Scripts People Live

by Claude Steiner

  Typically, classical psychiatric views of paranoia allow that paranoia has some connection to external stresses. Speaking of precipitating factors associated with paranoia in the American Handbook of Psychiatry, Cameron1 mentions external challenges, close competitive situations, or being in close quarters with like sex persons for long periods of time and being socially isolated. Cameron mentions humiliation, failure and defeat, the loss of the major source of security or gratification as well as someone’s death or desertion, an actual rebuff, neglect or deception, economic loss, or physical incapacitation as being possible causes for paranoia. Later, however, he discounts all these facts when he says:

  This must not be taken to mean that adult paranoid reactions are produced by aggressive rivalry and erotic temptation, by failure and defeat, by sudden close contact or social isolation and by losses of security and gratification. These are only precipitating factors. They tip a chronically unstable balance, one dependent upon an infantile defensive organization, with defective reality testing, a selective hypersensitivity to unconscious processes in others, and irresistible tendencies to project and form pseudo-communities. Nevertheless, these precipitating factors are dynamically and clinically important since they can start off a process of paranoid development in which the patient, because of his defective personality organization, may then become powerless to stop.

  Thus, in spite of the evidence that external stress and oppressive conditions precipitate paranoia, the view remains that paranoids have “defective reality testing” and “infantile” personalities.

  I have a different view of the phenomenon of paranoia. In my opinion, what is called “paranoid schizophrenia” by psychiatrists is a state of mind which occurs in people as a result of systematic lying and oppression in childhood and in the person’s present life. “When a paranoid person projects what he denies,” even Cameron says, “he does not project at random. He describes hostile and erotic impulses to people who actually exhibit minimal signs of a corresponding unconscious impulse. Since everyone has hostile impulses … it is not difficult for the selectively hypersensitive paranoid to find persons on whom to project. Thus there is always a core of truth in paranoid accusations.” Here Cameron, in typically convoluted psychiatric jargon, states (only to let it pass) the most important fact about paranoia: namely, stated in my words, that paranoia is a state of heightened awareness.

  We all have a touch of paranoia. We may feel persecuted by neighbors, or think that people talk about us behind our backs. We don’t believe politicians, or we think the oil companies are deceiving us, or that our telephones are tapped. Most of our paranoias are controlled and do not run amuck. We are careful whom we share them with, and if they are discounted by others we don’t get especially upset; in fact, we are likely to agree and go along with the discount. Only a few of us get to the point where we lose our minds and become wildly paranoid. The kind of delusion that is involved in extreme paranoia can genuinely be described as a form of madness. It has, however, the same source and origin as the small paranoias which all of us are subjected to.

  All of us have enemies who speak behind our backs; all of us are the victims of conspiracies to divest us of our money, to cause us to vote one way or another, to cause us to agree or disagree with our politicians. For example, when an advertising agency puts together a campaign for menthol cigarettes depicting various beautiful outdoor scenes with young, beautiful, healthy people smoking menthol cigarettes in them, this is a conspiracy to influence our judgment so that we will consume menthol cigarettes. When politicians get together in smoke-filled rooms and agree to create an image for a presidential candidate which everyone in that room knows does not correspond to his personality, again this is a conspiracy to affect our thinking. When we buy a car or a house or an appliance, we are likely to deal with sales persons whose interests conflict with ours and who are willing to conspire to use deception and half-truths in order to get us to buy. When a spouse carefully disguises her interest in other men and, reacting with guilt, feigns love for her husband, she is conspiring to deceive her husband. We are all aware of these conspiracies. It’s safe to say that there are many other conspiracies we know nothing about, since the essential element of such a conspiracy is that it is kept secret and that its nature will be concealed from the person who is being conspired against.

  In the late sixties, the period in which the “New Left” organized to stop the Viet Nam war, a few people, represented in a few “paranoid” underground newspapers, claimed that the United States was secretly bombing Cambodia, that there was a conspiracy by President Nixon and Attorney General Mitchell to deprive dissenting Americans of their constitutional rights, that telephones were being tapped, that illegal entries were being committed, and so on. Those few people who believed these things to be going on were labeled paranoid, and the majority of the people ignored their statements. Today, of course, those paranoid perceptions have proven to be true. I use the example of the “New Left” as a general example which applies validly to paranoia in general. Namely, paranoia is a state of heightened awareness, a period in which a person begins to become aware of certain facts, such as the fact that he is being persecuted by communities of people (his family, whites, “big business,” politicians, etc.) who are conspiring in some way against him. Whether it be political activists who are being conspired against by the police, blacks who are being conspired against by whites, women who are being conspired against by men, or just people who are being conspired against by their families and their leaders, they all have such dawning awarenesses of the attempt that others make to oppress them—and these present themselves in the form of paranoia.

  When this kind of paranoid heightened awareness is met with discounts and is categorically denied and rejected, then, as has been pointed out before, people have a choice. They can go along with the discount or they can disregard the discounter and operate independently of information coming from the outside. The Little Professor who is perceptive and aware of the covert behavior and motives of people will use its intelligence to build elaborate schemes which explain its perceptions and the discounts of them. When these schemes become elaborate enough, when they are peppered with enough imagination and a certain amount of perverse exaggeration, then they become the full-fledged paranoid delusions that we see in people who have gone completely mad. However, these paranoid delusions all have grains of truth, and the only way to understand them is to see them as exaggerations the person is forced to concoct because her perceptions are being denied.

  In this light, we begin to understand paranoia and paranoid schizophrenia completely differently from the way it is presented to us by the usual psychiatric view. We can understand the mental hospital patient who believes that his food is being poisoned and that there are tape recorders in the wall that record everything he says, and who feels that there is a conspiracy by the communists, in league with his psychiatrist, to destroy his brain with X-rays, when, upon examining the situation, we find that he’s being forced to take excessive and harmful amounts of major tranquilizers daily, that his utterances to other patients and to the staff are being meticulously recorded in the nurse’s log, and that the staff of the ward are considering the possibility of administering electroshock therapy to him. It is these oppressive facts which are the source of paranoia, not the “infantile emotions,” the “defective reality testing,” and so on. When the perceptions of these facts are not discounted but honored we find that paranoia recedes and that, as in the case of all other forms of madness, the person who is being treated nurturingly and whose feelings are being accounted for will become sane once again. How to deal with the banal scripts of Mindlessness will be covered in Chapter 23.

  10

  Basic Training: Training in Joylessness

  When people begin to ask themselves questions about their own lives, when they come to the point where they no longer assume that what they have been striving for is necessarily good or right, they may be fa
ced with some difficult questions: If what I was told is right is not necessarily right, then what is? How do I decide what to do and what not to do?

  Some believe that the answers about what shall be done, what is right, have to be found in tradition. Believers in this point of view refer to traditional or sacred documents, such as the Bible, or the Koran, Dr. Spock, or to written or unwritten law, and find their answers there. Others believe that the answer to that kind of question is to be found through logical, rational inquiry.

  But there is a third point of view, one which many would have difficulty taking seriously; namely, that the most valuable source of information about what is good for people is within every one of them. This belief holds that human beings have a deep, built-in notion of what they need, what benefits them and harms them, and that, if left alone, people will follow their human core, their Center, and find the correct path toward harmony with themselves, each other, and nature.

  The reader may find this an astonishing statement. Everything around us evidences the contrary. It seems that if left alone to do as they wish people will kill, plunder, rape, and consume themselves in sexual and drug orgies. Violence, sexual excess, drug abuse, sadism seem to be what people really want to do, we are told. That’s why we need law and order and discipline, isn’t it? What are we to believe?

  Transactional analysts believe that people are O.K., that is, good, fine, loving, cooperative, eager to help, beautiful, intelligent, healthy. Why then do they act so badly? Why do they smoke three packs of cigarettes a day; why do they eat too much; why do they kill themselves with alcohol and heroin? Why are they mean to each other, why do they steal and lie, let themselves be abused and exploited? The answer, we believe, is that they are scripted to act thus. In addition, I believe that once scripted we are encouraged to remain in our scripts by people who benefit from it. We are encouraged to smoke, drink, eat, and abuse drugs by the food and drug industries. We are aggressive, competitive, and individualistic because, as will be explained later, those traits make us easily exploitable as workers and citizens.

  But people aren’t just scripted to act in certain ways counseled by others. They are also scripted to ignore their own counsel. Scripting not only prescribes behavior for us, it also cuts us off from our own internal compass, our Center, the wisdom of our body which is capable of informing us what is good because it feels good and what is bad because it feels bad. Many people completely ignore their bodies. Some people even feel that their bodies are a lesser part of them, even that they are cursed by having a body. To them the fact that something feels good means that it is bad. The better it feels the worse it is. Sex, for instance, being one of the best-feeling activities, is one of the “worst” for us. Joy is sinful.

  I believe that we are able to know what is good for us if we can experience how it feels. When we listen to our bodies we find that cigarettes feel bad, that clean air feels good, that alcohol beyond a certain small amount feels bad, that cooperating feels good, that lying feels bad, that being in love feels good, that not getting and giving strokes feels bad, that certain work feels good and certain work feels bad, that sex without affection, and sometimes affection without sex, feels bad, that masturbation feels good. Overeating feels bad when you pay attention to the body after the initial comfort and tranquilizing effect of being stuffed. We can listen to our bodies and tell when we want to be alone and when we want to be with someone, when we want to sleep, when we want to walk, or sit or lie down.

  We are all to some extent split off from our bodies. But all of us also retain some good connections with them. Evidence of how a part of our body is connected to our Center is the way we reject certain harmful situations. Most of us will pull back our hand when it touches a hot stove. We are connected to our hand enough to feel the pain and thus pull back. Some of us will not be able to overeat; others can’t “hold their liquor” without throwing up; others are unable to inhale cigarette smoke without coughing; others can’t sit long without eventually having to do exercise; others can’t tollerate polluted air. Some can’t stand the side-effects of aspirin, sleeping pills, stimulants, and food with additives such as MSG or saccharin. Every one of the above examples is evidence of a good connection between the person’s Center (the self, consciousness, which decides what is good and what is bad for the person) and some part of her or his body which is being harmed. A good connection with our body helps us know what is harmful but also tells us what is beneficial for us. When we are Centered fresh water tastes good, clean air smells good, and we can tell what kind of food we need. If we need exercise our body tells us so, and when we go ahead and respond to the need it feels good. The same is true for our sexual needs. What feels good under these circumstances is good.

  Yet, you will say, if that is the case, why does heroin, for instance, feel so good? How come a deep drag on a cigarette is such a pleasure? Why is getting drunk so much fun? I would like to answer this question by explaining how joylessness (being split off from our bodies) leads to drug abuse.

  Powerful drugs like nicotine, ethyl alcohol, opiates, sedatives, and stimulants are, in effect, short cuts for Centering. They restore, for a short time, the connections between our Center and the rest of our bodies. They do this, at least partially, by “knocking out” the Pig Parent who does not want us to feel good. Different body splits react to different drugs, which explains why people prefer certain drugs to others.

  However, this connection is brief; the side effects of the drug are unpleasant after a while, and a new dose of the drug is needed to create well-being.

  The connection is fleeting, yet the drug remains in our body; the side effects of the drug as it accumulates become more marked. Some drugs (all the sedatives: alcohol, barbiturates, opiates, and some tranquilizers) require larger and larger doses to recreate the connection; and when the body is saturated with the drug it reacts violently by becoming ill when the drug is withdrawn. The body’s regulatory mechanisms go haywire under the influence of large dosages of drugs, more with some drugs than with others. Barbiturates and heroin as well as alcohol are the worst in this respect. Marijuana (ironically, given the nightmare of cruel and unusual punishment that is connected with its use) is one of the least likely to have that effect.

  Thus, injunctions and attributions that remove us from our bodies can result in drug addiction. When they don’t, they simply result in joylessness, a life in which we, ourselves, our Centers, are lodged somewhere in the head detached from the myriad pleasurable and unpleasurable sensations of the body. Because we feel no pleasure we are joyless. Because we feel no pain we don’t take care of our bodies until the pain is so acute that we cannot ignore it any longer, often too late, as in the case of smokers who feel no discomfort in their lungs until they have cancer, or overeaters who endure the pain of overweight until their heart gives way.

  The same mechanism that causes drug abuse is the source of another form of addiction which might be called consumerism. Buying feels good; having a new car, washing machine, or wardrobe feels good, and, just like drugs, buying is a ready avenue to pleasure. People become addicted to buying as others are addicted to drugs; they will go on buying binges and feel cravings to buy which are similar to the cravings of an alcoholic. The consumer’s “morning after” hangover, the damage done by his excesses, is his bills, to which he becomes a slave just as an alcoholic or junkie is a slave to drugs.

  Joylessness is unfortunately exploited by business interests. Drug use and consumerism are widely encouraged through the media and large numbers of people’s livelihoods depend upon the expenditures of a joyless population on drugs and essentially useless consumer items. We need only note the hue and cry of tobacco farmers when there is a threat to the consumption of cigarettes to realize how our country’s economy depends on the joylessness of its population. The situation is a vicious circle. Millions of crazed consumers travel billions of miles in their mobile homes, dune buggies, dirt bikes, tearing up the countryside wasting ener
gy, polluting the air, looking for the thrills which they could find within and among themselves and with the earth if they stopped and let their Centers communicate with what goes on around them.

  The expanding economy of which we Americans are so proud is predicated on a frantic earning, spending, manufacturing, selling, energy-consuming pace which eats up our resources. We sit in the midst of the vast dung pile of our gross national product desperately reaching for sweet smells, clean air, open spaces, sunshine, and the Good Life.

  Injunctions and Attributions for Joylessness

  Perhaps the most fundamental attack on the integrity of the human body which causes the initial and most important split in us is the way in which children’s sensuality is prevented from expressing itself.

  A great emphasis was made by Freud and his followers on infantile sexuality. I believe that while sexuality in children exists, Freudian theory makes more of it than fits reality.

  This is an important point because the Freudian perspective leads us to believe that we repress children’s sexuality and suggests that the rest of the child’s life is relatively without repression. But repression of sexuality is just a minor aspect of banal scripting for Joylessness. Repression of sensuality, that is, the ready connection between all the senses and our consciousness or Center, is a far more important factor in people’s lives. Sexuality is not fully developed in childhood and will blossom in adolescence in spite of anti-sex scripting. But our senses can be permanently split off from us by the time we reach our teens.