From a beautiful post (emphasis mine):
Furthermore, in the rush to destigmatize individuals who have been diagnosed with mental illness (i.e. “It’s not your fault, or anybody else’s!”), are we not paying the price of hopelessness? In other words, psychiatry is saying “there is something fundamentally wrong about you and the way you have been wired over which you have no control. Your problems are not sane adaptations to insane circumstances, but rather these symptoms indicate that your brain is broken.” Psychiatry seems to believe that it is better to tell “the mentally ill” that all they can hope for is the ability to manage their mental illness because there is no recovery (even when clinical data do not support such unwarranted pessimism).
This is precisely what I found so comforting in psychoanalysis. Finally, I was told that what I was experiencing was a completely sane way of adapting to insane circumstances and not some uncontrollable organic damage. Just the idea that it is OK to react to abuse trying to protect yourself from is was an enormous relief. There is nothing wrong with people who react against abusive situations.
How is wanting to kill yourself or cutting yourself when you live in a good situation a sane response?
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Suicidal tendencies are not a result of good situations. they are a result of profound childhood traumas.
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Of course, these are all issues that I thought of as central themes to my thesis. To summarize what I found: I kept coming across a tone or an assertion in the critical analysis of my author, that went, “He should not have done that. He was just being childish.” Again and again I came across this tone, where the critic, having lived an entirely different sort of life, would give himself an omniscient position in order to morally criticize the writer.
In fact, I thought the author’s instincts were very good in relation to himself. But by what criteria? It’s hard to get across the point that his refusal of psychiatric drugs was in his own favor.
Anyway, his anger was very lucid. Let me quote:
“When I was still a student I had discovered late that however much I tried to be ‘objective’ in my criticism of such eyesores as Kipling, Faulkner, Melville, Conrad, Shakespeare (in TITUS ANDRONICUS, OTHELLO, THE TEMPEST)–apart from some of the more obvious ‘anthropological’ novels such as Defoe’s CRUSOE– there was always in the back of my mind a smouldering discontent which one day would erupt. If this is cracking up, then Jesus! let the whole world erupt. The thing that happened to the Jews has never been unleashed against animals. And the things which bloody whites–among them Jews– are doing to my family, to my countrymen, to black people everywhere, have never been done to animals. What is done to the animals is nothing compared to the grisly history of man’s appetite for inflicting misery on other men. And the colourful nature of that grisly appetite is surely horrifying enough for every man and woman to seriously confront the question of just how much are human beings humane? And those victims who survive–what becomes of them? They get psychoanalysed by doctors who say, Well the Nazis did you a favour by solving your Oedipus complex for you and solving your latent capacity for infanticide and kleptomania so that now you are a man without complexes.
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“They get psychoanalysed by doctors who say, .”
– Doctors don’t psychoanalyze. Doctors practice psychiatry and pump people full of anti-pscyhotics.
“Well the Nazis did you a favour by solving your Oedipus complex for you and solving your latent capacity for infanticide and kleptomania so that now you are a man without complexes”
– I wish people read something before making such ignorant assertions. No analyst would ever confuse the personal with the historical. The Nazis and the Oedipus complex simply cannot appear in the same sentence.
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But that is precisely what does happen — the psychologists do in fact confuse the personal with the historical. The critics do it and it has always been done to me.
But Marechera is being a bit facetious here, I think, and also a bit figurative rather than literal. I suspect he is referring to the way the colonials maintain that they have done the black people some good by colonizing them. So “Nazis” is probably shorthand for colonizer.
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