Normopathy

The insanity of normality Arno Gruen Summary by Maria Davits.Good and evil are not determined by the intercourse of people with one another, but entirely by a man’s relations with himself. — Jacob Wasserman.To become responsible for one’s own self, to become autonomous, is a paradoxical process. The complexity of this interplay is apparent when we consider, on the one hand, that it is needed for the child to bond with the parents, to attach, and on the other hand to become autonomous, learn to take responsibility.
Basically, responsibility can develop in two directions: the evolving psyche either directs- openly and freely, answerable only to itself- the formation of its own self or it passively submits to the formative influences of others. In the latter case, it evades the burdens of true responsibility.
It is an act of self-betrayal when children begin to lose consciousness of their own self.
Such adaptation to the power needs of parents, obedience, and formative behaviour , leads to a split in children’s psychic structure, separating their interior world from its interaction with the environment. In this way, the connection and interplay between actions and motivations disappear. If we lose the connection to our own interior world, to dissociate, then we can relate only to a false self, to an image-oriented self attuned to behaviour and feelings pleasing to our surrounding world. The need and perhaps also the compulsion to preserve this image-orientation take precedence over all one’s potential perceptions, feelings, and empathy. The resulting inability to be rooted in oneself is what engenders destructive and evil behaviour .
Escape from responsibility is always repressed from consciousness. Necessarily so, since the surrender of autonomy by submission to the will of others initiates a fundamental power game:
“I will become the way you want me to be so that you will take care of me. My submissiveness ensures my power over you from now on; With it I force you to take care of me.”
In this way, dependency becomes revenge for submissiveness.
Destructive behaviour and self-hatred, dissociation and neurotic behaviour and worldliness is rooted in the betrayal human beings commit against themselves in order to share in a hallucinated sense of power. If we reject ourselves because it might endanger our position of power, vengeful feelings begin to determine our lives.
If such an outer-directed development recognises only obedience and adaptation, and no longer acknowledges pain, the ‘natural’ end product is destructive behaviour . The bifurcation between outer or inner-directed courses of development leads to two realities: that of power or that of love.
Our civilisation, our power-based culture, with its demand for obedience is at the root of self-hatred. The way a person appears is still prized above inner substance, and adaptation is still rewarded above inner independence.
I refer to the type of insanity that disguises itself by hiding behind the mask of mental health. This insanity can easily conceal itself in a world in which deception and trickery are approved methods of adapting reality. Horrible intentions and acts are concealed more and more frequently behind smiling faces and masquerades as friendliness and seemingly considerate behaviour . This is why it is especially difficult to recognise the actual pathology of our times. Whereas people who can no longer bear the absence of human values in the real world are considered ‘crazy’, those who have severed themselves from their human roots are certified ‘normal’.
The pathology of normality: it is not only the flight from emotional pain but also the fear of falling apart, that constantly threatens the cohesion in ourselves. For example: anxiety must be covered up. This constant covering up of our actual state of illness characterises present-day life to a degree scarcely known before.
For those who slip into the disguise of ‘normal’ behaviour because they cannot tolerate the tension caused by the contradiction between the reality impressed on them and their inner world, real feelings soon cease to consist. Instead, these people operate with ‘ideas’ about their feelings, not with experiencing them. They display their own feelings that have been imposed on them and renounce their true feelings. The ‘saner’ the image of the identity they have adopted, the more successfully they will be able to perform this manipulation. And manipulation it is, for their goal is not self-expression, instead they want to convince others that they act, think, and feel appropriately. This are the people I want to expose as the truly insane ones among us.
They endanger us all because they cannot face the chaos, the rage, and the emptiness inside them. To have to accept this inner emptiness as their own, they produce destruction and emptiness around them. To avoid knowledge about their inner self, they impose their ‘order’ on their fellow men and women and thus their way of dealing with themselves.
They diminish not themselves but reality by denying its contradictions and the fear this causes.
Their lives turn into a defence of this diminishment and a denial of their inner fears. They cling to their diminished reality and insist that it represents the ‘whole’ of experience. The self then willingly subscribes to a priori ideas about the nature of being, instead of basing itself on the interactions between the actual being and the surrounding world of which it is a part. Their consciousness thus does not reflect the integration of individual beings and outer reality but the need to conquer this reality.
This is why a self obedient only to ideas rather than to the free play of feelings grounded in the experience of both joy and pain enslaves itself and becomes destructive. ( protocols).
To the same extent we abandon ourselves to ideas, we mistake for feelings what are actually only notions of what we think we ‘should’ feel.
If we are prone to dissociate thought and feeling,- that is to distance ourselves from the roots of our feelings- the problem is that we will no longer be capable of an awareness of doing so. We will strive to see ourselves not as we are but as we think we ought to appear. Our image and our reality will not be isomorphic; they will not correspond to each other. If they do not correspond, this contradiction within our inner reality will be a constant source of fear, and the fear, in turn, will reinforce our dissociation.The notion that domination equals strength and helplessness equals weakness exists to different degrees, but it is present in all of us. The feelings we have about domination and helplessness are not in accord with those perfectly natural feelings we had during the initial period of our development when we were nourished and held in our mother’s protective arms.
If we later identify helplessness with weakness and domination with strength such feelings are basically mere functions of thought processes, not of our intrinsic nature and experience. These thought processes are part of an already diminished form of reality, one marked by the inability to tolerate feelings. Thus, we encounter again a process involving dissociation. It is primarily the inability to tolerate feelings that bring about dissociation between thought and feeling.
The central issue in individual psychological growth is the choice between two basic directions: toward the inner or the outer world. It is directed toward the inner world if children receive the kind of love that enables them to experience helplessness without feeling all alone. If this is the case helplessness will not be perceived as total abandonment or condemnation but as a state leading through pain and sorrow to a new strength rather than to destruction. This sort of experience will produce a self that does not perceive helplessness as a deadly threat but as a possibility for new integration and new beginnings.
The other direction, the outer one, involves the dissociation of the experience of helplessness and the denial of the inner world in favour of acquiescence in an extern imposed order in which one’s needs and perceptions are performed, first by parents, later by school, society, and state.
The horror of helplessness that must be denied because it is experienced as a mortal danger continues in force, however, and one of the motivating, although unconscious factors in life. The extent of this dichotomy determines whether or not we will lead a fully responsible life, whether we will affirm ourselves and life, or whether we will devote ourselves to the destructiveness and hatred of life, always placing responsibility on others.
We cannot live without trust and we attain trust by experiencing a supportive affection. Without this affection infants and small children can become apathetic and waste away or even die.Every power play is hypocritical about its motives and is based on a lie of one’s self.
Our fragmentation must be overcome, not by acquiescing in the logic of an alleged reality, but by insisting on our own ability to feel compassion, to experience sorrow and joy.
Patients change only when they accept responsibility for the decision they once made to submit to the power of others. For it is this submission that has crippled their potential for autonomy and initiated their psychic maldevelopment.
Many therapists have to recognise they made their patients dependent on them. In this way, the eternal game is repeated. This internalisation of the therapist- which is the opposite of finding one’s own identity- is mistakenly considered grown-up.
The only way to find true liberation and to meet the challenge of change is by confronting the pain caused by self-betrayal. We must confront the surrender that first made us hate ourselves because it reminds us of what we have done. Evil destruction in humanity has its roots in our inability to take responsibility for the early decision that made us relinquish our birthright to be ourselves.Maria Davits