OnSuffering

ThefollowingisaconversationconductedbyartistKaiOiJayYungwithAnthonyT.Morgan,on thesubjectoftraumaandillnessinrelationtothebodyandmind.
Anthony T. Morgan lectures in the history and philosophy of psychology at Northumbria University andundertakes research in philosophy as applied to the field of psychiatry. This text accompanies Yungs th th exhibition Amongst Dark Trees, A Clearing, at Grundy Art Gallery from 19 Jan 9 March 2013.

Kai-Oi Jay Yung (KJY): Is it possible that physiological and psychological traumas and illness are symptoms related to our difficulties in finding a purpose for our existence? That the body itself becomes a site to enact and distract from not knowing why we are here or what we should do? Anthony T. M organ (ATM ): I think it is certainly unwise to look at behaviours termed mental illnesses as symptoms stripped from their context, whether cultural or interpersonal, and so on. It makes far more sense to me to see these behaviours, however apparently crazy or unsettling, as deeply meaningful and related to a desire to communicate. Whether or not these behaviours are related to finding a purpose in existence is a different matter. Certainly they can be, for example we find that many depressed people experience a profound sense of disconnection from the world around them - that the world shows up to them as somehow uncanny and not-to-be-taken-forgranted; the gestures of other humans, such as shaking hands, can be seen as strange, and so on. The point is that when one has not found purpose or meaning in the world, the tendency to feel increasingly detached from it is perhaps unavoidable. Perhaps these many different traumas and illnesses that we see played out in many different forms, from chronic fatigue to mania to anorexia and so on, stem less from a lack or loss of purpose in life as a profoundly felt sense of disconnection from other people. Even the person in the midst of a manic episode who may feel his world as imbued with far too much meaning or purpose may still feel deeply disconnected from those around him, at least at an intimate level. The role of the body in all this is fascinating, and I think we are only beginning to take seriously its place in trauma and mental illnesses. There is certainly a sense in which the split of mental and physical illnesses is a pragmatic rather than ontological one - some illnesses feel more mental and others more physical, but in general there is a huge crossover. I am no expert on hysteria, but it seems that the body comes into play more when certain emotions that are perceived to be unacceptable cannot find expression. So in Freud's times, women tended to develop bodily maladies as a means of trying to communicate their distress; the same may be true of anorexia and M.E. today. It seems to be the case that within any society there is a certain repertoire or menu of options available through which one may convey one's distress. While some seem to remain across time and cultures, there is considerable variation. I guess I see mental disorders as communicative gestures, and the body is one of the crucial sites by which this goal is enacted. That said, the term 'psychosomatic' is nowadays taken as an insult! KJY: We create and shape our surroundings through interacting with a semiotic system of signs and symbols around us, so it seems almost inevitable that if the individual does not relate or feels disconnected to his environment or relations with others, this can manifest through blockages of communication manifesting both physically and mentally. Would it be absurd to seek to understand two approaches to 'illness'? Those that experience

OnSuffering
anomalies on a very cellular level, e.g. pathogenic mutation of the organism itself, and those that are a result of emotional and physical 'external' trauma, as a result of which people communicate their distress through behaviours such as anorexia and disorders such as M.E? What I find insulting is the stigma attached to the second strand of 'illness' and society's perception of depression and behaviours in contrast to what we uphold as 'normal, health, success, happiness'. It is society's avoidance of accepting the imperfect or failure that results in shame, guilt and the need to hide and repress in order to conform to perceived ways of being. I think at present there are many shifts that signify a good clearance to open up space for fault and more acceptance of being human. For example, the crisis within establishments as the BBC, or Superstorm Sandy, compared to ongoing conflicts on civilians in many warring nations, we have it easy. In the same way it takes a major crisis to lead to a restructuring, can it take a major trauma or illness to bring awareness to an individual? ATM : The distinction you make between two approaches to illness largely mirrors the distinction made by the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz in his famous paper The Myth of Mental Illness. He distinguished between real illnesses that involve changes at a cellular level and those that are more metaphorical illnesses, such as mental illnesses. Whether or not this is a useful distinction remains an ongoing debate. There are of course many ways in which external events and traumas contribute to anomalies on a cellular level, but I guess that what you are getting at is the rather reductive tendency to understand responses to trauma at a cellular level. We have been there before around the turn of the th 20 century, and it seems that in the age of the brain there is a renewed enthusiasm for such explanations. Paradoxically, perhaps, the stigma attached to certain mental disorders, specifically schizophrenia, increased when it was understood more in reductive biological terms. That said, you are right that there remains this stigma surrounding mental disorders that seems to persist despite many awareness campaigns designed to counter this. I guess that whenever the mind is involved, people tend to have an idea that someone is free to behave differently and are thereby responsible for their behaviours. Of course to some extent this is true, but it is a very complex area and one that most people do not seem to be willing to think about hard enough, preferring instead to request that the depressed person snap out of it or the alcoholic show a bit of willpower, and so on. As for your interesting question of crisis leading to restructuring, I think there is much to suggest that this is the case. Arthur Miller said that possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people's suffering and so the problem is not to undo suffering or to wipe it off the face of the earth but to make it inform our lives, instead of trying to cure ourselves of it constantly and avoid it. It has been widely argued that our relationship to suffering has profoundly changed in the modern West. Deprived of religious narratives within which to ground the experience, suffering has lost any value, any ideas of new perspectives or insights to be gained from it. Suffering has become meaningless and its relief is regarded as meaningful and good. Human discontent has increasingly become less a matter for spiritual, moral, or philosophical consideration, than for biological, behavioural, political, or psychiatric understanding and intervention. Of course we have to be careful here not to find meaning in all forms of suffering there is nothing to be gained from the suffering of starving children, for example. But to go to the opposite extreme and deny meaning to any form of suffering is equally problematic. It has been argued that there is no such thing as suffering

OnSuffering
that befalls us out of nowhere, that is purely biological, contained within the individual, and unconnected to the meaningful nexus of social relations in which the self is already concretely involved. Seen in this light, suffering is always meaningful in the persons life and is always trying to tell us something about our existence. KJY: This question of how we define human health or sickness and distinction between mental and physical health is fascinating as well as how we can define suffering and what it is trying to tell us about the way we live. To return to basics, I understand psychoanalysts are concerned with the internal study of mind, the stability of emotions and reasoning. I am interested in several views of suffering. For Freud, we're inflicted with suffering from three angles- of the body-a reminder of its natural decay and the cycle of life, external factors- starvation and thirdly our relations to men, which perhaps behold most impact due to the degree of harm inflicted on the subconscious. I think the character of Troy in August Wilson's play 'Fence's demonstrates a character experiencing all three sufferings in the form of pneumonia, his affair, and relations with father. According to Carl Jung, through pride we are deceiving ourselves' and 'we deem those happy who through the experience of life have learned to bear its ills without having been overcome by them". I am quite interested in the former and latter forms of suffering. From the brief readings into Szasz's criticism, it appears he asserted psychiatry along with the power of language were conducive means to control others. It's a fascinating approach to the sensitivities and intricacies of how society is ruled and rules the individual. His distinguishing between 'true' diseases- those that can be scientifically measured, tested- i.e diseases being bodily, opposed to the pseudo-science' of psychiatry and its definition of behaviour related 'disorders' is revealing if not an slightly ominous reflection of the Mental Health system and those that operate within it. For example, his allusions to psychiatrists as prison wardens of individual agency, infringing freedom from violence and mental self ownership of othersbut perhaps is not to be mooted. Early demonization of masturbation or the scientific racism of draptetomania is evidence of how power and authority manipulate freedom through systems of control and fear, forces of subjugation to maintain hierarchical structures. Although it risks being viewed as refuting any positive benefit of psychiatry on the individual, this perspective is useful to understand how such categorisation easily filters through into attitudes and how we define what is good. 'If god talks to you, you are 1 praying, if you talk to god, you have schizophrenia' . That science itself does not guarantee absolute truth returns me to an inherent danger in how we live - the extent to which we are entrenched in language, signs, symbols that we invest in- on order to believe we are able to co-exist. Since occupation and revolt comes and goes, revolt and rebellion give way to sometimes parallel chaotic systems of violence and control, even mental selfliberation/escape has been taken away ... unless perhaps there is wealth? I am thinking here of Sarah Winchester and her 'Mystery House' which I addressed in my show 'Interval; A Narrative Psychosis' - wealth afforded this American nineteenth century figure a certain liberty to build a sprawling, outlandish estate as a result of midnight sances and allowed
1

Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin. New York: Doubleday, 1973

OnSuffering
her to channel her occult obsession. Wealth also affords those who can and have the means of language and certain efficiencies to avoid queues or the wrong quality/type of treatment. 'The problem' in living has troubled people forever', but to allow people to behave in response to the extent of their troubles is then a matter of life and death- of order and lawand perhaps health is just another string to the puppeteering, alongside class and wealth? The individual finds him/herself surveilled, controlled and subjugated from multiple angles, even his/her health is not his/her own. 'the one who first seize the word imposes reality on the other, the one who defines thus dominates and lives the one who is defined 2 is subjugated and may be killed.' In the place of one power system erects another? To brandish and empty out psychiatry as merely a system of control is reductive, there are treatments that 'help' those in 'need', it is also unlikely the person experiencing depression or alcoholism particularly enjoys this state and does not wish to be helped or help him/herself if given the right trigger for choice. Yet, surely seeking psychiatric help to answer 'the problem' in living that has troubled people forever' risks itself perpetuating systems that uphold regimes of inequality, superiority and power struggles through language and division. These life difficulties, source for much anxiety and questions of meaningfulness and suffering in the first instance, that the soul doctor is no longer the priest but the pharmacy or self help guide, this can reduce and perhaps give false hope. There are indeed questions of bureaucracy and also questions of wealth and access that again can enforce marginalisations and boundaries. We have also moved into a space since broadcast media to create more meaning and lack for ourselves perhaps. The craving of the individual who we celebrate/despise for extreme anomalies in behaviour in the ubiquitous celebrity reality show today is at once incarcerated and incarcerating for humankind, but very revealing about how we live and how sufferings in our society shapes identities. Where can we go if religion, science and medicine cannot help us, and technology also appears to compound our suffering? ATM : There is so much to say in response to your thoughts, but I am happy to just have a stab at the final question you pose as it is an important one. I guess I would start by saying that I do not agree that religion, science, medicine, and technology either cannot help us or serve to compound our sufferings. Of course all of them can (religions can oppress, science can strip meaning, medicines can numb, technology can dis-empower, and so on), but I think the challenge now is to think about how we can use all these resources in a way that can help to alleviate suffering. I think that alleviating and transcending suffering are closely connected to meaning and personal understanding, even an entire re-interpretation of ones life. In line with this, Viktor Frankl wrote that suffering ceases to be suffering in some way at the moment it finds a meaning. As I see it, the problem is not science or technology per se so much as the extent to which the dominance of these modes of thinking currently have a tendency to obscure or block out other modes of enquiry. This
2

Ibid

OnSuffering
was what Heidegger was so concerned about in some of his later writings on technology that it can lead to a totalizing kind of approach to our thinking that closes down alternatives. In the field of mental health, we could see the rise of psycho-pharmacology as an example of this insofar as it increasingly dominates our thinking over other approaches to understanding human distress and suffering. In contrast, it is precisely through the contemplative, imaginative, story-telling aspect of our being that ideas of how suffering can be made meaningful arise. The Christian myth is that suffering is part of Gods plan for humanity; humanists may see suffering as grounding the possibility of ethics through compassion; Stoics maintained an indifference to suffering as something morally irrelevant; anthropologists have viewed suffering as a ritual process by which we temporarily retreat from our customary environment to descend into ourselves for the purpose of revitalization and renewal; Nietzsche held that suffering ennobles the human spirit and makes possible human advancement; Heidegger held that suffering could pull you out of the everyday and towards greater authenticity. These are but a few prominent examples. To these could be added modern techno-scientific myths or narratives that many find useful in creating meaning from their suffering (for example, chemical imbalances or brain diseases the power of the latter narrative greatly enhanced by the seductive allure of brain imaging technologies). The problem, as Karen Armstrong has pointed out, is that today mythical thinking has fallen into disrepute as we tend to dismiss it as irrational and self-indulgent or equate it with something that is simply not true. However, she suggests that mythology is not about opting out of the world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it. Myths, she argues, are effective insofar as they give us new insight into the deeper meaning of life. So we can work with traditional pre-scientific myths of suffering, or modern techno-scientific myths. The danger comes not from the existence of the latter so much as their tendency to eliminate the competition, so to speak. Like Heidegger, however, I remain optimistic that where the danger is greatest and we begin to become aware of our increasing domination by the impersonal techno-scientific forms of understanding, the possibility of change and resistance arises. KJY: Your comments highlight the value of myth making and I appreciate your thoughts bringing me full circle to my initial concerns of trauma and suffering, whilst allowing a slight shifting towards an alternative perspective. Our basic human fight and flight response is at base critical for survival. However, it is when we perceive everything in our environment as a threat or danger - through inability to cope with life's events or stresses that we can become stuttered into physiological and psychological states of pain and suffering as a result of feeling out of control, alienated... inducing states of anxiety, depression... This is interesting in terms of bringing us back to Freud's ideas of control and how we desperately seek such explanatory systems for our life's plan; how and where human suffering fits into the life span that each individual is afforded.

"Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help

OnSuffering
they would have no difficulty exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of 3 anxiety." Indeed, it is not useful to disregard systems of religion, science, medicine, and technology as merely sources of suffering, and all the more implausible to go through life completely disengaged and abstracted from all of these systems of myth or... truth making. I agree it is useful to consider how they can alleviate our suffering but I cannot help but question the extent that they can help us and hence, feel that they do compound our suffering more than they allow us to understand and alleviate such suffering. These systems offer competing models of explanations that man seeks in his quest for understanding his/her life in relation to happiness, control, knowledge, certitude. The shamen and the clergy have perhaps been supplanted by the techno-scientific systems, but does this offer us respite?

Armstrong's pointing to the capacity of myth making systems to intensify and deepen our life's meaning is apt and I'd like to consider the limits of the systems of techno-science and capitalism for example as two such models of this complex relation between man and his/her suffering. The myths upheld by both can perhaps be asserted to be founded upon man's essential rights of equality and freedom and to paraphrase Rousseau, if we are born free and equal in the eyes of Lord or Nature, how can we live in inequality and coercion? The power-fraught capitalist system has failed us and accentuates the frustrations between individual desires and the lived reality in confrontation of global/personal inequalities and infringement of man's freedom. The techno-scientific community appears more accommodating and participatory across margins, ages, backgrounds, ethnicities, sexual orientation compared to capitalism- it appears to offer the individual hope in terms of a self-actualization and appears to allow us more access, control of how we live. However, as put forward also by Sassower, the techno-science realm still in fact operates within and kowtows to the same hierarchies of consumption, production and distribution as the Capitalist system- disputes between social media platforms to maintain economic and social eminence one over another and ensuing loss of end user experience is one such example, as well as funding and freedom regulations. But does the techno-scientific sector also fall short on delivering the honesty and truth we seek (for instance, the potential of the internet of things and speed as a new advancement on the internet itself as a way to connect us)? I in fact think you're at present safe in the multiplicity of our choice in which myth we may choose if any, since there appears a renewal in magic and religion perhaps in counter to the predominance of techno-science. If individuals can change their lives through the belief system they uphold, then how are we not able to cope with our suffering... better? Or, perhaps this is where anxiety and suffering as Frankl also exemplifies can lead to progression of the individual - anxiety is essential since it is useful. I don't want to get into a discussion about good and bad, pain and its absence, but why simply, is there so much suffering. I know that you have addressed this in your point about being careful in not finding meaning in all suffering- but this then emphasises the very
3

Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930

OnSuffering
problematic of suffering itself. You cannot allow for one suffering over another, for one to be more useful is again subject to interpretation or the myth making we follow. Does this point to more spiritual interpretations - that we simply haven't learnt our lesson? A song I particularly liked in the 90's 'For What It's Worth' by Oui 3

Let us not allow another dream to turn sour Dismissed by cynics as the son of flower power We don't know how and we don't know why But we can still retain love in our mind's eye And I know bitterness is never a solution Cos deep in my soul I had a silent revolution As a means to an end I may choose wealth But love is truly an end in itself
... recalls Frankl's experience as a holocaust survivor-

The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss...In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfilment."4
Suffering of some turns them to bitterness and he/she cannot find the route to love, which then brings me to personality, genetics and choice. Choice of myth and its faith can be eradicated through suffering, and yet it turns others towards strength of faith - spiritual, religious or otherwise. Why do some find the value in their suffering to help them, and others are consumed by it? Is it then that those who are without systems of myth or belief are more susceptible to ... be extinguished by it? ATM : I think that systems of myth or belief do help us to avoid being overwhelmed by suffering. I also think that practice does too. By this I mean something akin to the spiritual practices discussed by Pierre Hadot in his book Philosophy as a Way of Life. It may well be the case that religions never return with their same very potent and useful myths regarding suffering, but nonetheless their spiritual practices remain, and I think it is up to us in a secular society to think seriously about the role that practices play in our lives, especially in relation to suffering. We can already see the influence of certain practices, such as meditation, yoga, and so on, for example in the context of depression. But even to sit in silence or to sit with boredom without trying to flee it, or to engage in acts of contemplation, and so on, if practiced regularly are small acts of rebellion, counterparadigms to technology. Perhaps these can also help us to understand our suffering better or to find more meaning in it. Peter Sloterdijk recently wrote a book entitled You Must Change Your Life, in which he sees the human as a practicing, training being, one who creates itself through exercises and thereby transcends itself. These were the sorts of
4

Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, 1946

OnSuffering
ideas to which Foucault was turning towards the end of his life in his writings on technologies of the self. Even those practices that have been so heavily associated with (and tainted by?) religions, such as fasting, prayer, asceticism, and so on, all potentially have much to offer us. Nietzsche wrote that all the virtues and efficiency of body and soul are acquired laboriously and little by little, through much industry, self-constraint, limitation, through much obstinate, faithful repetition of the same labours, the same renunciations, and that we have to learn to think differently in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently. Such practices may also wean people off the worst excesses of capitalism, which would surely be a good thing with regards to our suffering! We may even learn to love ourselves, and others once more...