Further Reflections on Psychotic Knowledge (cont.)
By Shunyamurti

Morton Kelsey, a Jungian analyst, wrote in one of his books that the difference between a genuine vision and a psychotic hallucination is that the latter is out of touch with reality. His example of the latter was that of a man who believed that the FBI had put him under surveillance. For Kelsey, that belief was delusional, by definition. I doubt that too many informed people would agree with him these days. The naïveté of the so-called experts in psychology is astounding. Is this not itself a form of repression approaching psychosis?

The late Harvard psychiatry professor John Mack nearly lost his position because he took seriously the reports of otherwise ordinary people that they had been abducted by extraterrestrial beings. By definition, according to the gatekeepers of the psychotherapy industry, alien abduction is a psychotic hallucination. Psychologists can lose their licenses if they take such reports at face value. Not even Lacanian analysts are willing to entertain any other hypothesis. But is not such closed-mindedness more psychotic than the abduction reports? Is not such diagnostic rigidity the equivalent of the Church’s unwillingness to look through Galileo’s telescope in the Middle Ages?

Lacan famously defined psychosis as foreclosure of the Name of the Father. But has not society itself foreclosed the Name of the Father—the reality of the Absolute—as a matter of ideological necessity? Are we not all (to the extent we are “well-adapted”) committed to remain cut off from the Self in order to genuflect to the altar of ego-consciousness? And if some of those who refuse to swear allegiance to the ego fall into hell realms, others ascend to divine luminosity. The latter group, the successful mystics, can offer the only real help to those who have dropped into the abyss of psychosis. Rather than confine those who suffer in nightmarish mental institutions, we should be creating joyous spiritual refuges under the governance of mystics rather than psychiatrists. Our current approach to treatment is bankrupt. With a few exceptions, such as the clinic led by Willy Apollon and the Ecole Freudienne du Quebec, treatments are primarily drug-based and lack sufficient depth of understanding and willingness on the part of therapists to enter into the world of the psychotic. There have been great pioneers in this realm, of course, including Jung, Klein, and more recently Harold Searles, Wilfred Bion, Donald Winnicott, and others. But the field of depth psychology has been under attack and losing ground for years to the minions of pharmacological repression.