The medical term for madness is psychosis, which essentially implies having beliefs, attitudes and behaviour that are antithetic to social convention.  Psychosis is not the only category of mental illness; there is also neurosis.  The old adage captures the distinction nicely.  A neurotic thinks that 2 and 2 equals 4 and is worried about it.  A psychotic just knows that 2 and 2 equals five.  So neurosis is a disturbance of doubt while psychosis is a condition of certainty and conviction.  They are styles of being, different but not immiscible.   Although people may try to evade the torment of neurosis by developing  delusions , they can still be tortured by convictions  of victimisation, devastated by fears of fragmentation.  Life for somebody who is psychotic, can literally be hell!  Even when things are calm, there is no peace from their internal thoughts and voices.  No wonder so many people who have a psychotic breakdown, chose to end their own lives. 

The problem is not so much how we can distinguish between neurosis and psychosis but how we can we distinguish each from so called ‘normality’.   ‘Normal’ is a social construct, defined by reference to the culture a person comes from.  The Christian notion of God, his reincarnation as Jesus Christ, the virgin birth and the resurrection, is considered quite normal in the United States of America and much of the western world.  But as Richard Dawkins has emphasised, what is God but a massive delusion?   The only reason a religious conviction is not  considered mad is that the same delusion is shared by others.  Falling in love is another delusion that is widely encouraged by society even though it has such massive potential to shatter a person’s private web of meaning.   

Psychosis is a distortion of meaning and as such,  a logical consequence of being human.  We can all go a bit mad at times.  Human beings are creatures of meaning, compelled to find reasons for their existance and what happens.  They have a big brains that can see into the future, and a deep seated fear of what might exist in that void.  They have the imagination to invent stories and can be both comforted or tortured by the delusions they create. 

Meaning develops  through relationship with others, initially our mother, father, brothers, sisters, grandparents and later, a wider circle of family and friends , teachers, mentors, books and television.  It is conditioned by society, represents society and maintains us within that society.   Therefore, if we regard psychosis as an alternative or distorted state of meaning, it is a social disease.   It stands to reason that those who grow up isolated, conditioned by  perceptions that are incompletely normalised by others, develop their own fragile belief structure  that can set them apart from others.  Alone in a black and white world, where people are either idealised or denigrated, they can tend to be suspicious and blame others.   All the good stuff is located in themselves while the bad stuff is projected out though the opposite may attain.  

But there are shades of isolation. People who live on the cognitive borders of society are able to function quite normally for much of the time, but may exhibit uncompromising and paranoid ways of thinking when their meaning is challenged.  Mental illness might be regarded as a defence against the loss of meaning induced by change.     

As  creatures whose identity is created from meaning, we are all vulnerable to change.   Any of us can be overwhelmed and devastated by an event that is completely outside our experience,  and most of us, especially the more solitary, adopt strategies to prevent the devastation caused by a breakdown of meaning.  Some may assume an idealised persona, a special identity that offers a role and purpose.  This may be reinforced by special musical, literary or artistic talents perfected through the years of isolation.   Others may mould themselves to their environment, sensing what others want and adapting to it. Women are said to be better at this, readily adapting their personality to the needs of a new partner.  And finally some keep it all together by encapsulating themselves in an all consuming interest, an obession for work, a dedication, a faith.   

We can see examples of such behaviours in our colleagues, friends, family and in ourselves, but some people are more fragile, more susceptible to change and more clearly defended against it.  But fragility is no reason for segregation.  Society needs to achieve a democratisation of belief and thought.  People with conviction and creativity can be exciting and inspiring.  Most effective politicians have some spark of madness in them.  They can be dangerous unless reined in by their civil servants.  Society advances, not by the most stable, healthy members of society, but by those independent thinkers,  who may at times be considered mad by their colleagues.  Darwin, Einstein, Newton, and many of the great writers, artists and composers have all been considered mad at times.   Ignaz Semelweis, whose hygeinic principles saved the lives of millions of women from puerperal fever, spent much of his life incarcerated in mental institutions.

Some of the ideas in this article were inspired by a talk on psychotherapy and the psychoses given by Darian Leader at the Biennial Conference of the Hallam Institute of Psychotherapy on October 2nd.  

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Once a soldier, man of action,

with connections to the King,  

A traveller, he healed the sick 

From Dumfries to Berwick,  

Made miracles

from Durham to Dunbar,

Received acclaim from Rome.  

.

Be our bishop, they cried.  

At first, he denied. 

Too much work,  he replied. 

I need peace, time and space

to converse with the grace 

of God, but don’t mention the ducks,   

We’ll throw in the island, they said,

Bring you breakfast by boat.  

.

You can wash our feet, they said

if that makes you feels good. 

But he waved them his blessings 

And cuddled his ducks instead. 

.

They must have thought Cuthbert was the man of the moment, a born leader, active, wise, understanding and willing to travel.   But he was also widely known for his piety, diligence, obedience and asceticism.   Northumbria extended as far north as the Forth and as far west as Galloway.  Cuthbert travelled the length and breadth of the country,  preaching,  performing miracles and talking to the people.  His generosity and gifts of insight and healing led many people to consult him. He set up oratories and churches throughout the Kingdom and established a reputation for himself and the church further afield.   When Alchfrith, King of Deira, founded a new monastery at Ripon, it was Cuthbert who became its praepositus hospitum or visitors host. He was a leading exponent of the customs of the Roman church at the synod convened at Twyford on the River Aln and also at the synod of Whitby.     

King Eagwith, about whom the great historian Macauley once said, ‘Who?,’  was impressed and prevailed on the Abbot of Montrose to release him to become Bishop of Lindisfarne,  but Cuthbert didn’t want that sort of responsibility.  He liked coming up with ideas, but he needed space to think and contemplate.  He agreed only if he could live for as much time as he needed in solitude on Inner Farne.  Cuthbert loved the sea and had frequently travelled from Melrose to the priories at Lindisfarne and St Abb’s.  It was said that he could communicate with the wild creatures.  The Eider Ducks were so tame they would nest in his hut.  To this day, the locals refer to them as Cuddy’s Ducks. 

But Cuthbert spent more and more time on his remote island.  If anybody, even the King, needed to see him, they would have to get a boat and a pilot and undertake the often perilous journey from the mainland.  At first he would welcome visitors and wash their feet, but later he waved his blessings from the window and returned to his contemplation. Cuthbert preferred the company of his wild creatures to man, but his inaccessibility only added to his reputation for piety.  

He died in his island hermitage and his body was brought back in state to be buried at Melrose.  Some years later, it was exhumed and his beatification was assured when it was found that no decomposition had set in.  It now rests in Durham Cathedral. 

So what kind of man was Cuthbert?   A reluctant leader?.  A man of great promise, who could not deliver; always out for a duck?  A selfish recluse?   This is open to conjecture, but I like to think of him as a scholar, a man of ideas and inspiration, who could be too affected by others’ agendas.  He needed to escape, to cease the chatter, the demands and be alone.  It wasn’t that he was selfish; quite the opposite.  But he was no politician.  He could see everybody’s view and could so easily be compromised.  And he was quite unsuited to administration. Luckily for him the King recognised Cuthbert’s symbolic importance and his retreat to the island just added to the mystique. He even passed a law protecting the ducks.   

I have just completed St Cuthbert’s Way across the Border Country from the abbey at Melrose to Lindisfarne Priory. It crosses the Eildon Hills (the Roman Trimontium), then follows the broad upland River Tweed as far as the crystal well at Maxton,turns south along Dere Street, goes up over the Cheviots to Wooler, gains the sea at Beal and follows the Pilgrim’s Route across the sands to The Holy Isle.

I rubbed up  a whole new crop of blisters and trudged the mud and sand of the Pilgrim’s Route barefoot and bloodshod.  Half way across, the sky darkened and a squall blew in from the North Sea.  It was then that the it started, an unearthly sound as if all the souls of the departed sailors shipwrecked on this coast has been disinterred and were howling in agony.  It came from what looked like a clump of rocks on a distant sandbank. I focused my binoculars and saw between two and three hundred seals, half of them pups.  This would have stirred Cuthbert’s heart and it stirred mine.                           

My feet have healed and I’ve donated my boots to the RSPCA.  Maybe a duck will find them useful.

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It is the autumn of 1913 and strange things have begun to happen in the village.  First it is the doctor’s ‘accident’.   His horse trips on a wire stretched across the gate to his house, throwing him heavily,  the end of his collarbone sticking out through the skin of his shoulder.  Next the farmer’s wife falls  through the rotten floor of the baron’s sawmill and is killed instantly.  In revenge and anger with his father, who refuses to claim compensation or grievance,  their  eldest son destroys the baron’s field of cabbages and is instantly dismissed, committing the family to starvation.  Then Sigi, the Baron’s son is kidnapped, flayed and found in the middle of the night hanging by his ankles in the barn in a state of severe shock.   Then the steward’s baby son is left exposed to the freezing cold.  Finally Karli, the midwife’s son, who has Down’s syndrome is attacked and nearly blinded.  The culprits are never discovered though a sinister group of children always seem to materialise offering to help after each an atrocity is committed.  It might appear that, led by Klara, the pastors eldest daughter, they are  taking their revenge for the cruel repression they had endured at the hands of their fathers, but we never quite know for sure.   

When Klara and Martin arrive late for supper, the pastor forces  them to wear white ribbons as a sign that they have not learnt to be responsible.   Martin is further humiliated by having his hands tied to the sides of his bed to stop him masturbating while Klara collapses while being severely and unjustly reprimanded by her father in front of the whole class.   

And then there is the doctor,  who, not just content for abusing his housekeeper, is also forcing his attentions on Anni, his fourteen year old daughter.  And the steward, who thrashes his son within an inch of his life for taking Sigi’s whistle from him and throwing him in the pond.   This is a highly dysfunctional village that seems to thrive on malice. 

And Eva, who is unfairly dismissed by the Baron and then prevented by her father from marrying her sweetheart,  who teaches at the village school. 

It is the schoolteacher who finds out what has happened,  but when he confronts Klara and Martin, they lie; they know only too well the penalties for being honest.  Their father, the parson, grows angry and accuses him of spreading calumny on innocent children and threatens to report him to the school board.  

The note attached to Karli notes that the sins of the fathers are visited on their children.  It would seem that Klara and her gang become avenging angels.  Klara even kills her father’s pet bird, though her youngest brother poignantly offers to replace it with the bbird he has rescued because his father is so sad. 

The film ends with the news of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo and the imminence of war.  We are left with the sense that in some way the children have brought about the horror that was the first world war.  They didn’t, but the narrator, who is the schoolteacher as an old man, says that the events in Eichvald in 1913/14 might clarify what was eventually going to happen in Germany.  Theirs was the generation who became Nazis and perpetrated their own cruel repression on the Jews.      

White Ribbon was directed by Martin Hanneke and released in 2009,  being awarded ’ La Palme d’Or’ in Nice.   It is a powerful and disturbing film.  It is the children are the  stars of the film; they act their parts with such convincing realism while the cimetography with its long gothic shots of the snowbound village and its protestant inhabitants reinforces the dark repression.    

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Yoga achieves perfection of the body through the asanas and pranayamas (Hathayoga). Asanas are a series of stretches and postures, which, it is claimed, give you the same cardiovascular efficiency as vigorous aerobic exercise and vast improvements in fitness.  Each posture stretches a certain set of muscles and is followed by a posture that stretches the opposing set.  They need not be difficult and the postures do not have to be maintained for long.  Proceed at your own pace.  It will leave you feeling remarkable relaxed and refreshed.  Pranayamas are a set of breathing exercises that invigorate and balance the system.

Yoga achieves perfection of the mind through meditation (Radayoga).   The meditation is designed to clarify the surface layers of the mind as lack of movement clarifies a muddy pool so you can see down to the depths. It involves sitting or lying comfortably in a quiet place in a relaxed posture and by breathing and inward chanting to attain a deep state of consciousness akin to trance.  Preoccupations, worries, regrets are banished from the mind while you concentrate on the here and now.  In trance, there is a clearer focus on the sounds and feelings around you while everything else drifts away.  Meditation is focus and can be achieved through creative work; painting, sculpture, gardening, poetry, music, cooking, even  running and walking or even sitting quietly by the side of a river fishing.  Find the time and the space in your life to do this. 

Asanas, pranayamas and meditation exist for one purpose, that is to acheive that peaceful state of body and mine that allows a contemplation on the meaning of life, what yogis say is union with the divine, or an innermost state of peace and contemplation.

Yoga is not another religion.  Yogis do not believe in a single God or even a company of Gods, but they do believe in the notion of a divinity, a state of being that creates and pervades all existence and they revere sages like Sri Aurobindo as instruments to help us attain a state of perfection. 

I cannot believe in such a divine presence, although I acknowledge the power of the human mind to create it. There is much about our existence that we cannot explain, but I like to place my faith in evolution, cosmology and the amazing power of the human mind to create meaning out of our existence.  But I do believe that Yoga is a wonderful system of  healing the mind, the body and the spirit or meaning and I incorporate asanas and meditation as an essential components of my everyday life. 

Our lives are so fragmented; we express so many different aspects of ourselves at different times.  We are, in the words of Sri Aurobindo, disorderly ordered.   We seem to have a fatal attraction to pain and suffering.  Yoga is a means of liberating ourselves.  Yoga is not only a method by which man can attain that state of peace and relaxation that facilitates health, fulfilment and happiness.  It  also creates a state of being that allows reflection on the deeper meanings of our existence,  alongside but separate from our daily preoccupations with work, family and the material aspects of contemporary living.   

Some yogis may renounce all material connections, retire to an ashram and live a life of self perfection, but most of us cannot do that.  Each person must follow their own path. But we may find time during the day to carry out asanas and pranayamas and we may also be able to build into a more balanced way of life time to meditate and reflect on the deeper meanings.  This can only help us to cope with stress, to think about what we are eating, how we are living and deal better with the strains of life that cause illness.    

In June, I lived for three weeks in the Sri Aurobindo ashram high above the town of Nainatal in the foothills of the Himalayas.     

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What is going on?   My guide explains.  ‘At the new year, we remember our ancestors and we make gifts to appease their spirits and give ourselves good karma.   It’s not real money, but fake paper money.  Some also burn paper models of cars, servants, possessions.  You see, we believe in the afterlife here.  If we can appease the spirits of our ancestors, then we will have a good life too.  It will bring us luck.’

In the Buddhist temples, they sell paper effigies like soldiers in red coats and hats to burn.  Buddhism sits comfortably alongside superstition here.  Many of the tribes in the country are animist, they believe in spirits.  In a wood outside a village in Northern Laos, just a dozen miles or so from the Chinese border, we came across a group of huts on stilts topped by a pole bearing the remains of a flag.  The huts were surrounded by a stockade and a moat.  There was a wooden board in front of it bearing a photograph of the deceased and the dates of his life.   His possessions were stacked under the eaves together with the remains of food and flowers. 

‘When a parent dies, we look after his spirit in death in the same way as we looked after his body in life.  That way we will get good karma and show our children how to look after us when our time comes.’

‘But the people who live in the village, the Black Tai, do not go to the wood after dark.  They are afraid of the spirits.’ 

A few days later, in the Khmer village, we came across an structure that looked like two sets of poles for growing runner beans.  Between it was a table with clay figurines on it. 

”The people here believe that if they touch the body of a dead person, they will die.  So the shaman  builds these arches and covers them with leaves and symbols.  The relatives then pass through the arches three times and leaves a clay model on the table to protect them from the spirits who might take them too.’

We met the shaman, jolly toothless man with a wispy beard, no shirt and a cigarette tucked behind his ear.  My guide left him some indigestion tablets for his wife.  Strong medicine!

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The opening sequences set the mood, time passing in the ticks and strikes of the clocks, the unrelenting passion of the crimson carpets, walls and drapes.  We see a woman or is it a man; the angular face and lank hair obviate sexuality.  She is lying in bed.  Another woman, plump and beautiful with ringlets of honey blonde hair lies asleep in a chair.  The invalid gets up stiffly and walks painfully across to her bureau and writes in her diary, ‘It is Monday and I am in pain.’ 

Agnes is dying of cancer.  Her sisters, Karin and Maria, have returned to look after her, but it is the peasant Anna with her plump expressionless face and simple faith who loves and cares for her.  ‘In elliptical flashbacks, intended to give us emotional information, not tell a story, we learn that the three sisters have made little of their lives.’ Karin is icily detached, married to an older husband, a calculating, sneering diplomat, whom she loathes. She cannot bear to be touched and in one awful scene lacerates her cunt with a broken glass and smears the blood over her lips to avoid her husband’s attentions.  Maria is beautiful, but corrupt and heartless.  She is married to a weak man, whom she despises and so she consoles herself with other liaisons.  When her husband stabs himself and pleads for help, she turns away.  Maria and Karin were close as children, but are now too damaged to allow any real intimacy.  Agnes always felt isolated, especially from their tragic though beautiful mother.      

Theirs is not a happy house, it’s a place of guilt and repression, cries and whispers.  Nobody can get close enough to draw comfort from anybody else.  Agnes is in agony, her back arched as she struggles to breathe, desperate for human warmth, but her sisters turn away.  Only Anna can console her, pillowing her head in the living flesh of her breasts to ease her terrible transition.   

Cries and Whispers is a disturbing film, a film about life and death.  It’s not only Agnes who is dying.  Karin and Maria are too, and in a way, we all are.  Their lives have no hope, no meaning.  Karin works while Maria plays, but these are evasions.  Theirs is a simalcrum.   Without human warmth, without love, there can be no life.   Paradoxically, it is Agnes,  who finds life  in simple pleasures, the garden, a drink of water and the comfort of  being held.   So Bergman presents us with a contrast, a counterpoint between the hopelessness, defensiveness and meaninglessness of  Karin and Maria’s lives with their compromises, pretences and terror of real contact and the dreadful void of death that confronts Agnes.  

Bergman does not spare us the shock and horror.  Harriet Andersson is not beautiful in death; sweat glistens on her angular face, her hair is lank, her skin pale and grey, her eyes terrified;  she arches her back, she drags air into her damaged lungs with long, tortured stridor, she retches, she beats her fists on her barren, wasted chest. 

The cinematography is superb.  As the critic, Roger Ebert, wrote, ‘The camera is as uneasy as we are. It stays at rest mostly, but when it moves it doesn’t always follow smooth, symmetrical progressions. It darts, it falls back, is stunned. It lingers on close-ups of faces with the impassivity of God. It continues to look when we want to turn away; it is not moved.  Agnes lies thrown on her death bed, her body shuddered by horrible, deep, gasping breaths, as she fights for air. The sisters turn away, and we want to, too.’  We know things are this bad, but we don’t want to have to feel it.  The scene of  Anna embracing the decomposing Agnes has all the soul searching depth of a Rembrandt,  the horror of embracing death but at the same time a moving and familiar reminder of the pieta.   So the death of Agnes  represents the corruption of humanity.  And here again we have the dialectic;  life in death and death in life.   This film gets as close as any film can get to the crimson membrane of passion and sexual disquiet that for Bergman is the soul.  

Cries and Whispers has little narrative.  We don’t know how the major characters arrived there; we are left to fill in the gaps from the darkness of our own experience.  This is the power of Bergman.  He does not attempt to explain; he just shows us what its like.  He communicates on a level of human feeling so deep that defies description – but how well he communicates.

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The building’s in scaffold, a big yellow crane

Is removing the tiles that cover the nave

And disturbing the sleep of the souls in their graves

Oh, they’re raising the roof of the church today.

They’re raising the roof of the church today!

The foreman’s come round to check it’s ok.

The boys are excited and shouting, ‘Hooray!’

They’re having such fun!  What more can I say?

Cos they’re raising the roof of the church today.

They’re raising the roof of the church today.

The frantic incumbent looks ashen and grey.

The Duke and the Duchess are in disarray.

They cancelled the trials since it poured yesterday!

Now they’re raising the roof of the church today!

They’re raising the roof of the church today.

The organist thunders, parishioners pray

To God, their salvation on this judgement day

Now the pathway to heaven’s wide open to gaze

Since they’ve raised up the roof on the church today.

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