When my youngest daughter was three, we visited friends who were older than us, childless and without the usual cohort of toys available in other people’s house. To while away the time my daughter took to tipping over a jar of buttons my friend kept on her sewing table. Then she sorted with vigour, first in colour lots, the greens, blues and whites, then in order of size, finally she tackled shapes though most buttons were round.
My daughter spent hours at this task which gave her all the pleasure of a game, a form of playfulness where she was able to create a sense or order out of this disorder.
I think of her now at play when I consider our human impulse towards classification and order. A strange leap to another passion of mine, one I think can be dangerous, including the therapeutic nihilism that comes out of labelling people who do not fit the acceptable norms of behaviour into categories such as borderline personality disorder, the so-called personality disorders of the DSM-5, which to my mind can be used as an attack on a person’s credibility.
When we claw back the features marking a person as borderline, a person deemed to fit somewhere between the medical categories of neurosis and psychosis, Freud’s classical nosology of the basic human condition, I’m into one of those misleading and artificial binaries that entered the psychological world.
When I began my training as a psychoanalytic therapist my teachers assured me, almost everyone is neurotic. The basic human condition, no matter how well raised, how well analysed, no matter how well we manage to deal with our troubled souls and weird ways of being, our bad habits, most of us are at heart neurotic. Or so the early Freudians argued
But for some of us, some whose minds get unhinged, typically through extreme levels of trauma we copped the glorious label of psychotic. In simple words we were mad.
There’s the mad and the sane.
In my thirty fifth year I spent a year visiting Heatherton psychiatric hospital in Cheltenham one day a week for the purpose of understanding more about psychosis. I went as part of my training to become a psychoanalyst. In those days the prevailing belief was that psychosis was untreatable by conventional therapeutic means, with few exceptions. The preferred treatment for such souls was medication.
Then in line with the gradual intensification of the medicalisation of states of mind as erupted in the early 1900s when another binary erupted between these men in the helping professions, beginning with Freud who wanted to turn states of mind into aspects of the body, propelled by his drive theory.
For Freud we are all motivated by basic physiological drives for sex and food, these drives fuel our behaviour, whereas others preferred to adopt a morel chemical approach to our minds, our brains.
The mind body binary erupted into the psyche soma division that fed into arguments of therapy as a science in need of medical techniques. Think of lobotomies – taking out part of a person’s brain to quell their unruly emotions – versus, the mind as more complex and multi layered.
Antonio Damasio writes about awareness, and the folks I studied in my PhD exploring the nature of the autobiographical impulse we learn from earliest days.
Everywhere I look I find the binaries, beginning with the genders, the impulse to categorise as male or female, fat and thin, tall or short, ugly or beautiful, and all the in-between or mixtures fall to the way side like my all daughter trying to make some sense of the vast sea of buttons on the floor scattered around her small form.