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'case notes

By A_Nietzschean_Schizoanalyst_writes...

Forgive my intrusion, but I feel that someone must bring a sympathetic scientific understanding to bear here.

Do the truly morbid shout so loud? If the patient hasn't the courage of his convictions to commit suicide (which is, after all, the simplest thing), if they still carry on taking part in life, then we urge them in to consider seriously why that is.

Whilst one may rationally consider oneself to be totally without hope or interest, one's nervous system is still intrinsically 'optimistic' because it is alive. It is also more powerful than those ghosts and ghouls and phantasmagoria, the 'convictions' of reason. It is fairly obvious that anyone who writes, speaks, or commits any act in the name of rationally-argued suicidalism and hopelessness, is a 'walking contradiction', an unwitting victim of their own deception and spokesperson for the valiant optimism of the nervous system. This contradiction can have its basis in a more widely distributed complex of the 'double-bind' variety.

Life goes on, and the body and its contingency and futile irrationality must be faced daily. Many case histories describe the sincere, if perverse, willing of Reason to overcome and destroy the body, to overpower the nervous system, for reason to 'reign supreme eternal' (this outcome imagined by the patient either as paradise or complete extermination, it makes only the most trivial difference). Each case shows equally the impotence and failure of Reason to do so. Additionally, in the current case as in so many, the power of Reason, or radical truth, has become projected, externalised into global historical processes which in their turn are invoked as supernatural agencies of (episodically or simultaneously) destruction or salvation of the patient, and/or everyone and everything around him (it is usually a him).

As a pathologist of the mind, one exhorts such cases to follow the vectors of their nervous system rather than the wild speculations of cranial reason. In colloquial terms, you have to be a 'headcase' to let your body and nervous system become guilty and sick because of an affectation of Reason, after all widely acknowledge in the field to be the flakiest and least functional of the so-called 'faculties'.

The patient's calling himself a 'romantic' is an admission of a proclivity in the nervous system inclining the body to act in certain positive (if unhealthy) ways (this appears to be the patient's only 'excuse' for not simply capitulating to common drone-life, although significantly he doesn't allow others that excuse): why then does he insist on tying down these libidinal impulses into circuits of a metaphysical imaginary, which speaks of natural principles, universal processes, future worlds that this body has no connection to? In this way the body at every step is checked and filtered by a policing mechanism that will not allow any spark of life, interest, laughter, to get through, unless it is 'consistent' with 'the plan' - resulting in the sad specimen we see before us.

One of the first precepts of our science is that the life is neither progressive, consistent nor rational. Unless the brain can abandon its grim, all-too-human drive to mastery, to rational self-consistency, universal history, etc., the nervous system will be dragged unwillingly along with it, a wet rag of what could have been life, powering an autistic organism. On such occasions, it would indeed be better for the organism to terminate itself, but, _contra_ the patients themselves, life is actually stronger than that. The condition is typical of a complex special to the human, male, adult, academic, pseudo-tragic, 'thinker'. What often makes our job difficult is that the depth of the malady inevitably leads them to scorn simple psychological diagnoses as being 'below' them. The patient likes attention, but only responds well to company which flatters and mirrors his own obsessions (patients often form hermetic groups or attach themselves cravenly to suspect political causes which eventually prove 'unworthy' of the patients grand theories -- or in fact tired of the patient's fanatical impotence). Yes, they react badly to diagnosis. To which we must respond, that we cannot be held to task by the victim of a common disease first diagnosed by a prominent German philologist(!) of the 19th Century, if our diagnoses reflect its banality.

In transcendental pathology we often say that it's as if a central tendency of the human brain is to see the world 'as if in a camera obscura', from its own imperious, upside-down point of view, regardless of harm to the body and indeed the world. This disease, it's true, has a fine pedigree. Its virulent spread has been unchecked from the earliest days of 'civilization'. Indeed from some of our research it seems that the development from early mammalian nervous system to human brain produced a veritable organic tendency towards this banal attractor, with the evolution of alphabetic writing playing the part of a powerful catalyst. (nb. Perhaps for this reason some patients exhibit an extraordinarily aggressive ambivalence towards writing, in several recorded cases becoming obsessed during periods of depression with mathematical games which, however simple, seem to the confused patient to offer a welcome escape from the perceived tyranny of reason and language.)

Being sucked down this plughole enthusiastically, it's true, could be called 'romantic' in the sense in which the denizens of lunatic asylums have often been perceived as such. If our untimely intervention fails, the patient could even expect an honourable footnote, below the other wizened involutes, in the history of philosophy, the history of an error.

yours sincerely

dr raj persaud
clinical researcher, transcendental pathology
R&J Madely University