SpokenVerse | Ageing Schoolmaster by Vernon Scannell (read by Tom O'Bedlam) @SpokenVerse | Uploaded February 2013 | Updated October 2024, 21 minutes ago.
A persistent fear of death is called Thanatophobia. Sufferers will usually have other unhelpful thinking habits such as hypochondria. There are some kinds of human behaviour that such psychological labels describe very well.
If Psychology would stop there and not seek to categorise, explain and modify human beings then it might qualify as a science. But Psychology doesn't stop there: it hangs out a shingle and touts for business in the name of Psychiatry.
Sigmund Freud equipped doctors with a set of very-adhesive labels to stick on anybody they didn't like. Freud said that there is no such thing as Fear of Death because nobody really believes they are going to die. What you're really afraid of, he said, is that you Dad is going to cut your balls off because he jealous of the sexual relationship you have with your Mom. I'm not kidding, he really did say that. He added that you have hidden this fear from yourself by disguising it as fear of death. If you can bring yourself to believe crap like this, then perhaps you're qualified to be a psychiatrist.
Freud fooled a generation of quasi-intellectuals. Nothing that he said is believed now - except Conversion Disorder - an invention doctors still find useful as a labour-saving device. It means that pain is all in your mind - not in your leg or in your belly where you feel it, and it's caused by "stress". It has never been proved that Conversion Disorder actually exists and, as far as I know, no study has been done.
A scientist might point out that "the limbic system evolved in early mammals to control fight-or-flight responses and react to both emotionally pleasurable and painful sensations." Evolution doesn't work backwards: anything that requires a sophisticated mind can't affect systems that are common to all mammals.
Psychiatry has no labels nor vocabulary to describe normal, laudable human conduct. If it were a science then it would spend some time studying what's right with human beings, rather than only what's wrong with them. It's strange that Art and Science comes from people that psychiatrists label - Artists are Schizophrenic or Bipolar, Scientists are Autistic.
You have to suspect a profession that is so obviously masquerading as a science. It can't prove any of its propositions and it doesn't try, yet nobody challenges it. (Well, except Scientologists and look what happens to them). All psychiatric practices of fifty years ago are now considered harmful. Psychiatry is a pernicious False Belief System. Like other money-making professions Psychiatry is a conspiracy against the layman.
Richard Feynman coined the term Cargo Cult Science to describe social sciences:
He said:
"I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are
examples of what I would like to call Cargo Cult Science. In the
South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw
airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same
thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like
runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a
wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head
like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's
the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're
doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the
way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So
I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the
apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but
they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land."
http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm
I'm a little apprehensive about death and dying. I'd be crazy if I weren't.
.
Paintings:
by Andre Henri Dargelas, 1828-1906. The School Room and Blind Man's Buff.
by Albert Anker, 1831-1910. The Village School, Sinnender Knabe, Portrait of a Girl
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Anker
And now another autumn morning finds me
With chalk dust on my sleeve and in my breath,
Preoccupied with vague, habitual speculation
On the huge inevitability of death.
Not wholly wretched, yet knowing absolutely
That I shall never reacquaint myself with joy,
I sniff the smell of ink and chalk and my mortality
And think of when I rolled, a gormless boy,
And rollicked round the playground of my hours,
And wonder when precisely tolled the bell
Which summoned me from summer liberties
And brought me to this chill autumnal cell
From which I gaze upon the april faces
That gleam before me, like apples ranged on shelves,
And yet I feel no pinch or prick of envy
Nor would I have them know their sentenced selves.
With careful effort I can separate the faces,
The dull, the clever, the various shapes and sizes,
But in the autumn shades I find I only
Brood upon death, who carries off all the prizes.
A persistent fear of death is called Thanatophobia. Sufferers will usually have other unhelpful thinking habits such as hypochondria. There are some kinds of human behaviour that such psychological labels describe very well.
If Psychology would stop there and not seek to categorise, explain and modify human beings then it might qualify as a science. But Psychology doesn't stop there: it hangs out a shingle and touts for business in the name of Psychiatry.
Sigmund Freud equipped doctors with a set of very-adhesive labels to stick on anybody they didn't like. Freud said that there is no such thing as Fear of Death because nobody really believes they are going to die. What you're really afraid of, he said, is that you Dad is going to cut your balls off because he jealous of the sexual relationship you have with your Mom. I'm not kidding, he really did say that. He added that you have hidden this fear from yourself by disguising it as fear of death. If you can bring yourself to believe crap like this, then perhaps you're qualified to be a psychiatrist.
Freud fooled a generation of quasi-intellectuals. Nothing that he said is believed now - except Conversion Disorder - an invention doctors still find useful as a labour-saving device. It means that pain is all in your mind - not in your leg or in your belly where you feel it, and it's caused by "stress". It has never been proved that Conversion Disorder actually exists and, as far as I know, no study has been done.
A scientist might point out that "the limbic system evolved in early mammals to control fight-or-flight responses and react to both emotionally pleasurable and painful sensations." Evolution doesn't work backwards: anything that requires a sophisticated mind can't affect systems that are common to all mammals.
Psychiatry has no labels nor vocabulary to describe normal, laudable human conduct. If it were a science then it would spend some time studying what's right with human beings, rather than only what's wrong with them. It's strange that Art and Science comes from people that psychiatrists label - Artists are Schizophrenic or Bipolar, Scientists are Autistic.
You have to suspect a profession that is so obviously masquerading as a science. It can't prove any of its propositions and it doesn't try, yet nobody challenges it. (Well, except Scientologists and look what happens to them). All psychiatric practices of fifty years ago are now considered harmful. Psychiatry is a pernicious False Belief System. Like other money-making professions Psychiatry is a conspiracy against the layman.
Richard Feynman coined the term Cargo Cult Science to describe social sciences:
He said:
"I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are
examples of what I would like to call Cargo Cult Science. In the
South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw
airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same
thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like
runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a
wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head
like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's
the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're
doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the
way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So
I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the
apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but
they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land."
http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm
I'm a little apprehensive about death and dying. I'd be crazy if I weren't.
.
Paintings:
by Andre Henri Dargelas, 1828-1906. The School Room and Blind Man's Buff.
by Albert Anker, 1831-1910. The Village School, Sinnender Knabe, Portrait of a Girl
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Anker
And now another autumn morning finds me
With chalk dust on my sleeve and in my breath,
Preoccupied with vague, habitual speculation
On the huge inevitability of death.
Not wholly wretched, yet knowing absolutely
That I shall never reacquaint myself with joy,
I sniff the smell of ink and chalk and my mortality
And think of when I rolled, a gormless boy,
And rollicked round the playground of my hours,
And wonder when precisely tolled the bell
Which summoned me from summer liberties
And brought me to this chill autumnal cell
From which I gaze upon the april faces
That gleam before me, like apples ranged on shelves,
And yet I feel no pinch or prick of envy
Nor would I have them know their sentenced selves.
With careful effort I can separate the faces,
The dull, the clever, the various shapes and sizes,
But in the autumn shades I find I only
Brood upon death, who carries off all the prizes.
