Page 66 - Microsoft Word - SPIRIT AND THE MIND.doc

Psychiatry’s Resistance, An Interview 49
S: What if while you were thinking it was psychopathology, Jesus came again to give you another experience?
Dr. A: Now I would say that the world is part of my delusion. I would begin to think that I was delusional about Christ giving me another sign. I’d think that I was going crazy.
S: What if you didn’t go crazy, and were still able to function well?
Dr. A: If it happened to me too many times I’d be sure that I was crazy. But if it happened only once I might be able to consider that it wasn’t psychopathology. Because I don’t think that psychopathology usually comes as an isolated blip out of the void. The more often it happened, the more I would be sure it was psychopathology, I suppose.
S: Let’s say that you went to your desk and all of a sudden, on your writing pad, there was a magnificent picture of the vision that you had just had with a message underneath saying, “1 understand what is going on in your mind and the difficulty you are having grappling with it. I want you to know that this is real and not an hallucination. I am giving you a deeper vision into reality.”
Dr. A: If he really wanted to help me he’d better not do that. He’d better let me wrestle with the experience and not do too much confirming. In other words, I suspect that my tolerance for an idea that has this much disjunction from my ordinary experience is going to be very low; I could stand only a little piece of it without assuming that I had lost my capacity to separate primary process1 from secondary process.2
S: I’m feeling your resistance right now.
Dr. A: This has happened to me once. I had a brief religious experience about twenty years ago. It lasted two to four minutes, I suppose. And my initial assumption was that it was psychopathology. I was a psychiatric resident and I thought, “Oh no, finally it’s happened to me—I’ve blown my tubes and that’s it.” It literally took some weeks before I felt more comfortable. I happened to be in analysis at the time and fortunately my analyst didn’t assume right away that it was psychopathology, so I began to accept it as a very brief mystical experience.
S: What was the experience?
Dr. A: I’ll tell you—I suppose it’s all right, I told my analyst. Actually, after this many years it doesn’t seem like such a marvelous event. Of course it did at the time. It had the quality of disjuncture