Back to the Sixties

Here's Oliver James, banging the drum for more psychotherapy:

Christmas No 1s are usually mawkish nonsense, but in 2003 it was the song Mad World. With the chilling line "The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had", in some respects it is up there with TS Eliot's Prufrock as a poetic account of bourgeois despair.

From Erich Fromm to RD Laing, authors have rightly asserted that the more well adapted you are to our crazy society, the crazier you will be. Yet the light of sanity still comes shining through. As a friend of mine recently pointed out, the really interesting question is: "Given what we know [of the personal and geopolitical lunacy of our leaders], how come the world is so good?"

I actually like Mad World, but really, the sub-Blakean lyrics don't bear too much scrutiny. Tears for Fears, who did the original version back in the early Eighties, were followers of Arthur Janov's primal therapy, made famous by John Lennon screaming about his mother on the Plastic Ono Band album. It was one of those semi-cultish therapies which tended to take over people's lives. All therapies tend to be semi-cultish of course, but this one more than most. As far as I remember - it's a long time since I read the book - your dreams were meant to alter as you screamed your way out of your neuroses, with the death of your old self. So the quoted lyric, far from being up there with TS Eliot's Prufrock as a poetic account of bourgeois despair is just Tears for Fears following the official line of their chosen cult/therapy and showing what good boys they were.

As for Erich Fromm and RD Laing, well, this is a guy who hasn't left the Sixties, the old One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest days, when those pure noble souls who weren't prepared to bow down to the Man were driven insane by the System, and the only honest response was to drop out, smoke dope, and dream about what it was going to be like after the Revolution.

Still, he's funny, is Oliver. Here's his reaction to Bush's re-election:

"I was too depressed to even speak this morning. I thought of my late mother, who read Mein Kampf when it came out in the 1930s and thought, 'Why doesn't anyone see where this is leading?'"

And here he is, celebrating Freud 150 years after his birth:

My father was psychoanalysed by Freud's daughter, Anna, at the house in Hampstead where Freud died. One day, approaching the house for a session, my dad felt an unaccountable wish to leap over its wall. When he reported this to Ms Freud she asked, 'And did you have an erection at that moment?' He did. How strange that she could have known this.

Now he comes up with this:

What we urgently require is £20bn devoted to a Campaign for Real Therapy.

£20bn, on therapy. Yep, a funny guy.

Comments

[James Hamilton]

I'll say this for Janov: at least he was clear on what was "therapy" and what politics. James is just one of a vast number of British psychotherapists/psychiatrists/psychologists whose principle attributes are the great care they take to make sure that their psychology never contradicts their politics and their iron certainty that the two will always coincide.

[Bob-B]

As a theoretical linguist I think what we urgently require is £20bn devoted to theoretical linguistics.