With My Hand on This Book, I Diagnose Thee

Everyone sees the world through the eyes of their own culture, which means that no-one sees the world. It is always our creation.

Robert Wolff describes how a group of Western anthropologists devised what they thought was the ultimate culture-free exercise for children: the kids were given paper and pencils and asked to draw “anything, anything at all.” The children in question were Indonesian, and they were completely nonplused by this instruction, and were unable to draw. This carte blanche freedom was absolutely foreign to them, and rather disturbing. Then Wolff changed the instruction and asked them to draw their homes, and they merrily drew, improvised and elaborated on the theme, and once started it was hard for their exuberance to stop. What they needed was a starting point, and Wolff crossed a language barrier of the mind by giving them one.  

My experience then is not just subjective to me, it is subjective to those around me too. I am only partly an individual, and like any other social object, I have been forged in the crucible of education, advertising agencies and politicians’ (i.e. my) lies. I can’t know all the things that have composed me, any more than a blind spot can know the eye that it has activated.

Some cultures are almost more blind spot than they are vision, for instance religion, which can only begin a conversation with do you believe this particular credo, do you eat this diet, will you despise such-and-such a thing or action. Religion is the leprosy of the spirit.

Can we be humble, and at the same time bear being who we are?

Psychotherapy was once an exploration of who we are and now it has become the industry of helping people cheer up and fit in. Can there be a correct diagnosis outside of Diagon Alley? When true magic has gone AWOL, we comfort ourselves with a Linnaeus-like classification system where, by the power of naming, we believe we have conquered. As Prufrock said,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

               And how should I presume?

And if I did spit out all those butt-ends, would anything be left of me? Could the unformulated selfness that was here before the world began presume existence in our ordinary atmospheres?

Psychological diagnosis could only work if a new word was thought up for each person’s situation. Like twigs thrown into the fire of life, we all bend and glow in our own unique way, turning under the heated air and revealing the story of all our years. If we have time, we could lean back and admire each other’s brief and glorious consumption by the living flame.