Questioning the Purpose: Psychiatry
The Conscience of Psychiatry at Work
By way of background, and to account for a possible bias in the mind of some, I grew up with a psychiatrist for a father, who even in the mid nineteen fifties, when the business of psychopharmaca barely got under way, declared that he would never prescribe such drugs, and that he would offer talk therapy only. His prescription pad was used to write vaccine exemptions for his children, and his most heavy prescriptions to his patients were walking with your bare feet on the grass (think grounding!), and for an insomniac it was to drink warm milk with honey before bed. Today, I would be dubious about this latter prescription, based on what I know about nutrition, but earlier in my life, I would sometimes resort to this particular sleep medication myself.
When I became aware of the work of Dr. Peter Breggin, it promptly reminded me of my father. Breggin came to the profession when the madness of frontal lobotomies and psychopharmaca was in full swing. He ended up being instrumental in ending the barbaric practice of frontal lobotomies, and an expert witness against many pharmaceutical companies in respect of various psychopharmaca, demonstrating many times over that the cure is often worse than the disease in these cases.
We can however go a level deeper in our understanding, guided by the concept of the origins of the ego as it is explained in A Course in Miracles, which is unique in its expression that the ego itself is an illusion. This latter idea is in many ways implicit in the notion of the Ascension in Christianity, however before the Course, I am not aware of this theme being clearly elaborated anywhere. In other words:
Let us return the dream he gave away unto the dreamer, who perceives the dream as separate from himself and done to him. ²Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. ³In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects. ⁴Together, we can laugh them both away, and understand that time cannot intrude upon eternity. ⁵It is a joke to think that time can come to circumvent eternity, which means there is no time. (ACIM, T-27.VIII.6:1-5)
In other words, our problem is not that we had the thought of separation, but that we entertained it seriously and forgot to laugh about it. During my early years with A Course in Miracles, when I went up to the original home of the Foundation for A Course in Miracles, in Roscoe, New York, I had many conversations with Dr. Joseph A. Jesseph, a psychiatrist who was then on staff at the Foundation, and who was writing a book, A Primer of Psychology according to A Course in Miracles. The book is worth reading, but one of the more salient points of it is the realization that “abnormal psychology,” is the psychology of the ego in all its forms.
The driver behind psychology and psychiatry, is for the ego to study itself, and to take itself very seriously - exactly the opposite of what Jesus advises us to do. And the energy behind our judgments of others is always to reinforce our own reality, and play the black jack to others and ultimately to prove ourselves right and God wrong. This is one good reason why Jesus asks us in the Course, would you rather be right or happy? He is prompting us to expose that driver, why it is so important to us that we be right, namely exactly because our ego-self our false self is not who we are in truth.
Seek not outside yourself. ²For it will fail, and you will weep each time an idol falls. ³Heaven cannot be found where it is not, and there can be no peace excepting there. ⁴Each idol that you worship when God calls will never answer in His place. ⁵There is no other answer you can substitute, and find the happiness His answer brings. ⁶Seek not outside yourself. ⁷For all your pain comes simply from a futile search for what you want, insisting where it must be found. ⁸What if it is not there? ⁹Do you prefer that you be right or happy? ¹⁰Be you glad that you are told where happiness abides, and seek no longer elsewhere. ¹¹You will fail. ¹²But it is given you to know the truth, and not to seek for it outside yourself. (ACIM, T-29.VII.1:1-12)
And the answer is forever the same as what Jesus experienced with the temptations in the desert, once we recognize that we really are God’s children, we do not have to prove anything, the need for constant confirmation is of the ego entirely, exactly because it is our false persona:
Learn, then, the happy habit of response to all temptation to perceive yourself as weak and miserable with these words:
²I am as God created me. ³His Son can suffer nothing. ⁴And I am His Son.
The process of how to break out of the cocoon and evolve into a butterfly is given by the Course as the process of forgiveness, which really means letting go of the judgments and the difference by which I reinforce my separation from God and the rest of the sonship. The outcome of it eventually is completely child-like reliance on God, for I am no longer insisting on doing it alone. We let go of the unholy trinity of me, myself and I, and become a functioning part of the Holy Trinity, as we accept once again that we are His Son, in whom he is well pleased: I am as God created me. And I am his son.
When the Atonement has been completed, all talents will be shared by all the Sons of God. ²God is not partial. ³All His children have His total Love, and all His gifts are freely given to everyone alike. ⁴“Except ye become as little children” means that unless you fully recognize your complete dependence on God, you cannot know the real power of the Son in his true relationship with the Father. ⁵The specialness of God’s Sons does not stem from exclusion but from inclusion. ⁶All my brothers are special. ⁷If they believe they are deprived of anything, their perception becomes distorted. ⁸When this occurs the whole family of God, or the Sonship, is impaired in its relationships. (ACIM, T-1.V.3:1-8)
The way psychology and psychiatry works is that of course it can be helpful at times, for it helps to know how to function in the world, but there is a subtle undertone that the judgment of someone as “sick,” helps us define ourselves as “healthy,” or “normal.” From beginning to end, the ego is a belief in differences, and it is not the truth.