And being me, I am contemplating. One unfortunate thing I noticed in interacting with him in person is that I retain huge unprocessed emotional energy regarding Father archetypes, which he unquestionably is. He is a sincere, decent human being, deeply knowledgeable, and has accomplished a great deal. He has never particularly sought nor avoided the limelight. He has simply, as far as I can tell, tried to do good, useful work.
I tend, though, not to respect any authority. In some cases this is good. I think much of Western culture in the sense of material progress has arisen because of our ability to go beyond those who came before. Rather than value their work for its own sake, we break it, rebuild it, and make it better. Again, this applies mainly to the material domain. Spiritually, of course, we are if anything moving backwards.
All this to say, of course, that I thought I was a bit clumsy, but there is nothing I can do about it at the moment.
But I would like to focus a moment on his work, which remains relatively unknown to many, particularly in Western Europe and the United States.
In a nutshell, what he did was vastly expand the domain of human consciousness, and thereby the domains of healthy, appropriate thoughts, emotions and behaviors. This is enormous.
Among other things, he offers a mindset and therapeutic understanding which could easily bring thousands–perhaps more–of people currently classified as psychotic within the realm of the well adapted, without drugs. Such an inclusion would both require and ENABLE a vast expansion of our collective understanding of what it means to be human.
When we think Depth Psychology, for most this is either Freud or Jung. Freud is what academic psychiatrists study, and Jung tends to be popular among people who read Joseph Campbell, or who can’t bring themselves to accept Freud’s materialism, or following psychodynamic reductionism.
Freud initiated the idea that early childhood experience is vastly important. He stumbled, as I have said, early on on the idea of hysteria being the result of traumatic early sexual experiences, and he developed a method (no doubt drawing on earlier or contemporaneous work) called abreaction of eliciting deep feelings–of fear, of being trapped, of being angry, of being sexual, etc.–allowing them full expression, and then letting them subside. This method worked.
Jung proposed the idea of the Collective Unconscious. What he found is that certain deep themes seem to be a shared property of humanity as a whole. But Jung seems never to have pursued abreaction at all. Here is an entry whose very brevity indicates the relative unimportance of this in my view critical discovery within the history of Depth Psychology: Abreaction.
Here is a comment on Jung’s use of abreaction:
“though traumata of clearly aetiological significance were occasionally
present, the majority of them appeared very improbable. Many traumata
were so unimportant, even so normal, that they could be regarded at most
as a pretext for the neurosis. But what especially aroused my criticism
was the fact that not a few traumata were simply inventions of fantasy
and had never happened at all”.
Asked about Rank’s theory on birth trauma, Jung replied, as I understand it: We are all born. That was that.
But Grof had the unique privilege of being a psychiatrist in clinical practice allowed by law to give doses of pharmaceutical grade LSD to patients in controlled clinical settings, over a period of many years.
And what he found was that the birth trauma very much does not only remain with people, it remains at a very deep level, and in many cases, unprocessed, it colors the entire complexion of a life. This is enormous.
All of the traumas Jung ascribed to fantasy could quite easily be seen, within this paradigm, as symbolic manifestations of traumas which could not otherwise expressed.
And again, if a newborn goes its first week without nursing, we consider this a traumatic event in modern practice. We know that little babies who do not get enough affection and love react with withdrawal and other symptoms which persist into adulthood. There is little serious question about this, even within the mainstream.
What then is the magic event which turns a baby from a Tabula Rasa the moment before its umbilical cord is cut, into a sensitive and delicate creature the moment afterwards? The idea is preposterous.
The reason I looked (cursorily, I must admit, for the moment, although the basics seem clear enough) into abreaction at all was that I asked Stan a question that I think he had not recently considered the answer to. I asked him: do you think the reason that psychiatrists reject the idea of perinatal trauma is that they have no effective tools with which to deal with it?
I thought this was a good question. It seems obvious enough to me that ALL MD’s, psychiatrists included, tend to relish the power relationship implied in having unique, presumably socially useful knowledge. What happens when they don’t have an answer, even in theory? I once asked a martial arts teacher if the name of technique X he had shown us wasn’t actually Y. I did not realize it at the time, but I put both him and the other students into a sort of existential crisis whose depth I only grasped when they were able to collectively sigh relief at him finding that technique in fact was best called X within the school we were then studying. This was instructive to me, in itself.
Practically, psychiatry medicates and “pathologizes” whatever it does not understand. This is not skill: it is high grade and expensive imbecility.
The problem is exacerbated once one grasps the HUGE importance of the psychoanalysis all psychiatrists have to undergo, which in the magical space within which these people operate is supposed to work to resolve them of all psychological conflicts which might interfere with their intent of becoming superior human beings.
Granting that perinatal trauma not only exists, but is of HUGE, enormous clinical importance, would cause a rift in the complacent world views of these people. It would, within their world view, imply that they themselves are incompletely analyzed, that they have not sufficiently prepared themselves for their sacred role as divine mediators between the realms: sanity and insanity. Hell, some of them may even be nuts themselves, despite being declared “clean”, and particularly since this is in fact the case, the objective truth, in my view, this notion, this very path of thought, is insufferable.
And add to this of course the mechanistic bias of almost all contemporary “science” (Scienceishness? Scientocity”) and you eradicate the realm of the Transpersonal/Collective Unconscious as well.
I have to run, but this is how the lunatics got in control of the asylums. More to say later.