Health and the Mind - Schizophrenia
Welcome from Mitchell Ginsberg (Jinavamsa).
..... comments invited: see email, below .....
For a more general introduction, go to
my Home Page.
On mindfulness, see
mindfulness practice or insight (vipassana) meditation.
(There is more on Mindfulness-Based Psychotherapies, below.)
For more on
The Far Shore: Vipassana, The Practice of Insight, including some selections and reviews, go to
The Far Shore
directory.
And, similarly, for more on
The Inner Palace: Mirrors of Psychospirituality in Divine and Sacred Wisdom-Traditions, go to
The Inner Palace
directory.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Early work
My early work in psychotherapy was focused on families with one member diagnosed and hospitalized as schizophrenic ("Schizophrenic Families") and (later, in an NIMH research project, in the late 1970s) with alternative treatment for adolescent and post-adolescents with this same diagnosis.
I had the good fortune to be invited to an ongoing seminar on Language and Thought in
Schizophrenia (given my work in philosophical psychology and philosophy of language,
which I was teaching at the time at Yale University). Loren Mosher, M.D., the man who
invited me into this seminar, one year later became Chief of the NIMH Center for Studies
of Schizophrenia.
In memory of Loren Mosher, M.D. (3 September 1933 - 10 July 2004). His openness to the
perspectives, understandings, and wisdom of those outside the world of Western medical
training was a fresh and refreshing breeze. In appreciation for his good-willed influence
on my own life, from the time when he first introduced me to the world of schizophrenia
in 1967, and supported and encouraged my further training and experience, both in the
Soteria Project (modeled on the Kingsley Hall project in London administered by R.D.
Laing, M.D.) that we talked about in the late 1960s and in which I worked almost a
decade later, and in my other interests in the world of psychotherapy. For more, with
links to various articles on his life and work (including several giving more on the
Soteria Study), see
Loren Mosher, M.D., and
Still Crazy After All These Years (an overview article). For memorials, see
Memories of Loren Mosher, M.D.
Recently there has appeared his posthumously published work,
Soteria: Through Madness To Deliverance.
For one of the continuations of Soteria-related inspiration, see the work of Luc Ciompi, based in Lausanne-Bern (Switzerland), at
The Soteria Concept. Further, for Ciompi's view that goes beyond the thought-affect dichotomy in understanding human distress (aka mental disease), see his
Non-linear Fractal Affect-Logic,
with links to various of the theoretical underpinnings of this Affect-Logic,
including discussions of fractals (from the work in mathematics of
Benoit Mandelbrot)
and of discontinuous bifurcations (from the work in mathematics, physics, and chemistry, of
Rene Thom, of the
Nobel Laureate (1977)
Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, and of many others,
related to the mathematical concept of
discontinuous functions, from the calculus), known in this rather precise applied-mathematical sense as
chaos theory
or
catastrophe theory.
For a philosophical complement to this, see Robert C. Solomon's 1977 project of "the total demolition of the age-old distinctions between emotion and reason, passion and logic" (as he put it in
The Logic of Emotion
with his typically vibrant flair and panache),
which can be considered along with some of his much more recent extended analyses of the logic of emotions, as in
True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us (2006)
and also his posthumous
Not Passion's Slave: Emotions and Choice (2007).
My own 1964 paper ("The Concept of Love"), which has a rather similar conceptual perspective, is part of a forthcoming collection. Many sections of
The Far Shore (1980, 1996, 2001)
suggest an understanding of various emotions and emotional states (love, fear, anger, resentment, etc.) that does not rely on the above-distinctions that Solomon was intent on demolishing. One alternative to attempting to fight our way free from a conceptual mental jacket (requiring the dexterity in thought that Harry Houdini demonstrated in the body) is to take a different starting point, one that does not take as axiomatic the distinction between mind and heart. There is a hint for this project in Nietzsche (such as at
Genealogy of Morals, II, 16), or in taking a non-Euro-centric perspective as is available in Buddhist Abhidhamma (or Abhidharma, the higher or theoretical psychology of Buddhism), in Daoism, and in other theoretical orientations (or worldviews). These and related issues are addressed in this same forthcoming work, with tentative title
Calm, Clear, and Loving: Soothing the Distressed Mind, Healing the Wounded Heart. Reflections on Nietzsche, Freud, World Psychotherapy, Human Distress, the Logic of Love, and Open Awareness.
(This manuscript is now being prepared for publication.)
In the article cited above,
Still Crazy After All These Years,
Mosher touches on the role of medications, mentioning the life of
John Nash, Nobel Laureate in Economics (for work applying his mathematical theories,
especially those in mathematical game theory, to various human endeavors),
who took no psychotropic medications from 1970 on (contrary to the
implication in A Beautiful Mind, a movie rendering of his life).
See also
John Nash: Recovery without Drugs
and
John Nash to Give 2007 Convocation Speech (at American Psychiatric Association),
with its less romantic and more accurate history.
For more on questioning main-stream psychiatry, including the work of Laing, see the links provided at
Psykiatrikritikk og Antipsykiatri [=Critique of Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry]
and, further, at the links toward the end of this web site.
The Kaiserian tradition was also central in this opening me up to work in this area, with the
seminal text by Hellmuth Kaiser himself, and those that have come out more recently
by one of his main students and the editor of his main writings, Louis B. Fierman, M.D.,
whom I would like to thank again for his encouraging my work and further training in
this domain in the early 1970s. I can recommend here Kaiser's
Effective Psychotherapy
and Fierman's more recent writings, such as his
Freeing the Human Spirit: A Psychiatrist's Journal,
his
"Shrink" - On Becoming a Psychotherapist,
and,
with a tripart vision of the goals of psychotherapy, his article
You'd Be Paranoid Too, If Everyone Were After You, with
references to further of his books in its note 1.
The inspired work of the psychiatrist and family therapist
Maurizio Andolfi, Professor of Psychology at the Universita La Sapienza, and
Director of the
Accademia di Terapia Familiare, both in Rome, Italy,
has impacted my understanding of the role of the therapist in any individual or family work, whether or not with extremely distressed and disturbed family members, especially the need of the therapist to be creative and fully present, and to maintain an overview of the entire therapeutic situation (including the initial frustrations and the ultimate yearnings of the family members). From an age when therapists in formation had much more experience actually doing therapy (as opposed to a focus on learning theories or studying psychopharmacology as the core focus of one's training), came his stressing the importance of the therapist's personal role in helping, not hindering, the therapy process. What can be seen is that the ideas, beliefs, understandings (beautiful insights? dogmatic preconceptions? personal limitations?) of the therapist will be deeply respected by the family, but in ways that may block the therapy from addressing the most vital questions (as when the therapist is uncomfortable about some issue, which the family, or individual, will then sense and thereafter typically avoid bringing up). Oddly in such situations, the therapist's own turbulence over some issue is a hindrance, in opposition to the principle that the therapist is there to help people deal with issues that would otherwise be too stressful to address.
I feel quite fortunate to have had ongoing personal contact, long discussions, inspiring
guidance, and both personal and professional encouragement in my life from
these individuals, each in his own way.
Links to other sites on the Web
Metanoia
The Society for Laingian Studies
Soteria Foundation in Budapest
Oxford Univ. Press Schizophrenia Bulletin on Soteria (June 14, 2007)
Soteria Bern (Switzerland)
Swedish and Danish work: The Parachute and the OPUS Projects
Please come back soon and visit here, as I will updating and adding to this home page
as time permits.
More to be added.... visit when inspired.
email:
jinavamsa@yahoo.com
C 2009
