Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe
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Название: Beyond Fear
Автор: Dorothy Rowe
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Общая психология
isbn: 9780007369140
isbn:
Those who do not conform in terms of race, nationality or religion are easily dealt with. They become strangers, enemies, and are easily persecuted.3 Such persecution can be carried out in many different ways, but always the persecutors try to justify their cruelty. It is not unknown for psychiatry to supply such justifications. During the Second World War German troops were stationed in Norway, and a number of these soldiers had liaisons with Norwegian women. Children from these liaisons were classed by Hitler as Aryans, the highest possible classification in the Third Reich. As such they had to be taken from their Norwegian mothers and placed in special homes reserved for such privileged children. At the end of the war the Norwegians transferred their hatred of the Germans to these children. They were put in orphanages and asylums where they were sexually and physically abused and not educated. As justification for this a leading Norwegian psychiatrist explained that these children were mentally subnormal and insane because their mothers must have been insane to have consorted with German men. Only recently have a few of these children, now quite elderly, been able to speak publicly about their cruel treatment.4
Those who do not conform to the laws and customs of society, but who cannot be expelled as strangers and enemies, are deemed to be bad or mad, if not both, but in any event they are punished because they are feared. For their hundredth issue the journal Open-mind ran a survey to find the heroes and villains of mental health. (A most distinguished group, Freud, R. D. Laing, Peter Breggin and myself, appeared in the survey as both heroes and villains, thus supporting my contention that different people see things differently.) The nominations for the villains category were submitted by a reader, Terry Simpson. His first nomination was ‘fear’. He explained: ‘Fear of “madness” is second only to fear of death in our society. Distressed people have been abused, isolated, assaulted and killed in a systematic way since the term “mad” was invented.’5
Our fear of madness stems from our fear of annihilation as a person. If we do not understand our own fear, then when we find ourselves falling apart, crumbling, shattering, disappearing, we fear that we are going mad, and indeed our reaction to the threat of annihilation as a person is what society calls madness. Madness is our fear of annihilation and our defences against that fear. If we understand what our fear is - that is, that events have shown us that there is a serious discrepancy between what we thought our life was and what it actually is - we can, despite our sadness and distress, act sensibly and effectively. If we do not understand what the fear of annihilation is, we become frightened of it. We then deny this fear in ourselves and we reject those whose behaviour may remind us of the fear we want to deny. This is why people suffering mental distress are rejected.
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