmly. But, like @unenlightened pointed out, in the real world, everyone has their breaking point.

If you put yourself in his position, he was being asked to furnish an official diagnosis to others, while also being asked to disregard the steps he was supposed to take in his official capacity when giving this diagnosis. Whatever you believe about the merits of psychiatric medicine, he was being put in a position where he was effectively being asked to do something not-allowed for which he could be held responsible. If he provided the note, freeing you of work-obligations, he himself was obligated to provide the officially mandated treatment.

Now that might be a structural issue with institutional psychiatry. it may be - and i think i agree that it is - an artificial problem which shouldnt exist in the first place. But just as you were in a difficult, frustrating position and responded with anger, so did he. Thats human.

But what do you make of the situation? again like un said, the more we seek confirmation of the untrustwothiness of others the more we'll find it. You talk about how he was disgusted with your vulnerability - but were you respectful of his?

But, like unenlightened pointed out, in the real world, everyone has their breaking point. — csalisbury

Well a shrink whose breaking point is anything said by a client needs to get another job; they are a menace. I don't want to make a judgement at this distance, and based on one side of the story, because sometimes an emotional response is what is required. But on the face of it, it doesn't sound very therapeutic.

he was disgusted with your vulnerability - but were you respectful of his? — csalisbury

That's an unfair question to put to the client. Client - therapist is not an equal relationship, and whatever the failings of the client may be, they do not excuse the failings of the therapist. I would say, in general, that disgust and anger are defences against vulnerability. The therapist needs to be vulnerable, but also able to maintain himself in his vulnerability, and not defend by projecting.

Those are good points. I feel like I put you in a weird position, 'at-ing' you, as though I was calling upon you to defend or buttress my post. I didn't mean that.

I can handle it. :love:

I've had an experience perhaps similar, in some ways, to the one @All sight described.

The first time I was hopsitalized I was 19. I was working at an island resort in Maine. It was an island on a pond, accessible only by a 'ferry' which was basically just a raft with a dinky motor. Rich non-mainers owned houses on the island. They would all contribute to a island fund. They would summer for a few weeks, and we would make the food, wait on them, upkeep the island etc. while living there in a cabin (two cabins, to be exact - one for boys, one for girls.) The first week of work was the week before everyone arrived. It was cleaning-up and getting everything ready. I had just finished my first year of college and was severely depressed. I had taken the job because it had been offered to me, and because it was conveyed to me that this was a good opportunity (a lot of local 'kids' before me had made 'connections' doing this job. That was kind of part of it. It was part of the culture of it. But more than that, I felt responsible to my mom - that I needed to prove I could do a job, that other parents kids were doing - that I could do a job like anyone else.

But I was severely depressed. The first week I could barely keep it together. At the end of every week, we could go home for a couple days. I did, and wrestled with the idea of suicide. I made a noose out of wire, which was less a real possibility of escape than something I used to contemplate suicide as something real and external, and my mom found it. Maybe I wanted her to? I don't remember that, but it would make sense.

Anyway - she found it, I was hospitalized. I was pissed. Because I knew I was going to miss work - and even though maybe that was the point, I still was mad. The head of the psych-unit was an authoritative presence. He was big and confident and used to having things done as he said they ought to be done. i hated him. He had a star trek ring tone on his cellphone that I hated. One time, in a meeting with me and my parents, it rang - and you could see him waiting for the effect to register, as though he wanted people to see that he had a quirky or nerdy side. At least I remember it that way.

I hated him a lot. Patients would talk about him in glowing, thankful terms - about how he'd convinced them to get shock therapy and they had resisted, but then acquiesced, and were now thankful. I thought of him as being an aggressive alpha personality with a stable of passive broken people over whom he could exert his will. He talked to my parents once, in one of our meetings, about a big celebration he was going to. I remember thinking that this was a guy who had two sides - the lovable, nerdy, star-trek ring-toned'd guy in public, and how he was able to maintain this by his shadow-life where he was discharge his desire for dominance over patients.

I denied everything. I was not depressed, I was not suicidal. I didn't say it, but I certainly tried to convey that I was smarter and more willful than him. I made little comics with names like ' dr mountebank and the nostrums' which were about him and his medicine.

He told my parents, with me there, that if I didn't change my behavior, that I was an idiot. He has an aide there too who explained, in less aggressive terms, that there exists a kind of mental-forest that some sick people go into. That, without medicine and adherence to the process, I would keep going into the forest. And that each time, I would come back more sick.

This was also my awakening to the overlap of psychiatry and poverty. I realized that most of the people there were simply living live in pure chaos, and that there responses, their breakdowns, were - if not 'rational' then at least understandable in terms of something other than deficient brain chemistry. This was a hard thing that stuck with me - because it seemed to me that there was no safety net ultimately - that if you lost control, you had no guarantee that you wouldn't wind up simply in the grasps of someone for whom control was more important than healing. And that maybe this was basically the ultimate structure of things.

So I fought him every step of the way. I never conceded.

And then eventually, I got to go.

I actually have no moral to this story. I thought one might come up as I wrote it out, but I got nothing.

Tho actually - I think that this:

There is a religious aspect of friendship that I have in mind connected to forgiveness of sin
— sign

is at the heart of it, what lets you move beyond. I remember at one point while i was deep in 'phase ii' geting drunk and scribbling down 'god cant forgive what he doesnt understand'

What i think i was missing is the hubris in thinking that 'god' wouldnt understand my suffering and 'sin'. It was really me saying - 'i can still hide what i need to' camoflauged as an anger at being failed by others — csalisbury

Beautiful. What comes to my mind is something like authenticity as being in touch with always being still a sinner and a fool to some degree. God has to be a sinner and a fool to understand. Only a sinner and a fool can understand a sinner and a fool from the inside. A friend as true friend is an unfinished sinner-fool or only half-wise listening. Love-trust-hope builds a bridge from the undecided to the undecided. I feel that you know what I'm getting at, but I will add for others that I don't understand all this 'love' talk in terms of determinate metaphysical entities arranged in some quasi-geometric proof. The 'opened-ness' I have in mind is 'behind' or 'beneath' the signs, near the place of their genesis and reception (which I nevertheless can only point to with signs.)

Either remain hunched and silent or try to talk and tell 'lies'. The feeling was frustration and anger. and despair. I felt like this was a prison I was trapped in that couldnt be conveyed. — csalisbury

That's a pretty great description of Hell. I've been there. In some ways not being able to say it is the very heart of its darkness. The flow outward is damned up. One understands oneself as a disease that should not be spread in the worst phase. But one believes in this darkness, that one has seen the truth. So one protects others from this terrible truth. Or (maybe at the heart of the heart of the darkness) one thinks of oneself as purely crazy, afflicted not by the truth but the fantasy of a dark truth. I'm almost afraid to summon it to memory. Let's just say that it's amazing how disgusting and obscene existence can seem or be for certain states of mind. One maybe ever experiences a wonder along with it, that it could all be so disgusting and perverse. 'Implosion' and black holes come to mind. The world becomes a hollowed-out stupid skit, oblivious to its own nullity. Of course death appears as a sweet release. Suicide beckons to such a state of mind as the only heroic and/or rational act available.

To me one of the strange things is that a person can be mostly happy and yet still unexpectedly dragged into this darkness, surviving it and returning to be happier than most even. This helps me make sense of the some of the great musicians who committed suicide. Good music comes from ecstasy, from being happier than most. But probably sensitivity is two-edged. Heights and depths come together perhaps.

Why attempt to upset me? Why play games? I really gotta fight this overwhelming urge to flap my lips... this elevation and arousal makes my life harder, do you have to attempt it on purpose?

Why attempt to upset me? — All sight

DS: In order to reach that place of new life or
healing, the whole story on which the person has
built his or her life, and the system that enabled the
child to survive, has to be dismantled. That is
terrifying. It does not change without enormous
resistance, pain, fear and a huge fight.
DK: Yes, and it happens one step at a time; there is
no quick way through. A person comes into therapy
because something has happened that makes her /him
realise that s/he cannot continue as s/he is –
something needs to change. But understandably,
s/he is very ambivalent about giving up the defensive
belief system that has ensured survival.
And this system is most often challenged when the
patient actually starts to care about the therapist….or
shall we say that the little girl/boy inside the
patient, hidden from view, starts to make a new
attachment to a real person beyond the survival
system. When this happens, the
protector/persecutor is challenged, and the selfdefence
system goes into over-drive. It will try to
sabotage the therapy and the relationship with the
therapist – anything to regain control.

Donald Kalsched interview.

So the psychological response to trauma is a defensive splitting, and the divided selves are mutually antagonistic. As long as this condition is bearable and functional, why indeed upset it? But when it comes to fashioning nooses, or what-have-you, it is clearly not bearable and functional any more. To care is to be vulnerable, whether one cares about oneself or another; to be upset is to care, and this is the beginning of life. It is the business of a therapist to upset, to overturn a psyche that has become self-destructive, to force the antagonists together.

@csalisbury, have you heard of Ketamine? There are some clinics that administer it to MDD patients. It's the next big thing, like "aspirin", but for depression.

the psychological response to trauma is a defensive splitting, and the divided selves are mutually antagonistic — unenlightened

This approach has perpetuated the vicious circle - suffering
has been propped up and amplified by some psychological authorities, theories, and practices.

No it hasn't.

I'm sorry - I wasn't posting with the intent of upsetting you, but I can see how the way I responded was callous. I'm trying not to respond to the stories and thoughts of others with the same ' corrective' impulse I've used for a while, especially on here with philosophy, but thats just what I did, I think.

On top of thay, I probably should have trigger warning'd this thread. I'm in a volatile place as I have been for quite a while now, and this is volatile subject matter, especially for people who have experienced something similar. I'm working through these ideas, emotions, fears myself, and, while I'm trying to do so responsibly here, I'm also riding my own waves. The long story about my hospitalization was a sudden impulse, I typed it out very quickly (unlike me, i usually edit as i write) and I'm not sure quite why I typed it out - it wasnt a move in a game, or at least it wasn't intended as one.

Yep! I've heard of ketamine and studies about its efficacy for treating depression. It seems like a very interesting and hopeful avenue.

Beautiful. What comes to my mind is something like authenticity as being in touch with always being still a sinner and a fool to some degree. God has to be a sinner and a fool to understand. Only a sinner and a fool can understand a sinner and a fool from the inside. A friend as true friend is an unfinished sinner-fool or only half-wise listening. Love-trust-hope builds a bridge from the undecided to the undecided. I feel that you know what I'm getting at, but I will add for others that I don't understand all this 'love' talk in terms of determinate metaphysical entities arranged in some quasi-geometric proof. The 'opened-ness' I have in mind is 'behind' or 'beneath' the signs, near the place of their genesis and reception (which I nevertheless can only point to with signs.) — sign

Yes exactly. The 'hiding' of 'sin' creates this weird symmetrical structure. The more I hide my indiscretions from myself and others, the more I suspect others of harboring equally unforgivable abuses. And If I act shallowly and falsely, maintaining an aura of innocence - then, at the same time, I'm soliciting the other person to play along. And when they play along, its easy to see them as shallow and false. If I can see them as equal to me in their capacity for losing the path, or plot - that's the only time I can actually breathe.

But more than anything, I like this:

Only a sinner and a fool can understand a sinner and a fool from the inside. A friend as true friend is an unfinished sinner-fool or only half-wise listening.

I like this, because what many of us see as unforgivable is often, for our friends, a tenth as important as we ourselves have made it out to be. And flipped - I've had friends open up to me about dark stuff - and it's like - dude, you're killing yourself over that? It's not always clear to me, as listener, that we've entered the 'serious' atmosphere of self-recrimination - the atmosphere I feel is obvious and palpable when I'm the one confessing. There's often a delayed effect, when I only realize the significance partway through.

And then even when friends open up about the stuff that is a little darker. I don't know. It's still dark, but it usually doesn't diminish my affection and sympathy - especially when I can see the other person is truly torn up about it.

This is verrry cheesy. BUT one of my most cherished memories is at a xmas party, with a group of friends - linked arms, heads bowed down, eyes closed, gently swaying, singing 'bridge over troubled water' together in unison. That was probably the closest I've been to a shared religious experience. Or at least a certain type of shared religious experience. The experience of it welled up and overcame the sappiness I would've been put-off by were the critical observer part of me more in control.

That's a pretty great description of Hell. I've been there. In some ways not being able to say it is the very heart of its darkness. The flow outward is damned up. One understands oneself as a disease that should not be spread in the worst phase. But one believes in this darkness, that one has seen the truth. So one protects others from this terrible truth. Or (maybe at the heart of the heart of the darkness) one thinks of oneself as purely crazy, afflicted not by the truth but the fantasy of a dark truth. I'm almost afraid to summon it to memory. Let's just say that it's amazing how disgusting and obscene existence can seem or be for certain states of mind. One maybe ever experiences a wonder along with it, that it could all be so disgusting and perverse. 'Implosion' and black holes come to mind. The world becomes a hollowed-out stupid skit, oblivious to its own nullity. Of course death appears as a sweet release. Suicide beckons to such a state of mind as the only heroic and/or rational act available.

To me one of the strange things is that a person can be mostly happy and yet still unexpectedly dragged into this darkness, surviving it and returning to be happier than most even. This helps me make sense of the some of the great musicians who committed suicide. Good music comes from ecstasy, from being happier than most. But probably sensitivity is two-edged. Heights and depths come together perhaps. — sign

yeah, this is it. I can especially relate to the feeling of having to 'protect others' from yourself and your ideas.

I'm almost afraid to summon it to memory. Let's just say that it's amazing how disgusting and obscene existence can seem or be for certain states of mind.

To keep the Dante theme going, I think he got this feeling exactly:

"Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear."

Seems melodramatic until you know what he's talking about. Which, yet another poet said better

"even a proverb is no proverb to you until your life has illustrated it."

Yes exactly. The 'hiding' of 'sin' creates this weird symmetrical structure. The more I hide my indiscretions from myself and others, the more I suspect others of harboring equally unforgivable abuses. And If I act shallowly and falsely, maintaining an aura of innocence - then, at the same time, I'm soliciting the other person to play along. And when they play along, its easy to see them as shallow and false. — csalisbury

This goes to the heart of worldliness for me. Let's say that a person has come to terms in a certain way with human nature. They know their own evil (give it free play) in their imaginations. Yes, they wince at sins that they actually committed in the past, but perhaps they are behaving pretty well these days because they give their evil a life in their imagination. 'Wise as a serpent, gentle as a dove.'

I have the sense of many would reject this idea and instead feel that they must have clean minds. Sanity as sanitation. But if most people insist on having and projecting clean minds, then this kind of self-knowledge has to hide itself. People are trapped inside themselves, everyone afraid to confess that their interiors don't match exterior images of impossible/perfect purity.

I think this is where friendship as a kind of sacred sharing of secrets comes in. Profound friends stand in some secret place outside all the lying and faking. This structure is expanded in subcultures that really do violate norms.

This is verrry cheesy. BUT one of my most cherished memories is at a xmas party, with a group of friends - linked arms, heads bowed down, eyes closed, gently swaying, singing 'bridge over troubled water' together in unison. That was probably the closest I've been to a shared religious experience. Or at least a certain type of shared religious experience. The experience of it welled up and overcame the sappiness I would've been put-off by were the critical observer part of me more in control. — csalisbury

I relate. There's something so naked about singing and dancing together. The soul as a vulnerable ecstatic and gentle thing comes out. And anyone with a trouble childhood is probably going to feel afraid and tempted to repeat (as in my case) the mockery of my father of all such softness ad enthusiasm. (Now I maybe have turned that mockery on itself, weaponized that contempt against the contempt for all things gentle. )

I can especially relate to the feeling of having to 'protect others' from yourself and your ideas. — csalisbury

Yes. And I've more or less always identified with being some kind of writer. I find myself or present myself in words first and foremost. Father knows best. 'He thinks he's an old soul.' So the experience of being damned up, of only having poison for truth, was the anti-dream. Naturally my mind would present to me an ice-cold logic of suicide. Dostoevskian grins and grimaces. Looking back on it, I can enjoy in some sense my passage through that darkness. I can theoretically listen from a darker place, having endured the cruel laughter of the gods. All of this somewhat candifies the experience. If I am ever thrown back into that state, I will want to vomit at the idea that something could be made of it.

"Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear." — csalisbury

Great quote. It's as hard as describing being in love to a kid. The heights and depths can only be words from the outside.

Seems melodramatic until you know what he's talking about. Which, yet another poet said better

"even a proverb is no proverb to you until your life has illustrated it." — csalisbury

This is a great theme. Many is the time when I 'understood' something that I had read. My mind had absorbed the words, but then those words would take on a living meaning, sometimes years later. 'That's what he was talking about!'

(Now I maybe have turned that mockery on itself, weaponized that contempt against the contempt for all things gentle. ) — sign

I've been thinking a lot about this. This kind of goes back to the stuff about repetition compulsion, and the same psychological or affective impulse renewing itself, camoflauged, in new forms.

On the one hand, I think that's sure progress. Like - being contemptuous of contempt for all things gentle is a better way of navigating the world than being contemptuous of all things gentle.

But, at the same time, that same contempt-muscle is being flexed and strengthened.

It seems somehow related to this:

All of this somewhat candifies the experience. If I am ever thrown back into that state, I will want to vomit at the idea that something could be made of it.

Which I also get. And I like the clear-eyed appreciation of how that state works. I've succumbed, in the past, to the feeling that I'd overcome once and for all that state, and that I'd never think in that way again.

What I want to say is that the depressive state has to be met on its own terms. That doesn't say much of anything but. I've been using a moodtracker for half a year now. It helps to 'objectify' both positive and negative states. I can say, for sure, that its helped me through negative times. Not because it shows the negative as a 'delusion' but because it just kind of...naturalizes the process? Like It makes it easier to see it as an affective wave, a natural and normal process. and that, in turn, makes it easier to do things like: clean the apartment, make food - little stuff that draws me slowly out. Which is harder to do, if it seems smothering and absolute.

I think one of the most difficult things about extreme mood swings is that the really bad part is always appraised in light of the really good state. So the really good state wants to dance and exult and see the bad state as 'blindness' or 'confusion' that is over now that the truth is revealed. And the really bad state wants to see the good state as deluded and sugarcoating.

idk, moodtracking helps tap into the part of you that remains constant throughout all those states. A kind of neutral anchor. I'm not the type to dismiss ecstatic states, but I have been trying to figure out how to integrate them into my life.

but im realizing I've still left unsaid the point about contempt folding back on itself. I guess I haven't figured that out yet

On the one hand, I think that's sure progress. Like - being contemptuous of contempt for all things gentle is a better way of navigating the world than being contemptuous of all things gentle.

But, at the same time, that same contempt-muscle is being flexed and strengthened. — csalisbury

You make an interesting point. I must confess that I feel repulsed by men who aren't 'gentleman' (in the grocery store for instance.) I remember painfully being less of a 'gentleman' myself. The non-gentleman over-projects suspicion and the willingness to make war (a cat with its tail puffed out.) And the non-gentleman is the drunk person who exaggerates the interest that strangers might have their interruption. I guess in some ways I am just my own asshole father (who's much gentler these days anyway) responding to different sins. Because I can see the vulnerability behind the aggressiveness, and I do feel superior to it and embarrassed by it (along with some sense of danger), even as or because I remember expressing myself more in that way. I've convinced myself that I am one of the beautiful people (ignoring bad moods), and there's a cruelty in that. I can face up to it and pay myself on the back for a beautiful facing up to it, etc. I am wise because I'm a sinner and fool and a sinner and a fool for believing myself wise and beautiful. Messy stuff.