The title of the book eludes me now. But what this says fascinates and resonates:
When there is no demonstrable organic physical finding, a diagnosis based on what a person does, what he thinks, what he feels and how he expresses those feelings is not illness. What we are talking about is behavior, and I think that to call certain kinds of behavior that are strange and bizarre and that we have difficulty understanding-to call that illness is presumptive.
While it may be true that any action has its hidden motives, in "normal" life we agree to ignore this analytic precept. Society simply could not function smoothly if at every turn secretaries were saying to bosses, and mothers were saying to children, and lovers were saying to lovers, "I wonder what you really mean by that." Life outside therapy does not--cannot--run this way.
Unfortunately, the debate on this issue seems to consist of an overwhelming babel of specious and self-serving contradictions. But in the less than great, who are numerous, and especially in the meager of mind, who are countless, there is an admonitory and truculent concern primarily for the virtue of other people.
It is this "truculent concern" about OPV - other people's virtue - that drives the debate about same sex marriage and don't ask, don't tell. John, at the record store pointed this out just the other day to me. Some people just really want to get their noses into other people's stuff, in order to condemn them.
I say, live and let live. Man, ain't chew all got enough problems for your own self to be worrying 'bout? I sure as hell do.
It is not so much that I ignored the social amenities--I seemed never to have known they existed. It has proved easier to judge a pregnant girl than to provide her with proper food. It has proved easier to punish her for mistreating a fetus than to try to help her stop mistreating herself.
One hazard of the "get to know people" trades is that they can turn young skeptics into old cynics ... Be we already knew he was clever and observant about the failings of others ... If we stare at ourselves honestly, we all have our secret bigotries ... Having said all that, it is worth realizing that a bitter humor that seemed interesting and funny at the time really concealed a bitter human being. And as another hero settles back into the ranks of humanity, we have a choice of not to have heroes or not looking at them too closely.
The most dangerous animal in the world is a zealot or salesperson who believes in his product. Deadwood--useless personnel, characterized by aimless trifling action, torpidity, indolence, procrastination, languor, lethargy, sluggishness and even stupor. The wrong person in the wrong job at the wrong time.
In the main, psychiatrists and psychiatric patients exhibit the same thirst for big 'mental health' lies as do crowds of disaffected people thirsting for the redemptive messages of messiahs, whether religious or political. Nearly all WASPS believe in the punishment theory of illness which has that air of commonsensical rightness about it which is almost invariably a symptom of some aberration of reasoning.
One doctor said to another: "About the terminating of pregnancy, I want your opinion. The father was syphilitic, the mother tuberculous. Of the four children born, the first was blind, the second died, the third was dear and dumb, the fourth was also tuberculous. What would you have done?"
"I would have ended the pregnancy."
"Then you would have murdered Beethoven."
