One of the most notorious drunk drivers in the Ottawa area has been found not criminally responsible on his latest impaired driving charges because of a mental disorder that makes him believe female celebrities are controlling his actions.

The 33-year-old [Matt Brownlee] told psychiatrists that he knew the legal repercussions of his actions, but believed singer Shania Twain was helping him drive.

To my mind, the most salient question is: why focus on Shania Twain? The fact is, even people in Western cultures commonly believe some external entity is helping them in their accomplishments—ever heard the phrase “God is my co-pilot”? But the article simply states Brownlee’s belief, as though that were sufficient to demonstrate his lack of responsibility for his actions.

There is an attitude on the part of society that anyone with beliefs that strange must have something wrong with them. Strange here means unsanctioned by society—if large numbers of people believe something, then that belief is perfectly fine. I think this is at least partially due to uneven media coverage: a person’s unusual beliefs aren’t typically made public unless that person does something newsworthy, and most newsworthy actions are negative. Many, many people go through their daily lives guided by entities they believe to be external, but it never becomes an issue for the media.

If you believe unusual things, think about how you can challenge society’s prejudices. Do you think it is worth it to be more open about your beliefs in order to make society aware that responsible individuals hold them? It is a common opinion these days that one’s beliefs ought to be personal and private, but at one point sexual preference was also considered personal and private. This view had to be challenged in order for people to start working in any sort of organized fashion to change society’s views.

But at least, if you do believe unusual things and you get into trouble with the law, be conscientious enough not to damage the reputation of others who believe similar things by using your belief as an excuse.

Computer technology has been a real boon for people who either don’t identify with their body or wish to explore alternate identities. To quote Kurzweil’s explanation:

We all have personalities within us that are difficult if not impossible to express with our real-world bodies and in real-world environments.

With the current level of generally available technology this sort of activity is restricted to text and static images. Video and audio tend to be viscerally, immediately convincing in a way that text usually isn’t.

“We kind of got Six into a box somehow and we’ve been trying to figure out how to get out of it inside the limitations of an ensemble show,” she said. “When your character is in someone else’s head all you find yourself doing is reacting to what goes on in their head. You don’t really have an arc, or a story, of your own.”

…though it seems that the second season—especially last night’s surprising episode Downloaded—is starting to change that.

Egan wrote horror before he wrote science fiction, and it shows. But his stories are far from the usual fare. A typical horror story involving mind transfers or clones or the like might try to scare the reader with lurking clones of the main character, doing strange things out of sight. In The Extra and in many of his other stories, he reverses this convention. The premise is that the higher reasoning centers of a person’s brain are transplanted into another body, but the lower centers retain some consciousness; ordinarily we would see things from the perspective of the higher centers and the horror would come from the not-quite-consciousness of the lower centers in the old body—the horror of ambiguous personhood. But Egan writes from the perspective of the ignored, of the transient, of the minds that exist unacknowledged and powerless—in this case, the lower centers left over from the transplant, and this is far more unsettling than the other way could ever be…

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

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.)

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.

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.

Some of the better samples:

The control zone is the region that must be physically guarded to keep out intruders that might be attempting to eavesdrop. A well-shielded device will have a smaller control zone. I₁ remember being told in 1979 of a tape drive that had a control zone over two miles. Unfortunately, most control zone information is classified, and I₂ couldn’t get me₁ to be very specific about them… (NS, p. 17)

It does nothing other than its intended purpose (I₁ have analyzed the thing carefully and I₂ have complete faith in me₁)… (NS, p. 21)

If you really care about all this, we_1,3 recommend my₂ book Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols. (I₂ modestly abstain.) (NS, p. 427)

I_1,2 found all of this very amusing.

(They also quoted Alice in Wonderland at random intervals, which made it approximately the best textbook ever.)

I lived as if under constant inner pressure. At times this became so strong that I suspected there was some psychic disturbance in myself. (MDR, p. 173)

Jung decided that since he knew nothing about where this might lead, he would do whatever occurred to him: he “consciously submitted to the impulses of the unconscious” (MDR, p. 173). He built model towns by the lake; experienced strong fantasies and wrote them down.

In order to seize hold of the fantasies, I frequently imagined a steep descent… I had the feeling that I was in the land of the dead. The atmosphere was that of the other world. Near the steep slope of a rock I caught sight of two figures, an old man with a white beard and a beautiful young girl… The old man explained that he was Elijah, and that gave me a shock. (MDR, p. 181)

Jung also had a long-lasting inner figure called Philemon, who was a pagan with “an Egypto-Hellenic atmosphere with a Gnostic coloration” (MDR, p. 182). Here he writes about the insights given him by his experiences:

Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, “If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.” It was he who taught me psychic objectivity… I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me. (MDR, p. 183)

Jung’s experiences had a very large influence on the school of psychology he went on to found. I will have to write more about Jungian psychology at a later date.