![]() Their strange symptoms were seen as supernatural. (See my prior post.) Or witches, and burned at the stake, tortured or drowned to death. Several centuries ago, such suddenly stricken individuals would have been deemed victims of demonic possession, and treated with exorcism. And a crucial wake up call to contemporary psychology and psychiatry not to forget or stray too far from its Freudian roots in the "unconscious." Which is, sadly, exactly what has happened in recent decades. This is what we may be seeing in upstate New York and elsewhere. It potentially signals, both individually and systemically, what Nietzsche referred to as the "return of the repressed." Or what Rollo May (1969) described as "daimonic possession." In societies (like ours today) that tend to deny the daimonic, its personal and systemic repression and devaluation can cause seemingly random outbreaks of bizarre symptoms and behaviors (e.g., violence, rage, swearing, obscene gesturing) in psychologically vulnerable, unstable and hypersuggestible individuals. It is, quite possibly, sociologically speaking, a stunning reassertion of the reality of the unconscious. A classic case of "mass hysteria." A small psychic epidemic. Jung might call an archetypal eruption of the collective unconscious or cultural shadow. But from a psychological perspective, we could be witnessing what C.G. So what is going on here? That still depends on what investigators and physicians find. and the recent depiction of Jung's "hysterical" patient Sabina Spielrein in the new movie A Dangerous Method.) And to what took place long before that in the Middle Ages, when virginal nuns suddenly started spewing foul obscenities and thousands of people literally danced themselves maniacally to death or exhaustion in the streets. (See, for example, Freud's discussion of the case of Ana O. What it is ain't exactly clear." The baffling phenomenon sounds eerily akin to what was reportedly experienced by Sigmund Freud's patients in Victorian Vienna. As the old Buffalo Springfield song says: "There's something happening here. Fairly recently, something similar occurred in Northern California. It is happening in little Le Roy, in upstate New York, among a handful of teenage high school students. Something that, in this rabidly anti- Freudian, anti-Jungian, anti-psychodynamic, cognitively, behaviorally and pharmacologically indoctrinated climate of contemporary psychology and psychiatry, shouldn't be happening. ![]() ![]() In a tiny, unknown New York town, something remarkable is happening.
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