Relative State

The Hearing Voices Movement

The Hearing Voices Network is a UK-based organization devoted to raising awareness of the experience of hearing voices and supporting those who hear them. They do not support a solely medical approach to the subject; rather, there is an increased focus on the personal significance of the voices to those who hear them. An overview of their guiding philosophy is provided in the Web article Redefining Hearing Voices:

Hearing voices in itself is not a symptom of an illness, but is apparent in 2–3% of the population. One in three becomes a psychiatric patient—but two in three can cope well and are in no need of psychiatric care and no diagnosis can be given because 2/3 are quite healthy and well functioning.

…but I have to wonder how much their views are affected by sampling bias (being more likely to hear about people having problems), because they go on to say the following:

They are messengers and they have a message. They are related to sincere problems that occurred in the person’s life and they tell us about those problems. Therefore it is not wise to kill the messenger.

In any case, they bring up a very good point—that what a person is told regarding the meaning of their experiences has a large effect on how well they deal with them:

In Sandra Escher’s research with children hearing voices she followed 82 children over a period of four years. In that period 64% of the children’s voices disappeared congruently with learning to cope with emotions and becoming less stressed. In children with whom the voices were psychiatrised and made a part of an illness and not given proper attention, voices did not vanish, but became worse; the development of those children was delayed.

This is something we often forget: the power that our essentially arbitrary culture and beliefs have over us, and our own power to change them.

Other Hearing Voices Movement Links:

• Hearing Voices FAQ
• Listening cure (Newspaper article)
• Hearing Voices Movement on Wikipedia

77 comments January 23rd, 2006

Six, Spielrein, and Jung’s Anima

Last week, I wrote about the characters of Baltar and Six in the sci-fi TV series Battlestar Galactica. Such a relationship is not unprecedented.

From Carl Jung’s autobiography:

When I was writing down these fantasies, I once asked myself, “What am I really doing? Certainly this has nothing to do with science. But then what is it?” Whereupon a voice within me said, “It is art.” I was astonished… I knew for a certainty that the voice had come from a woman. I recognized it as the voice of a patient, a talented psychopath who had a strong transference to me. She had become a living figure within my mind. (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 185)

Later I came to see that this inner feminine figure plays a typical, or archetypical, role within the unconscious of a man, and I called her the “anima”. (MDR, p. 186)

What Jung does not mention in his autobiography is that he had what he considered a disastrous affair with the patient in question, Sabina Spielrein. Perhaps this explains why, for a very long time, Jung was consistently negative about the anima.

What the anima said seemed to me full of a deep cunning… The anima might then have easily seduced me into believing that I was a misunderstood artist, and that my so-called artistic nature gave me the right to neglect reality. If I had followed her voice, she would in all probability have said to me one day, “Do you imagine the nonsense you’re engaged in is really art? Not a bit.” Thus the insinuations of the anima, the mouthpiece of the unconscious, can utterly destroy a man. In the final analysis the decisive factor is always consciousness, which can understand the manifestations of the unconscious and take up a position toward them. (MDR, p. 187)

I find Jung’s attitude in this passage almost shocking. Such a lack of basic trust and respect between the persons of the psyche! Here are the roots of James Hillman’s reaction against Jung’s ‘psychic monotheism’—the decisive factor is always consciousness, but Jung keeps consciousness identified only with himself. Instead of encouraging the growth of her consciousness, she becomes only an instrument of his growth, who vanishes once she is no longer needed.

(There is another curious parallel between Spielrein and the character of Six—both were obsessed with the idea of the blending or hybridization of races. It was Spielrein’s fantasy that “Jung was descended from the gods, that their child, Siegfried, would heroically blend Jewish and Aryan qualities”. Make of this what you will.)

2 comments January 16th, 2006

Battlestar Galactica: Baltar and Six

A couple of days ago, I watched the entire first season of Battlestar Galactica.

OK. Humanity made the machines, called Cylons. The Cylons rebelled, left, and attacked again. Humanity’s survivors are on the run in space. But you know this, or can find it out easily. That’s not what I want to talk about.

The series has a character called Gaius Baltar, who suddenly finds himself sharing his head with his former lover, a Cylon mimicking human form—Number Six.

Six sometimes appears as a hallucination to Baltar, in which case he must talk to her out loud, where others can hear. At other times she appears in the house in Baltar’s head (which is modeled on his old house, which was destroyed during the Cylon attack). Six can control Baltar’s body by appearing as a hallucination and literally twisting his arm, but to speak to others she must persuade or trick him to say what she wants. (Some of these scenes are extremely amusing.)

The writers are deliberatly ambiguous when it comes to the subject of Six’s nature. Is she some sort of manifestation of Baltar’s guilt at unintentionally betraying humanity? A Cylon plot to make Baltar secretly their agent? Is Baltar himself a human-mimicking Cylon and unaware of it? The writers seem to hint at many different possibilities without actually endorsing any.

I personally found some of Baltar’s and Six’s interactions to hit rather close to home at times. They have this very emotionally charged dynamic that is actually quite familiar.

2 comments January 9th, 2006

Site Spotlight: The World Dream Bank

Chris Wayan, of The World Dream Bank, has an interesting viewpoint on Jung.

I see more and more that just because I have been “swallowed by my anima” in Jung’s terms—surrendered to my dreams, treated “unconscious” forces and dream-spirits as my friends and equals, not as things—does not make me a fool. As I note my disagreements I see them not as symptoms of my immaturity in Jung’s view, but as defining my character and culture, deeply different from Jung’s—different from anyone likely to end up as a working therapist or an academic, for one thing!

There are other relevant parts scattered around the site—Wayan has a spirit wife, and a category on his site devoted to multiple personality dreams.

5 comments January 3rd, 2006