S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 2 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 1 6 1 1 Stanislav Grof interest that it deserves” (Jung’s foreword to John Perry’s book The Self in Psychotic Process, Perry 1953) has unfortunately not been mentioned in Ken’s discussion of schizophrenia and mysticism. This brings us to the problem of the participation of trans- personal elements in the experiences of psychotic patients. While emphasizing that a sharp distinction between pre- and trans- is all-important for this matter, Ken admits that the disruption of the egoic syntax opens the individual not only to “mythic thinking and magical references”, but somehow also to “invasion” of material from transegoic realms that can lead to valid spiritual revelations. He suggests that the disruption of the editing and filtering functions of egoic translation leaves the individual open and unprotected from both the lower and the higher levels of consciousness. As the egoic translations begin to fail and the self is drawn into pre-egoic realms, it “is also open to invasion (castration) from the transegoic realms” [Ken’s parentheses]. He emphasizes that he personally does not see any other way to account for the phenomenology of the schizophrenic break than to assume that a dual process is set in motion: the individual begins to regress to the lower levels of consciousness while, at the same time, he is invaded by the higher (Wilber 1980, 152). This peculiar mixture of regressive phenomena and trans- personal elements in psychotic (and mystical) experiences cannot be easily accounted for without understanding that the perinatal realm of the psyche is not just a repository of memories of biological birth, but also a natural experiential interface with the transpersonal domain. Without this realization, the fact that genuine spiritual insights can sometimes be channeled through psychotic personalities and experiences will have to remain for Ken’s system “a mystery”– a fact that he himself admits. Similarly unexplained remains in his theory the observation that “true mystics occasionally reactivate regressive complexes on their way to mature unity states”. In spite of the fact that Ken acknowledges frequent mysterious invasion of transpersonal insights in psychotic patients, mysticism remains for him miles apart from psychosis. It represents for him a purely transegoic progression, whereas psychosis is primarily characterized by a regression to early infancy in the service of the ego. This is clear from Ken’s interpretive comments to Erich Fromm’s description of the psychotic experience that, at least partially, allows interpretation in perinatal terms: “He can be possessed by the passion to return to the womb, to mother earth, to death [pleromatic incest]. If this aim is all-consuming and unchecked, the result is suicide or insanity [pleromatic castration]. A less dangerous and pathological form of a regressive search for unity is the aim of remaining tied to the mother’s breast [maternal incest], or to mother’s hand, or to the father’s command [paternal incest]. Another form of regressive orientation lies in destructiveness, in the aim of overcoming separateness by the passion to destroy everything and everybody [what we call ‘substitute sacrifices’]” (Wilber 1980, 153) [Ken’s parentheses]. The lack of recognition of the perinatal and transpersonal elements in the dynamics of unusual experiences leads Ken to simplistic interpretations that sometimes border on the bizarre and absurd. A salient example is his approach to the experiences of ritual satanic cult abuse, a complex and baffling phenomenon that in the last decades has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. Ken believes that these experiences are nothing but distorted childhood memories and gives as an example a hypothetical situation where the source of the experiences of satanic cult abuse is the infant’s observation of his or her mother carving the Thanksgiving turkey (Wilber 1994, 303). Any serious researcher of the UFO phenomena and of alien abduction experiences would also be surprised to find out that Ken believes that a similar misinterpretation of childhood memories could adequately account for the rich spectrum of fascinating and puzzling observations in their field. I feel that personal experience of working with clients suffering from problems of this kind would give Ken more respect for the extraordinary nature of these phenomena and the depth of the issues involved. Ken actually uses his understanding of psychoses as F–1 pathologies as a theoretical justification for pharmacological and physiological treatments as primary therapeutic interventions in these disorders: “Most forms of severe or process psychoses do not respond well (or at all) to psychoanalytic therapy, psychotherapy, analytic psychology, family therapy, etc.– despite repeated and pioneering efforts in this area. These disturbances seem to occur on such primitive level of organization (sensori-perceptual and physiological) that only intervention at an equally primitive level is effective – namely, pharmacological or physiological (which does not rule out psychotherapy as an adjunct treatment)” (Wilber 1986, 127). Ken does not mention here the possibility of successful psychotherapeutic work with many people who by traditional psychiatry are or would be diagnosed as psychotic. While the earlier psychotherapeutic interventions based on the psychoanalytic model were severely limited by the therapists’ tendency to interpret all psychotic phenomena in terms of postnatal development, strategies using larger cartographies of the psyche and supporting the experiences of the clients
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