The Relationship of Mad Pride to Messianic Transformation
How can the Mad Pride movement create lasting change in a world on the brink of self-annihilation? How can we make the transition when humanity clings to the old ways? Laing did not attempt to grapple with the question of how to effect social change: after he wrote The Politics of Experience he stopped writing—or speaking—about his controversial idea that the mad were the avantgarde of a new order. In fact, he seemed to retreat from the 1960s idea of collective social change just as the collective spiritual ferment of the 1960s itself died out. In public lectures he often said he had no “answers” to the major problems of humanity, he was just “raising questions.”
Unlike Laing, John Weir Perry had developed a theory of social change. Although he shared Laing’s view that the normal world was self-destructive, he was optimistic that human beings would pull together in time to avert annihilation. The guiding thread throughout Perry’s career was his death-rebirth theory of madness. However, Perry also was a student of cultural transformation, and he was convinced that society itself was undergoing an organic process of spiritual evolution.
He concluded that prophets are the catalysts of revolutionary change. He tells us that the prophet—like the mad person—undergoes a visionary experience: he or she plunges or is plunged into the myth world, the collective unconscious, into the deeper levels of the psyche.1 The prophet, unlike the mad person, Perry believed, takes it upon himself or herself to solve not just their own growth crisis but the growth crisis of society. He or she emerges from madness with a new myth. “If his myth-making capacity is working well, he may deliver the new myth that is going to be accepted for the next phase of that culture’s evolution. That then leads to a whole cultural renewal. Wallace [see chapter 15] calls it a ‘revitalization movement.’”2
In other words, the prophet is creatively maladjusted. Someone adjusted to society would not have the motivation or the capacity to solve the growth crisis of society and foster its spiritual evolution. The maladjustment of the prophet, the mad person, is not a pathological aberration or a medical problem: it is a mutation in service of the spiritual evolution of humanity.
All of his adult life, Perry, who lived until 1998, believed that humanity was confronting a major crisis—as a result of our materialism, our rationalism, and “our aggressive self assertion that disregards the needs of the whole.” We are destroying our fellow human beings and polluting beyond repair the resources of the Earth.3 We need to accept that we are all interconnected. We need to make a transition—a revolutionary change—to a new way of life characterized by harmony and equality and cooperation with, not domination of, nature.4 Revealingly, the Mad Pride activists interviewed in this book say the same thing.
“Dire straits are now upon us . . . awaiting us just ahead,”5 Perry wrote prophetically in 1987. Perry believed that “history shows us that when a culture is in dire straits the collective psyche is activated”; it responds creatively somehow to crisis, to challenge, to necessity, to the specter of catastrophe.6 Perry believes that prophets will arise, who I have argued will come largely from the ranks of the mad, who will become the “mouthpieces” of the new society, the catalysts of change (see The Sociobiological Function of Madness: The Spiritual Evolution Narrative in chapter 1 and part 5).
Let me interpolate here that Paul Levy’s theory of change is identical to Perry’s. (Both Perry and Levy are Jungians, so their similarity in this regard is not surprising.) Levy’s theory of change posits that certain visionary individuals—those whom Perry calls prophets—are most likely to formulate the symbols and myths that can help society make the transition to a new mode of being. Levy writes:
Jung said, “Social, political, and religious conditions affect the collective unconscious in the sense that all those factors which are suppressed by the prevailing views or attitudes in the life of a society gradually accumulate in the collective unconscious. . . . Certain individuals gifted with particularly strong intuition then become aware of the changes going on in it and translate these changes into communicable ideas. The new ideas spread rapidly because parallel changes have been taking place in the unconscious of other people. . . . If the translation of the unconscious into a communicable language proves successful, it has a redeeming effect [my emphasis]. The liberating vision of the artist [or prophets] attracts us into itself so as to make itself real in time, changing the world in the process.”7
Unlike Levy, Perry consistently made a spurious distinction that weakens his theory of change—between the mad person and the prophet. Perry asserts that the mad person and the prophet both undergo the same kinds of transformative visionary experiences but invariably choose different routes—the mad person opting for self-change and the prophet opting to transform society.8 (This sometimes happens, of course.) In recent history the mad person has little or no choice at all. However, we can see today if we look that the Mad Pride movement is composed of mad persons who have opted not merely to change themselves, but to change society; contrary to Perry, many of them have a prophetic orientation.
It is ironic that a radical thinker like Perry was so bound by cultural convention that he failed to notice or acknowledge that the great prophets in the past usually had been mad—that is to say, by the standards of psychiatry these prophets were psychotic. They had undergone the mad experience as Perry had described it. Perry’s dichotomy of the mad person and the prophet is at odds with his many of his own observations. Perry had often noticed that the mad in general have a keen interest in social problems. For example, in an interview in the mid90s Perry said that as soon as he finished medical school he began to discover that schizophrenics manifested an unusually strong interest in social problems and in the problems of the world.9 This interest belies Perry’s contention that “psychotics” choose to transform themselves, as opposed to prophets who opt to change society. Furthermore, Perry repeatedly noted that the “vision of oneness” that he believes is integral to social transformation was found in “the messianic ideation” of his psychotic clients; he found in their hallucinations a prefiguration of the new society that was “waiting to come about in the collective society of our time,” in the next phase of our spiritual evolution.10 This was very close to saying that the mad were prophets manqué or prophets in the making. In fact, this belief was sometime inaccurately imputed to Perry.
The fact is that there is a dearth of prophets today, in large part because so many potential prophets are “caught” and “squelched” (as Perry put it) early in their lives; they are inducted into “careers” as mental patients11 before they have a chance to complete a process of spiritual rebirth. The pool of visionaries from which modern prophets might emerge is depleted by the “mental health” system. How many potential prophets, spiritual leaders, are there among the mad—among the so-called mentally ill—who are nipped in the bud, in the bloom of their spiritual development, by the treatment they are given by the psychiatric system?
It is my argument that our society has been unable to transcend its spiritual stasis despite the severity of its dysfunctionality—despite the fact that we face now the prospect of ecological doom—largely because it has been so successful for centuries in psychiatrically suppressing its nonconformists and prophets, its mad persons, those who are the natural catalysts for social transformation. This is why Mad Pride is such an auspicious development. The Mad Pride movement is changing this situation, opening up new possibilities by providing the mad with social support and alternative “maps” of madness. It seeks to free the mad from the chronicity of patienthood (caused by psychiatric drugs and indoctrination) so they can become creatively maladjusted. Perhaps some of them will thus realize their individual potential by becoming the prophets, social activists, and spiritual leaders who will help humanity to make the transition to a higher stage of consciousness and a new social order.
This development does not vitiate my criticism of the Mad Pride movement for abandoning a messianic vision. The question is not whether Mad Pride is having an impact but whether it is effective enough. The abdication of its original messianic-redemptive perspective is discouraging in light of the urgency of the crisis that confronts humanity, which has taken on even more ominous dimensions (e.g., the dire scientific expectations about global warming and other ecological crises that are developing) since Perry’s death. It is unfortunate—I repeat—that the writings of visionaries like Perry and Laing have been ignored by the leaders of Mad Pride.
Perry wrote that most schizophrenics believe they have been in communication with God and that they have been given a divine or messianic mission to fulfill—to change society. (We saw in the introduction, under What Is to Be Done? Adopting a High Messianic Perspective, that many of the persons who wrote on the Icarus forum expressed this same belief.) This is the same belief that possessed Jesus, Moses, and the prophets from biblical times to the present. It is remarkable that Anton Boisen, born at the turn of the twentieth century—a religious pioneer, chaplain, and original thinker who had recovered (an especially rare, or undiscussed, feat in those days) from a mental breakdown in his youth—antedated Perry by decades, yet his observations are almost identical. On the basis of years as a chaplain in mental hospitals Boisen observed that the idea that one is going to play an important role in resolving a “world catastrophe” arises spontaneously in different persons—living in completely different historical eras—who are going through profound inner struggles.12This sense of a social mission, Boisen emphasized—this was in the mid-1930s—is characteristic both of psychotics in “ hospitals” and of men of “outstanding religious genius.”13 Boisen’s and Perry’s observations (and those of others today, including my own) lead to the same conclusion, which they both stop just short of drawing: Many mad persons are prophets in the making. There are not many potential prophets in our society—not many persons who believe they have a messianic mission to fulfill. In a time of looming world catastrophe, our society desperately needs such people; we cannot afford to let psychiatry squelch them.
Messianic Mission or Grandiose Delusions?
Psychiatrists are certain that the mad person’s claim to have a mission is a symptom of their illness. Anton Boisen pointed out that the founder of the Quakers, George Fox, would have been locked up immediately had he ever been examined by a psychiatrist14—a fact also noted by William James. After his religious conversion Fox repeatedly proclaimed to all who would listen that “the day of the Lord [the messianic era] was coming upon all flesh.”15 By modern psychiatric standards Fox was a schizophrenic, yet Fox had a brilliant mind, and the Quaker movement he founded became an important and valuable force for spiritual and social progress.
How many potential George Foxes are there among the mad today—how many prophets? It must be noted that by the standards of modern psychiatry the great Biblical prophets were all schizophrenics or bipolars. In fact, in the early twentieth century it became popular for psychiatrists to write books on Jesus’s psychological condition: the majority opinion among these writers was that he was a paranoid schizophrenic. Psychiatrist Charles Binet-Sangle wrote in 1911 in his book The Madness of Jesus, “The nature of the hallucinations of Jesus, as they are described in the orthodox Gospels, permits us to conclude that the founder of the Christian religion was afflicted with religious paranoia.”16
St. Paul and George Fox might not have become great spiritual leaders had there been psychiatrists around in their day: they would have been locked up, drugged into a stupor, and told it was scientifically determined that they were chronically mentally ill. Had Jesus “returned” in the 1950s in America he might have been lobotomized instead of crucified. If he returned today in the twenty-first century he would be put on a cocktail of psychotropic drugs and if he resisted it would be inferred that he had no “insight” into his “illness” and he would be forcibly injected with Haldol.
The greatest Christian prophet of the twentieth century, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., was also a martyr (his son and others believe he was assassinated by the FBI under orders of J. Edgar Hoover). As stated, King was optimistic that “through . . . creative maladjustment, we may be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.” As he said in 1961, “So let us be maladjusted, as maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, ‘Let justice run down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. . . .’ Let us be maladjusted as Jesus of Nazareth, who could look into the eyes of the men and women of his generation and cry out, ‘Love your enemies.’”17
The question I will raise here again is, Is it not possible that in the light of all the facts discussed above that mad persons—if liberated from the thralldom of the psychiatric “mind police” (Laing)—could play a decisive role in solving the Earth-threatening crisis, the world catastrophe, of the modern age? Could some of them among us not be the prophets, the myth makers, and the “poetic mouthpieces” of the collective psyche whom Perry believed we are awaiting? If this is true, it means that the many mad people who think they have a messianic mission are correct. They do have a mission; this is not a “grandiose” delusion.