The Sound of Silence

"Our present state of cultural disintegration is not maintained and prolonged by intellectuals as such, but by the fact that we haven't any. The majority of those who pose as 'intellectuals' today are frightened zombies, posturing in a vacuum of their own making.... The key to their souls is their longing for the effortless, irresponsible, automatic consciousness of an animal. They dread the necessity, the risk, and the responsibility of rational cognition."
- Ayn Rand

"… the monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind."
- Einstein

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Why has academia become so hostile to psychoanalytical self-exploration?

Excerpt from Symposium:

The Closing of the American Psyche

By: Jamie Glazov FrontPageMagazine.com

Monday, September 01, 2008

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Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, a retired physician (prison doctor and psychiatrist), a contributing editor to City Journal and the author of Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses.

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Dalrymple... What I am about to say cannot be proved in the scientific sense, but is merely the result of observation and intuition.

I think that the thinning of the way in which we account for the psyche (not just in America but elsewhere) is paralleled by the thinning of the psyche itself. First let me say something about the thinning of the psyche, or the character, or the personality.

We seem to live in highly individualistic societies, but societies without much individuality. (Individualism and individuality are very different.) No doubt there are many reasons for this. One of the things that strikes me about people nowadays is how little they like to be alone, at least alone without any stimulation from electronic apparatus. We cannot be in a bar, an airport, a store, a railway station, and in some cases a bus or train without having stimuli poured into us as if we were too fragile for our own thoughts and had to be entertained 100 per cent of the time. A high proportion of homes have televisions or computers constantly illuminated, often several at once. Young people now cannot bear silence; it makes them nervous, confronting them with their own thoughts. But a capacity to bear silence, and even a desire for it, are necessary for concentration, contemplation, reflection and probably for creativity.

Social pressures to conform to demotic tastes are, paradoxically in an age of mass bohemianisation, very strong, much stronger than, say, 50 years ago, which is thought to have been an age of conformity. In the name of diversity and the freedom of the individual, uniformity develops. That is why the spread of tattooing is an interesting phenomenon. People try to establish themselves as individuals by having a tattoo of a butterfly on, say, their left buttock. The cult of celebrity is important here. Most celebrities are pretty mediocre, perhaps with one talent. What is important is the combination of glamour and banality. In the cult of celebrity, ordinary people worship themselves. Unfortunately, the glamorous nature of life conferred by celebrity renders ordinary but perfectly honorable and indeed essential occupations a wound to the ego.

As for psychiatry, I think there are two aspects of it that have done damage. The first is psychotherapy in the debased version that has entered popular culture. This has resulted in psychobabble, which consists largely of talking about oneself without revealing anything of oneself, and as a substitute for genuine self-examination. If psychobabble is indulged in for too long, it actually empties the mind and character of real content.

The second aspect is DSMIII and DSMIV. In trying to become more scientific by operationalising its definitions, psychiatry has become terribly thin. It is as if psychiatry had automata for patients. The definition of depression in the DSM, for example, empties life of all meaning and consists simply of a checklist. The DSMs are to psychiatry what behaviourism was to psychology. I do not think it is necessary to be a Freudian to criticise this dehumanising trend. If you read the 19th Century French psychiatrists, say, and then a current textbook, you will see that for all our technical sophistication, a great deal of real understanding has been lost.