The Value of Madness
“What is a genuine lunatic? It is a person who prefers to go mad, in the social sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain higher idea of human honor.” - Antonin Artaud
These days it seems everyone has good reasons to go “crazy”. If you’re not at least a little crazy these days, then you must be nuts. “Normal” is just a consensus trance. We don’t need a new normal – we need to awaken from our trances. Let’s learn from some great explorers.
Charles Tart author of Waking Up among other books, is one of the first to indeed propose that the craziness that passes for normal has been and is a consensus trance.
The word “crazy” comes from Old Norse, the root word “krasa” meaning to “shatter or crush”. Our old frame of reference these days is being shattered. Some of the best dreams of humanity are in danger of being crushed – by reactionary thinking and feeling – unequal treatment of women, people of color, LGBTQ people, abuse of people not of a dominant religion; denials of climate change, increasing division and distance between the rich and everyone else – particularly illustrated by the rising stock market while 1,000’s of people are dying – over 60,000 new cases of Covid 19 in the U.S. yesterday! So it makes sense that anyone could “go crazy” now.
And, there are useful kinds of crazy. Where old ways of thinking and feeling are shattered, they may leave a gap or, nature abhorring a vacuum, fill us in with something more beautiful and worthwhile. I almost wrote worthwild – since, as Thoreau said, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.”
Years ago, I heard the writer, Studs Terkel, interview the radical Scottish psychiatrist, R.D. Laing, the author of The Politics of Experience and The Divided Self. I taped the conversation – from 1968 – but lost the tape - then realized just last month it might be on-line and sure enough there is a fascinating web resource with many of Studs Terkel’s interviews. Here are the links to-Part-1 and Part 2 of Studs Terkel’s interview with R .D. Laing.
One of Laing’s themes was that madness is often a “sane” response to a crazy world and/or family. He advocated letting the so-called “crazy” person go through their madness – to accompany them, not to stop their madness through incarceration, drugs or shock therapy. He particularly referred a book which I immediately got and started to read, “Operators and Things: The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic” by Barbara O’Brien.
Laing notes that our mode of living has changed less in the previous 5,000 years as much as the mode of living in the last 50 years. “We may have become very disarticulated from the biological and spiritual underpinnings of our existence.”
Milton Erickson, the greatest hypnotherapist of the 20th century, showed a unique ability to listen and accompany his patients’ unusual states of being. The book My Voice Will Go with You is a very accessible introduction to his Zen-like ability to connect with people. This story, “Word Salad,” is an enlightening illustration of his insight, devotion, and patience in working with a supposedly crazy person.
It is up to each of us and our communities to awaken from the consensus trance. It is up to each of us to contemplate how we can re-articulate with the biological and spiritual underpinnings of our existence. However, painful it can sometimes be to change, we owe it to ourselves and future generations to re-attain the wildness that more truly gives our world its full meaning and people their true freedom.
