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Psychiatry’s Resistance, An Interview 47
what he was saying. And if they did, it took them years and years to get to that point.
This really isn’t an original idea; you often read that if Jesus walked in today, we wouldn’t recognize him. The authorities would probably lock him up.
S: I’m a bit confused. First you say that you couldn’t conceive of a person with the power and wisdom that Christians believe Jesus Christ had—and now you seem to acknowledge that this type of greatness could exist even though we might not recognize him if he appeared today.
Dr. A: Maybe I should expand on that. I think that my human mental capacity is limited. We cannot evaluate anything beyond our level of consciousness.
We formulate the universe in terms of ourselves. We project ourselves onto the outside world. Astronomical theories, for instance, may be no more than extensions of what we feel and touch on earth— and may have nothing to do with what is really going on in space. What we really have is a projection—probably not a whole lot better than a paranoid projection of ourselves onto what we observe.
It would be hard for me to conceptualize something as far-removed from my own experience as a person with boundless knowledge or pure selfless love. I wouldn’t trust my ability to evaluate a capacity so beyond my own. I don’t think I would be able to recognize such a person. Now if I could get beyond that limitation—but I don’t know how to do that.
S: What I hear—and correct me if I am wrong—is that there are a number of concepts and ideas that you hold on an intellectual and rational level that serve to stop you from thinking about this kind of situation. You have decided that this whole subject cannot be comprehended by the human mind—and so you decide to shut yourself off from even considering possibilities.
Dr. A: I would think I had reached the outer limits of my mental capacity and everything that I thought beyond that would be spinning wheels mentally. To a certain extent I think the logical positivists, the Viennese philosophical school, really did away with metaphysics in one stroke on the basis that since we can’t think about it in a logical fashion, let’s not think about it at all because it is a waste of human effort. Let’s think about something we can actually grasp with the rational mind. This approach has a certain attraction.