SEICHEL, SCHIZOPHRENIA, HEBEPHRENIA, AND ZEITGEIST OF OUR TIMES!

SEICHEL, SCHIZOPHRENIA, HEBEPHRENIA, AND ZEITGEIST OF OUR TIMES!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 13, 2010

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Nobel Laureate Gunter Grass published a prescient novel more than fifty years ago titled, THE TIN DRUM (1959). If you have not read it, I suggest you do. Most people who have not read the book still know of it, perhaps having seen the movie in which Oskar Matzerath receives a shiny new tin drum on his third birthday, and vows never to grow up or get bigger.

Matzerath in the book tells his story from the insane asylum where he is being held for a murder he didn’t commit. The question of his sanity is pointless as he lives in an insane world where violence and treachery are the only vision imaginable. It is the world of rising Nazism, a world that formulates its destructive nonsense in empty language and senseless genocide.

THE TIN DRUM is a mock-epic chronicle of Western Europe’s (and by extension the world’s) twentieth century madness, a world in upheaval. Values become inverted. The tragic is indistinguishable from the comic, the agonizing from the ludicrous. Chaos is the outward appearance and inner principle of the world it seeks to capture. Imagined vitality creates its own decorum, which is an affirmation of its dissolution.

Although only a novel, it passages how the world would limp into the twenty-first century to a chorus of natural and manmade disasters.

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Ron Fournier writes of the recent oilrig blow up in the Gulf of Mexico, “Nobody led. Not the president of the United States. Not the chief executive of British Petroleum. Not Congress, federal agencies or local elected officials. From its fiery beginning, the gulf oil spill has stood as a concentrated reminder of why, over four decades, Americans have lost faith in nearly every national institution.” He concludes Americans have lost faith in and trust of their leadership.

AP Chief Fournier is talking about “blind faith,” the faith programmed into us over the last half century, a faith where we psychologically don’t have to take responsibility for things as they are, a faith when something goes wrong it is somebody else’s fault and somebody else has to fix it.

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Since World War Two, we have been living in Disney Land where nothing was real especially the consequences of our actions.

Parents lost control of the home, and joined their children in frivolous behavior.

Teachers lost control at school and automatically promoted students who could neither read nor write.

Churches lost control of message and tried to be groovy becoming as unconscionable as parishioners.

Employers lost control of productivity by giving workers everything but control of what they did while blindly robbing the corporate bank because they could.

Government lost control because it never got beyond the psychology of the Great Depression, expanding the economic safety net to the point of creating a society of whimpering children always looking for a handout.

We have eloquent speakers but no leaders because we no longer have control of our own lives.

Obesity, drug addiction, gang wars, terror in the streets, homicides and patricides, the surreal-picaresque world of pornography, Ponzi schemes, pederasty, corruption, duplicity and mendacity are symptoms, not causes, of a sick society that feeds on its sickness.

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We have refused to grow up.

A number of years ago a street survey was taken in New York City with a disproportionate number of respondents claiming to suffer from disorganized thinking and speech, loss of train of thought, periodic incoherence, and even some of the more telling symptoms of schizophrenia such as hallucinations and delusions. This was not a scientific study but indicated that symptoms of mental illness were common to many New Yorkers.

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There is a form of schizophrenia called “hebephrenia,” which has something in common with Oskar Matzerbath of THE TIN DRUM. The person suffering from this disease grows up physically but not emotionally. It is a Peter Pan like complex in which the highly sensitive person can literally stop maturing emotionally in puberty.

Hebephrenia can be triggered by extreme trauma experienced when very young and helpless to intercede, say when the child’s father physically and psychologically abuses his mother. The child lives in fear and feels responsible to protect his mother because there is no one else to do so, but is unable.

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This is something I’m thinking about while walking today.

Many people of my generation born in the 1930s have known war and deprivation as a constant diet. Now in the last decades of our lives, we are faced with terrorism. This pervading threat has no face, no country, no standing army, and no national allegiance.

Terrorism is a miniscule presence on the body politic but does extreme psychological damage to our collective psyche, which is preoccupied with nonspecific fear. There is no safe haven from this terror, not in the sanctuary of a church, temple, synagogue, or mosque. Nothing is sacred with terrorists.

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In this climate of fear, no one is in charge as everything is fragmented. No one is carrying the mantle because it is too heavy and ill defined. It is as if there is a gigantic hole in our collective psyche and no one can fill it. It is not that we don’t have people with intelligence and perspective attempting to bring sense to our nonsense. The problem is too often their sense is only more nonsense. There are exceptions.

Yiddish author Michael Chabon can look at the Israeli botched raid on the Gaza flotilla, Mavi Marmara, and register shock and confusion as he attempts to get his head around this display of blockheadedness.

“There is a Yiddish word,” he writes, “seichel, which means wisdom, but it also means more than that: it connotes ingenuity, creativity, subtlety, nuance.” A person who possesses this looks for a clever way out of problems, someone who understands that the most direct way, blunt force, often represents the least elegant solution, a person who can foresee consequences of his actions.

Chabon goes on to say Jews are chosen but not special, and the myth that has them special is the hole in which they constantly fall when buying into this rubbish. “We construct the history of our wisdom only by burying our foolishness in the endnotes.”

He goes on to say, “In the 62-year history (1948 – 2010) of Israel, like the history of the Jewish people and of the human race, it has been from the beginning a record of glory and fiasco, triumph and error, greatness and meanness, charity and crime.”

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The zeitgeist or spirit of our times plays havoc with our limited attention span, which has surrendered our brains to computer dalliance, and for it, writes Matt Richtel of the New York Times:

“We are paying a price. While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information scientists say, and they experience more stress.”

People will argue this point, and more warnings will materialize on the dangers of technology, but one thing is clear. Our survival as a human race seems more a matter of luck than pluck.

We create chaos and burrow through it, suffer pandemics and come out of them, if briefly revitalized, discover new ways to fail and new sources of human weakness, new methods of carnage, and doomsday scenarios, and yet the indomitable zeitgeist once again surfaces and stares destiny down. Alas, man prevails despite his constant dance with folly.

This is what I’m thinking today as I walk.

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