Psychology as Mystical Symbolism

by Jon Rappoport
March 1, 2017

Every time I re-publish this piece, I find another angle to emphasize.

This time, it’s reductionism, the strategy of making the truth, whatever it is, into something overly simple and, therefore, deceptive and false.

Approaching the subject of human suffering and anguish, from an honest viewpoint, gives you all sorts of experience to explore: people are abused, they are minimized, they have severe nutritional deficits, they live in poverty, they are surrounded by the threat of violence, they receive poor and confusing educations, they are exposed to toxic chemicals and drugs, they develop weak immune systems, they don’t know how to cope with peer pressure to conform, they never learn what freedom means, and so forth and so on.

And then…all this is reformulated and boiled down to a series of so-called mental disorders with names and labels. Symbols. Reductionism.

Such symbols can snare many people and drag them into slave-camps of the mind.

If you want people to become far more ignorant than they already are, you need look no further than the field of psychiatry, which is rife with symbols, which are the names of so-called mental disorders. There are about 300 in the official psychiatric bible. They appear to designate actual mental states, but upon close inspection, they’re empty of scientific meaning.

Pretending to represent erudite research, they impart gibberish.

An acceptance of these mental-disorder symbols automatically short-circuits any investigation of the mind’s true potential or power.

False map, no authentic territory, no treasure.

As a psychiatrist who left his profession in disgust once wrote me, “I was playing a shell game with my patients. I could label a person with one disorder, prescribe a drug, eventually diagnose a new disorder, combine drugs, adjust the dosages, and go on this way for many appointments. But all the labels were shams…”

They’re symbols. They appear to stand for something solid, but they don’t.

As I’ve shown in several articles, all so-called mental disorders are based on no definitive diagnostic tests. No saliva, no blood, no genes, no brain scans, for any of the 300 labels.

So what we have in psychiatry is a secular organized religion, a Tower of Babble outfitted with thousands of entirely fictional symbols. Which the priests know how to use. They have that training.

People in the general population are asking for shorthand explanations, and the professional symbol-talkers fulfill that need. That’s the exchange. That’s the transaction. The psychiatrist announces a symbol, which is the label for a disorder, the patient asks what it means, and the doctor explains.

Without the symbol, however, nothing happens. Nothing is consummated.

Give a human a symbol and he’s all ears. He wants to know. He must know. A symbol functions like a scent to a dog. He has to track it down.

If psychiatrists could make it work, they’d wear purple robes embroidered with esoteric shapes and signs and a tall hat topped by a star. They’d gaze into a pond and stir the water with a stick and produce Insight. They’d channel an entity from Ursa Minor in a dark room with organ music.

Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations, used his skills to promote his uncle’s work. Surely, Bernays saw, in Freud, a brilliant salesman, who had invented a whole new library of symbols that could be dumped on the masses, and then translated for public consumption.

A new church of the mind would be born.

The whole thrust of psychology/psychiatry, during its history, has been “resolution of the negative.”

I fully realize that psychology covers a wide territory, and there are exceptions to the rule. But all in all, the modern field of therapy is focused on “solving issues.”

Remedying problems whose roots are thought to be in the past.

Psychological “research” is fashioned to resemble the conventional practice of medicine, in which “negative elements are removed.”

Psychology’s public relations fronts and political connections have enabled it to gain an astonishing position in society. And this helps make people believe its central premise is true.

But is it? People, particularly patients, are malleable. Tell them that negative factors, traumas or conflicts out of the past are the reason they’re unhappy in the present, and they may well sign on the dotted line.

“Well, that makes sense. For instance, my father and I…and then there was my grandmother…she lived with us for a while…she was a martinet…always hounding me…”

Psychology maintains that “resolving” these past relationships will bring a greater sense of peace and normalcy to life.

But suppose there is a much larger unexplored territory in consciousness where the concerns are quite different, and far more profound?

I’m talking about everything that involves living a truly creative life. Imagination, invention, vision, and vast untapped energy.

Most of what’s called psychology doesn’t tread in these deep waters.

And that is evidence of massive ignorance.

It is futile to try to convince a conventional psychologist that the creative life should be his central focus.

If it were, it wouldn’t be psychology.

The creative life exceeds the norms of society. A life lived through and by imagination breaks through the ceiling of the universal fixation on problems.

James Hillman, psychologist and director of studies at the Jung Institute in Zurich, co-authored the book, “We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Therapy & the World’s Getting Worse.” Here are two Hillman quotes about psychology:

“Where a case history presents a sequence of facts leading to diagnosis, soul history shows rather a concentric helter-skelter pointing always beyond itself … We cannot get a soul history through a case history.”

“Our lives are determined less by our childhood than by the traumatic way we have learned to remember our childhoods.”

People learn how to “think about life” through the lens of psychology.

As a result, a putrid kind of brain-addled pop pseudoscience floats like a foam over the crest of society.

And when, in its own defense, advocates claim psychology is a science, they may as well be saying that an anthropologist, sitting in the jungle making notes on ants, is discovering vital facts about humans. The ants, if they knew what was happening, would, I’m sure, treat the whole enterprise as a fantastic joke. Just as we should, when shiny new psychology PhDs emerge from universities to treat the mind.

If all of psychology, its fatuous notions, and our memory of them disappeared from the earth tomorrow, much of society would come face to face with an interesting void. And then real exploration would begin. Again.

And people would eventually gravitate to the Creative Force, which has always existed within themselves.

Without the need for priests spouting mystical symbols.

Here is a passage from my work-in-progress, The Magician Awakes:

“The false magician gives the appearance of constructing a network of interconnected symbols. He need not actually build it. He simply imparts the impression that is already built. On this basis, he draws people in, because they are fascinated by systems, particularly when only certain ‘masters’ understand them. The supplicant wants insight. Reaching for it, he becomes engaged in a labyrinth. He walks many paths, looking for self-wisdom, but it eludes him. Finally, after months, or years, or millennia, he realizes he has been grasping at symbols of a strange map, a map that describes a fictional version of himself. Then he wakes up to the real beginning of his journey.”