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Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia

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Jonathan Harnisch

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“What we need is a profound rethinking of the nature of suffering itself, and what it is trying to highlight and ask us to change. We need to repoliticise emotional discontent in the minds of teachers, parents and policy-makers, rather than continue reducing it to dysfunctions that allegedly reside within the self. We need to acknowledge that suffering also reflects family/socio/political dynamics we would do well to better acknowledge and address.”

“I wonder,' said Gertrude dreamily, 'if some great blessing, great enough for th eprice, will be the meed of all our pain? Is the agony in which the world is shuddering the birth-pang of some wondrous new era? Or is it merely a futile struggle of ants In the gleam of a million million of suns? We think very lightly, Mr. Meredith, or a calamity which destroys an ant-hill and half its inhabitants. Does the Power that runs the universe think us of more importance than we think ants?' 'You forget,' said Mr. Meredith, with a flash of his dark eyes, 'that an infinite Power must be infinitely little as well as infinitely great. We are neither, therefore there are things too little as well as too great for us to apprehend. To the infinitely little an ant is of as much importance as a mastodon.”

“In that instant, I detected a subtle flicker of tears in her eyes. They glistened, like tiny diamonds forged by the emotions that surged within her. But I still don't know for whom these tears were. Whose sorrows were these tears meant for? Were they meant for the one who awaited her on the distant platform, their reunion tinged with anticipation and longing? Or were they for the one who stood on this platform, watching her silently and surreptitiously exiting his life story?”

“Pretty much all memory is fiction and heavily edited. [...] A memory is its own thing each time it's recalled. It's not absolute. Stories based on actual events often share more with fiction than fact. Both fictions and memories are recalled and retold. They're both forms of stories. Stories are the way we learn. Stories are how we understand each other. But reality happens only once. [...] Every story is made up. Even the real ones. [...] That's the thing. Part of everything will always be forgettable. No matter how good or remarkable it is. It literally has to be. To be.”

“Tim Kasser: ‘The heyday of humanistic psychology was in the 1960s and 1970s, when Keynes dominated. But since the rise of neo-liberalism from the 1980s, we’ve seen an influx of cognitive behavioural approaches and psychiatric drugs – technologies that put the cause of the problem right between your ears. The therapies our governments now want all focus on internal not external reform. They don’t see suffering as a call to change external circumstances for the good of our development.”

“They say that if you really love, you never want any harm to befall your beloved. While this may be true of “normal” love, I here attest that, in unrequited love, the case is quite the opposite. One begins to associate suffering with loving and, therefore, you begin to believe that the former begets the latter. If I can make him suffer, I can make him understand that he loves me.”