In a tiny, unknown New York town, something remarkable is happening. 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. But it is. It is happening in little Le Roy, in upstate New York, among a handful of teenage high school students. Fairly recently, something similar occurred in Northern California. Virginia. North Carolina. Mexico. And many other places around the globe. As the old Buffalo Springfield song says: "There's something happening here. 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. (See, for example, Freud's discussion of the case of Ana O. 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.
So what is going on here? That still depends on what investigators and physicians find. But from a psychological perspective, we could be witnessing what C.G. Jung might call an archetypal eruption of the
collective unconscious or cultural
shadow. A classic case of "mass hysteria." A small psychic epidemic. Psychogenic contagion. It is, quite possibly, sociologically speaking, a stunning reassertion of the reality of the
unconscious. With a vengeance. 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. This is what we may be seeing in upstate New York and elsewhere. The impressive power of the
unconscious. Freud's centennial revenge. 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.
Assuming (though it is too soon to tell) no clear toxic environmental, infectious or neurological cause is discovered, these extraordinary cases dramatically demonstrate the uncanny power of what Freud called the "unconscious," that which we chronically exclude from consciousness, in creating somatic symptoms like involuntary twitching, stuttering, swearing, seizures (as seen typically in Tourette's Syndrome or temporal lobe epilepsy) and so many of the other physical symptoms ordinary patients regularly bring to their general medical practitioner for treatment. In an era in which so many mental health professionals and consumers deny the very existence and importance of the unconscious in the etiology and treatment of mental disorders, such relatively rare cases serve to illustrate its undeniable presence and impressive power to non-believers, in much the same way a miracle might confront the atheist or agnostic with God's reality.
Several centuries ago, such suddenly stricken individuals would have been deemed victims of demonic possession, and treated with exorcism. (See my prior post.) Or witches, and burned at the stake, tortured or drowned to death. Their strange symptoms were seen as supernatural. How else could such bizarre behavior be explained by our ancestors? Freud's revolutionary "psychology of the unconscious" sought to scientifically explain not only those phenomena previously attributed to demonism, witchcraft and the supernatural, but to the somatogenic or physiological model of psychopathology predominant in Western psychiatry during the nineteenth century. Even now, a century after Freud, we resist recognizing that these sort of symptoms (and so many more) can be psychologically rather than neurologically caused. Unfortunately, we have regressed to a pre-Freudian Weltanschauung, throwing the Freudian baby (the unconscious) out with the bathwater (psychoanalysis). Some still consider such maladies signs of satanic possession. Others in the medical field insist that the problem must reside in faulty neurology or physiology. Bad biochemistry. A "broken brain." To admit the capacity of the unconscious or daimonic to take temporary or chronic possession of our bodies or brains is just too threatening to the ego and our precious scientific rationality. But when cutting-edge medical science fails to explain such mystifying phenomena, when all possible physiological and environmental causes have been carefully ruled out and systematically eliminated, there remains only one clear scientific conclusion: Behold and be humbled by the awesome power of psychology. And of the unconscious. What do CBT practitioners and biological psychiatry have to say about that!? It looks like Herr Doktor Freud may posthumously have the last laugh.
In the case of Ana O., Freud, a physician and neurologist, famously discussed the impressive phenomenon of hysterical conversion as it manifests in so-called "glove anesthesia," a condition in which the patient's subjective loss of feeling in a wrist and hand would be neurologically and anatomically impossible. And it was Freud himself who replaced the archaic and sexist term hysteria in describing the symptoms of this syndrome with that of conversion. Psychiatrically speaking, once all other medical or environmental explanations have been dismissed, the peculiar symptoms collectively displayed by the now famous "Le Roy fifteen" are seen by some as falling today into the general category of Somatoform Disorders, and specifically to conform to the diagnosis of Conversion Disorder. (A diagnosis of Tourette's Disorder or Chronic Motor or Vocal Tic Disorder requires symptoms to have been present for more than one year. However, in Transient Tic Disorder, symptoms by definition endure no longer than one year, and begin prior to the age of 18, as in most of these cases. So, it seems to me that, based on the symptoms, this diagnosis must also be considered.) What is Conversion Disorder?
