Mazu asked, “Then what should I do?”
Nanyue asked, “It’s like riding in an ox cart. If the cart doesn’t move do you hit the cart or do you hit the ox?”
Some ways say
You will be better and think better
When you act better.
Some ways say
You will be better and act better
When you think better.
Does it matter
So long as you work
To win all three?
I did not think that I would be returning to the DSM quite so soon after my recent post.
The caveat in my last post about the DSM bears repeating. Mental health is a serious issue. Using diagnostic tools and terminology merely for entertainment and “pop psychology” can be careless. On the other hand, these tools can help provide insights that may be useful, particularly when the subject and the subject matter are very important or even critical.
Non-professionals talk loosely and colloquially about paranoia. The DSM approaches this clinically and scientifically:
Paranoid Personality Disorder
Diagnostic Criteria
A pervasive distrust and suspiciousness of others such that their motives are interpreted as malevolent, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by four (or more) of the following:
Diagnostic Features [selected]
They suspect on the basis of little or no evidence that others are plotting against them and may attack them suddenly, at any time and without reason.
They are preoccupied with unjustified doubts about the loyalty or trustworthiness of their friends and associates, whose actions are minutely scrutinized for evidence of hostile intentions.
They may refuse to answer personal questions, saying that the information is “nobody’s business.”
They read hidden meanings that are demeaning and threatening into benign remarks or events. For example, an individual with this disorder may misinterpret an honest mistake by a store clerk as a deliberate attempt to shortchange, or view a casual humorous remark by a co-worker as a serious character attack.
They may view an offer of help as a criticism that they are not doing well enough on their own.
Individuals with this disorder persistently bear grudges and are unwilling to forgive the insults, injuries, or slights that they think they have received.
Minor slights arouse major hostility, and the hostile feelings persist for a long time.
Because they are constantly vigilant to the harmful intentions of others, they very often feel that their character or reputation has been attacked or that they have been slighted in some other way.
They are quick to counterattack and react with anger to perceived insults.
Thousands of words, myriad interpretations,
are only to free you from obstructions.
Shitou Xiqian (700-790), Song of the Grass Hut
Everything is standing in your way. Everything.
That would seem to make getting rid of things in your way a primary mission. Except it isn’t.
As Shitou says in his Song of the Grass Hut, getting rid of obstructions is not it. All of the words of wisdom and the beliefs and practices that go with them are only to free you from obstructions, not get rid of them. He even implies that the words and interpretations are themselves just added obstructions.
Everything is standing in your way. If you start today to haul everything off, you will be at it forever. Life as a trash hauler. If you free yourself from those things, they will still be there, but they may no longer be in your way. At least not as much in the way as it seems.
I have been thinking about Freud. As one of the pioneers of psychoanalysis, he and others published case studies that anonymized, and some would say took creative liberties with, their patients. One could say that analysis as practiced, developed and publicized by Freud and others is in fact a creative process.
Artists outside clinical psychology have also enjoyed the freedom to create and play—in the best sense—in the field of psychology and analysis. There are hundreds of examples: the paintings of Dali, the movies of Hitchcock, and so many more. (In some of these, Freud himself even plays a prominent role. The novelist D. M. Thomas in 1981 published The White Hotel, an extraordinary and unforgettable melding of Freud’s analyzing a patient with the surreality of the Holocaust. As a side note, The White Hotel, which has fascinated movie producers for decades, is now considered the ultimate great novel that will never actually be filmable or filmed.)
In this vein, what if professionals and creatives both were to devise case studies—entirely veiled and pseudonymous—of someone presently powerful and famous? Might that be revealing in ways that other profiles might not? Might such studies fill in the blanks in a personal portrait that is still quite mysterious and confounding?
Above all, might these case studies be true art? As I’ve written before, in the right hands, poetry and all the other arts can indeed be insurgent.
Lovers Before Me
The wise ones are
The lovers here before me.
They loved with passion and skill
Students of each other
Students of their own experience
Who graduated to be teachers of the ultimate prize.
I am jealous and intimidated
Wondering why I should bother to approach
Let alone try to love.
Still I listen to their tales of conquest
With the one I hoped would be mine.
Don’t try to love, they tell me:
Forget us.
Forget your lover.
Forget yourself.
None of us
Were ever here.
Mental health is a serious matter and mental health practitioners are serious professionals. These are not to be treated lightly and off-handedly.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) is the “bible” of the mental health profession: “a classification of mental disorders with associated criteria designed to facilitate more reliable diagnoses of these disorders.” It is not a reference to be thrown around and used casually by non-professionals.
The DSM can nonetheless be fascinating, especially when certain strong behavioral traits observed in others seem to closely match the traits and possible related disorders referenced in the DSM.
With the above caution and caveat, here are selections from DSM-5 about the Personality Trait Domain of Antagonism. More from the DSM about the way this may or may not relate to Narcissistic Personality Disorder will follow in a subsequent post.
Personality trait: A tendency to behave, feel, perceive, and think in relatively consistent ways across time and across situations in which the trait may be manifest.
Personality trait facets: Specific personality components that make up the five broad personality trait domains in the dimensional taxonomy of Section III “Alternative DSM-5 Model for Personality Disorders.” For example, the broad domain Antagonism has the following component facets: Manipulativeness, Deceitfulness, Grandiosity, Attention Seeking, Callousness, and Hostility.
Antagonism: Behaviors that put an individual at odds with other people, such as an exaggerated sense of self-importance with a concomitant expectation of special treatment, as well as a callous antipathy toward others, encompassing both unawareness of others’ needs and feelings, and a readiness to use others in the service of self-enhancement. Antagonism is one of the five broad personality trait domains defined in Section III “Alternative DSM-5 Model for Personality Disorders.”
Manipulativeness: Use of subterfuge to influence or control others; use of seduction, charm, glibness, or ingratiation to achieve one’s ends. Manipulativeness is a facet of the broad personality trait domain Antagonism.
Grandiosity: Believing that one is superior to others and deserves special treatment; self-centeredness; feelings of entitlement; condescension toward others. Grandiosity is a facet of the broad personality trait domain Antagonism.
Deceitfulness: Dishonesty and fraudulence; misrepresentation of self; embellishment or fabrication when relating events. Deceitfulness is a facet of the broad personality trait domain Antagonism.
Attention seeking: Engaging in behavior designed to attract notice and to make oneself the focus of others’ attention and admiration. Attention seeking is a facet of the broad personality trait domain Antagonism.
Callousness: Lack of concern for the feelings or problems of others; lack of guilt or remorse about the negative or harmful effects of one’s actions on others. Callousness is a facet of the broad personality trait domain Antagonism.
Hostility: Persistent or frequent angry feelings; anger or irritability in response to minor slights and insults; mean, nasty, or vengeful behavior. Hostility is a facet of the broad personality trait domain Antagonism.
Clearing the Table
Big plate small plate bowl
Fork knife spoon
Glass cup
Napkin folded.
Napkin crumpled
Dishes in disarray
Clear the table
To begin again.
If not for
Cooking serving cleaning
How would we eat?
If not for clearing
Every time
How would we see
The table top
So plain?
Pretty much every day now, my head spins, just a little. My head does not usually and chronically spin, but it does these days. I find myself not so much trying to make sense of some things, but trying to determine whether there is or will appear some appropriate and constructive response. So far, nothing.
Today, however, I did think about Philip K. Dick. I wrote a little about Dick a while ago. To say he was just a science fiction writer is not nearly enough. Some of his many books and stories have been turned into a number of successful movies (Blade Runner, Total Recall, etc.) and now into an excellent TV series (Man in the High Castle).
The reason for his books being so adaptable, and for his loyal and committed readers, is that Dick was a visionary, some might say a prophet. He was also psychologically and cognitively different. The two parts often go together.
The reason I’m thinking about Dick is the possibility that those of us who are confused about what is going on are being far too rational and far too narrow about all of it. Maybe what we need is a much bigger and stranger vision. Maybe to understand madness, we all have to try to be a little mad ourselves, or pretend to be. Just a thought.
Anyway, Dick suffered through some mental illness and/or religious experience late in his life. Some would say Dick was a bit of a madman. Or a visionary or a prophet. In any case, if we want to know what the future might look like—or for that matter what the present looks like—we can do no better than look at it through Dick’s eyes.
Writer Jonathan Lethem has written some fine appreciations of Dick. This is from Lethem’s Introduction to Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick:
Dick’s great accomplishment, on view in the twenty-one stories collected here, was to turn the materials of American pulp-style science fiction into a vocabulary for a remarkably personal vision of paranoia and dislocation. It’s a vision as yearning and anxious as Kafka’s, if considerably more homely. It’s also as funny. Dick is a kitchen-sink surrealist, gaining energy and invention from a mad piling of pulp SF tropes—and clichés—into his fiction: time travel, extrasensory powers, tentacled aliens, ray guns, androids, and robots. He loves fakes and simulacra as much as he fears them: illusory worlds, bogus religions, placebo drugs, impersonated police, cyborgs. Tyrannical world governments and ruined dystopian cities are default settings here. Not only have Orwell and Huxley been taken as givens in Dick’s worlds, so have Old Masters of genre SF like Clifford Simak, Robert Heinlein, and A. E. Van Vogt. American SF by the mid-1950s was a kind of jazz, stories built by riffing on stories. The conversation they formed might be forbiddingly hermetic, if it hadn’t quickly been incorporated by Rod Serling and Marvel Comics and Steven Spielberg (among many others) to become one of the prime vocabularies of our age….
If Dick, as a bearded, drug-taking Cal-i-fornian, might have seemed a candidate for Beatdom (and in fact did hang out with the San Francisco poets), his persistent engagement with the main materials of his culture kept him from floating off into reveries of escape. It links him instead to writers like Richard Yates, John Cheever, and Arthur Miller (the British satirist John Sladek’s bull’s-eye Dick parody was titled “Solar Shoe Salesman”). Dick’s treatment of his “realist” material can seem oddly cursory, as though the pressing agenda of his paranoiac fantasizing, which would require him to rip the facade off, drop the atomic bomb onto, or otherwise renovate ordinary reality, made that reality’s actual depiction unimportant. But no matter how many times Dick unmasks or destroys the Black Iron Prison of American suburban life, he always returns to it. Unlike the characters in William S. Burroughs, Richard Brautigan, or Thomas Pynchon, Dick’s characters, in novels and stories written well into the 1970s, go on working for grumbling bosses, carrying briefcases, sending interoffice memos, tinkering with cars in driveways, sweating alimony payments, and dreaming of getting away from it all—even when they’ve already emigrated to Mars….
Whether or not he was ready for the world, or the world ready for him, he longed for a respectable recognition, and sought it variously and unsuccessfully throughout his life. In fact, he wrote eight novels in a somber realist mode during the 1950s and early 1960s, a shadow career known mainly to the agents who failed to place the books with various New York publishers. It’s stirring to wonder what Dick might have done with a wider professional opportunity, but there’s little doubt that his SF grew more interesting for being fed by the frustrated energies of his “mainstream” ambition. Possibly, too, a restless streak in Dick’s personality better suited him for the outsider-artist status he tasted during his lifetime….Here, from an introduction written for Golden Man, a collection of stories assembled in 1980, Dick reminisces:
But I think you should know this—specifically, in case you are, say, in your twenties and rather poor and perhaps becoming filled with despair, whether you are an SF writer or not, whatever you want to make of your life. There can be a lot of fear, and often it is a justified fear. People do starve in America. I have seen uneducated street girls survive horrors that beggar description. I have seen the faces of men whose brains have been burned-out by drugs, men who could still think enough to be able to realize what had happened to them; I watched their clumsy attempt to weather that which cannot be weathered. . . . Kabir, the sixteenth-century Sufi poet, wrote, “If you have not lived through something, it is not true.” So live through it; I mean, go all the way to the end. Only then can it be understood, not along the way.
Danger, Will Robinson!
Robot B9, Lost in Space
Here is a simple formula to determine the level of danger posed by the actions of a government leader.
The theory is that the danger (D) posed is directly proportional to the idiocy of the leader (I) and the power of the leader (P):
I x P = D!
Thus, as the idiocy or the power increases, so does the danger.
You may find this formula handy.
Note: The exclamation point (!) does not denote an element of the formula. Rather, it indicates that the mere word “danger” does not convey how intensely dangerous the state of affairs might get, under the least optimal circumstances.
Coffee Paradise
The coffee’s not making itself
Arriving on its own
No cook or chef
No waiter or waitress
No server or servess.
The discipline of
Water pot
Grounds and heat
Is good for you
Poor stir press pour
Mindful walk
To kitchen and back.
But where is the angel or
The winged cup
This is a morning
For that lazy heaven.
Bob Schwartz 