Dear Unknown Friends:

I’ll begin by saying, carefully and with much feeling: for humanity to be truly civilized, the knowledge present in Aesthetic Realism is necessary. Some of the evidence for that statement is in the 1966 lecture that we are publishing in two parts: Mental Health Is about Perfection and Imperfection, by Eli Siegel. This issue contains part 2.

Four days before Mr. Siegel gave the lecture, a mass shooting had taken place: Charles Whitman had gone to the top of the clock tower at the University of Texas, Austin, and gunned down people below. This talk, so deep, vivid, careful, subtle, definitive, became part of the series on mental health Mr. Siegel was in the midst of giving. In the first half of the talk (published in our previous issue), Mr. Siegel discussed two poems of Robert Browning, “Johannes Agricola in Meditation” and “Porphyria’s Lover,” as a means of commenting on the mind of Charles Whitman. In the second half, he refers also to Richard Speck, who had murdered 8 student nurses in Chicago 2½ weeks before the Whitman killings.

What Hurts Mind

Eli Siegel is the person of thought who explained what the most hurtful thing in the human mind is—the thing in everyone, in each of us, that weakens our mind; that interferes with every aspect of our life (though we feel, somewhere, it’s smart and necessary); the thing that’s the source of all unkindness. It is contempt, the desire “to get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.” Mr. Siegel showed that the big fight in every human being is between the desire to have contempt and the desire to like the world honestly, to know and be just to what’s not ourselves.

And he has described how it’s this fight—between liking the world and scorning it—come to a certain point, which has a person’s mind be in a state of disaster. For example, someone has been in a long battle about valuing people or despising them; can’t make up one’s mind—but “then at a certain time…decide[s:] ‘To hell with meeting people and liking things.’” Said Mr. Siegel:

Other people are still fighting it out—that is the only difference…. Some people make a thorough job of it and others just play at it, dismally play. [TRO 562, 561]

Humanity will be civilized when we are learning about this fight in us between respect and contempt—and criticizing our own contempt. Humanity will be civilized when we are studying the landmark Aesthetic Realism principle “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves”—because this study includes the seeing that real care for self is inseparable from, arises from, is the same as its opposite, justice to the outside world. In coming years it will be seen that the knowledge I’m describing is as fundamental to humanity’s being civilized as knowledge of the alphabet is.

And So, Perfection & Imperfection

In the lecture we’re publishing, Mr. Siegel shows that when a mind is faring ill there’s a false relation in it of perfection and imperfection. The sense of oneself as somehow perfect, even as one may condemn oneself and be aware of various lacks, is of the very texture of contempt. This notion of oneself as perfect has everyday forms. It is in the feeling, “What I want is right—because I want it.” A sense of one’s perfection is in the feeling that one can deal with truth any way one pleases, change any fact to suit oneself. The making oneself superior to truth may be ordinary, but it’s smug, dangerous, ugly, fundamentally crazy (and we see it in a virulent form in some of the highest reaches of government). There is a sense of oneself as perfect in the feeling that one need not question oneself. Oneself as perfect is in the constant equation that a person who makes me important or seems to like me is good; a person who does not is bad. Oneself as perfect is in the taking for granted that any feeling we have must be correct.

Here, now, is the conclusion of the lecture Mental Health Is about Perfection and Imperfection. The person giving it, Eli Siegel, saw justly and truly the human mind—including mind at its greatest, most beautiful, and mind at its worst. He understood mind, in a child or adult. I consider him the person who most encouraged people’s minds to be strong and good, and I thank him with all my life.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Mental Ill Health—What Is It?

By Eli Siegel

There are all kinds of documents about the Texas occurrence, with various ways of seeing it. Take, for example, an editorial in that popular journal the Daily News:

Does a headshrinker have any responsibility to society at large? Or is it perfectly proper and legal for him to hear a patient vow to commit a crime, even wholesale murder, and not pass that information along to the police, the FBI, or some other appropriate government body?…Perhaps a police check into the past record of Texas madman Charles J. Whitman would not have revealed enough to warrant his legal detention. But many such individuals do have significant pasts….Should our psychiatrists formulate and abide by a professional code for dealing with such situations?

This whole problem of what to do has seemed too much for people. The word headshrinker, meanwhile, is interesting. It’s present-day vernacular, or slang, or with-it language, for psychiatrist. The instinct behind it is that a person who is mentally ill has too swelled a head.

We have come to the question of what is mental illness? The definition I once gave of a mentally ill person is a person who isn’t trying sincerely and enough to relate his or her care for oneself and possible care for the world. Any person who doesn’t do that is mentally ill. And it isn’t a static situation.

The News has the phrase “responsibility to society at large,” and that word responsibility is used a great deal these days. But what if a responsibility isn’t accompanied by like? Suppose a man had a child and was responsible for the child as to many things, but didn’t like that child a bit. It would be an awful situation, the having a lot of responsibility and no like. If you have a responsibility, the other thing is: do you have any like?

“Does a headshrinker have any responsibility to society at large?” Yes, a psychiatrist has a responsibility. But how can one tell the difference, when there are thoughts of a certain kind, between the ones that won’t become actions and the ones that will? A person says, “I feel like pouring this whole cauldron of soup on all the guests.” The statisticians have found that such a thought is followed by action—pouring soup on the guests—perhaps once out of 18,100 times.

“Is it perfectly proper and legal for him to hear a patient vow to commit a crime…” As far as I can see, Whitman didn’t vow to commit a crime; he said he thought of it. “…and not pass that information along to the police…?” Everyone knows that if you pass on such information—and it’s sad—the police will say, “We have to wait till he does something.” Unless he does something, he’s seen as being as good a citizen as any. —‍Well, this matter is very large. And the only way out of it is that people criticize themselves as part of life itself.

“Perhaps a police check into the past record of Texas madman Charles J. Whitman…” The illuminating, strictly speaking illuminating, thing about Whitman was in terms of his getting power quietly: the fact that he collected interest from loans he gave to his friends. That’s a certain way of getting power quietly, and it’s a little like what he did from the tower: killing a person from a distance. You lend money and you get interest. This person did that, in fact did it while he was a Marine. Aquinas was right—he questioned interest.

Is There a “Criminal Mind”?

In the same paper there was a story which, while it isn’t exactly useful, does have the national, painful uncertainty in it. This is called “2 Routes for Mentally Ill: Cure or Tragedy.” It’s by Richard Lyons, who writes:

Every hour of every day of every year an American is murdered…. All too often a killing is…the final pathetic result of an outburst of confusion of a warped mind.

Persons have written on criminology for a long time, but it can be said to have begun in the 1860s in Italy with Lombroso, who was followed by Ferri: there was the attempt to distinguish something called the criminal mind. It still hasn’t been distinguished. Some things can obviously be said. There are persons, for example, who have been in court thirty times for picking pockets, and one could say that such a person has a criminal mind. There are repeaters. There are persons who will do things, but it happens it’s very hard to distinguish them except in terms of their actually committing a crime. Also, there are differentiations. A pickpocket will not talk like a bank embezzler. Some “innocent” person who seems to be a librarian is working in a bank, and what she’s doing is embezzling every week. She looks like a grandma, as they say. Then there are those who have done worse things. The criminal mind has not yet been clearly distinguished from the ill mind, or the psychopathic mind, the alienated mind.

Lyons has the phrase “[the] result of an outburst of confusion of a warped mind.” But could this warped mind have gone on without the outburst of confusion? And what made for the outburst of confusion? Around the time of the Rorschach test and also of the revealing drug, the drug that makes one talk—a little after—there was the phrase the precipitating stress. What is the thing that made the camel jump over the safe, or the wolf jump over the fence? It was felt there is the precipitating stress, because it seems you can have a “warped mind” for years and all that happens to you is you have a “warped mind.” So, why should there be the “outburst of confusion”?

With Charles Whitman, that last point may have been his feeling that he didn’t understand wholly what he was studying at college, although he was doing pretty well; or the way his mother talked to him when she came to Texas to stay with him; or what he felt was a certain defiance of him by his wife, because she was working elsewhere and sometimes husbands haven’t liked that. And I’m quite sure there was the feeling that professors were acting superior. There are quite a few factors; and somewhere in the computing, his general feeling of hate changed into the desire to embody it. It might not have happened. We don’t know entirely what makes this change to that, just as we don’t know the last point when water changes into ice—because the process has been going on: it’s colder and colder and then it changes into ice.

I feel that there was something Whitman saw as the last straw. The last straw is a little like the precipitating stress. Then, there’s a feeling of too much. That relation between concept and doing something can occur—as, say, many persons have troubled dreams but very few decide to walk while they’re sleeping. So what is it that makes a person not only sleep but walk?

Are the Opposites There?

The article continues:

All too often the persons who commit the ultimate outrage against their fellow humans were given psychiatric examinations—and allowed to go their way. Four months before Charles J. Whitman spewed death from his Austin aerie a mental examination revealed that he was a highly disturbed young man.

To live is to be disturbed. It’s how you’re disturbed.

Richard F. Speck…was arrested on charges that he methodically slew eight defenseless girls, three years after he was examined by a prison psychiatrist. The doctor reported that the suspect, arrested 40 times before the Chicago murders, had no serious mental problems.

We see the opposites, including perfection and imperfection, planning and spontaneity, in these things. Since Speck is mentioned—never was a campaign better planned than that one. Talk about giving attention to every detail! And Whitman, with all the tumult—what a planner. So we have plan as perfection, and spontaneity and impulse as imperfection. The impulse itself is imperfect but it’s managed with some perfection.

Then the writer quotes Frederick Wertham:

“This man (Whitman) had a serious mental disease yet he did not get the treatment he needed. But the Chicago [Speck] case is quite different,” Dr. Wertham continued. “There was no indication that the suspect is insane but he does appear to be an alcoholic.”

When somebody reads in the Daily News that Whitman is insane but Speck is not—I feel a reader of the Daily News could think maybe there’s something wrong with both of them. The writer says:

Despite extraordinary advances on other health frontiers, relatively little progress has been made against diseases of the mind.

What Is Mental Health?

The meaning of mental health is still not seen. To have mental health, as people see it, is not to do something which will make a good many persons think you don’t have mental health. What is mental health as such? It’s very important to see whether mental health is based on like of the world and good will. The first form of lack of mental health is insufficient like of reality, which is the same as insufficient good will. That should be looked into. Aesthetic Realism says that a person who doesn’t like the outside world sufficiently, who doesn’t have good will toward it, is in a state of uncertain mental health.

Leaders in the mental health field agree that the nation needs to improve the facilities for treatment of mental illness and to train thousands more people to run them.

What that means is that there are lots of persons, ever so many persons, who don’t like what is different from themselves, who don’t like the world they’re in, who don’t like people sufficiently who represent that world. But that fact is not in the article.

A Fight in Everyone

Let’s take this statement, with which I began: that every human being is in an awful fight, constant, between perfection and imperfection. There’s a desire to certify oneself as good, okay, knowing. And there’s a feeling also that there are so many things one can’t do, and so many things one does that one shouldn’t. Is this true? According to Aesthetic Realism, a certain intersection of feeling that one is perfect and feeling one is seen as acting imperfectly or is imperfect, can make for a desire to kill. It can make for other desires. One can simply be objectionable. Or one can simply keep oneself apart. But this is a problem that every person has: how can I relate my desire to praise myself utterly and my seeing that there are things I do that I cannot say are good? The situation can be put this way: If a person has a tremendous desire to say he’s all right and fine and perfect, yet every hour sees something, or might see something, that says he isn’t—what kind of state is that?

Let’s say there is someone in a mental hospital and that someone, as often happens, has a look of beatific self-approval. There are a few looks in such a place, but one of them is beatific self-approval. Another is great glumness and sullenness. But even in the glumness there can be something like self-approval.

The article quotes a statement about community centers for mental health: “‘A person who walks into one of our centers never walks out without talking to someone.’” Well, the talking to someone is something. But what should be talked about is the large question.

What should be talked about is somewhere in the two poems of Robert Browning that I read: “Johannes Agricola in Meditation” and “Porphyria’s Lover.” What we can get from them is that seeing perfection in the wrong way can make one very angry and, as in “Porphyria’s Lover,” may have an effect on the life of another living being. Something we can get is this: smugness can make for murder.

In Us

The ingredients, the bases, the possibilities that the very worst person could have are in oneself. They are arranged differently. It’s like what can happen with steel: it can be arranged to be a cube, or it can be arranged to be a sharp knife. So there is a desire in everyone to see oneself as perfect. Meantime, there’s the other thing: the seeing of what else is present, and the seeing of oneself as being different from everything else and also like everything. Aesthetic Realism says: like the world more because it’s the only way of liking yourself on a basis that will work. The other ways of liking yourself are fallacious, flaccid, and fraudulent.

So if there’s going to be an interest in what is best for individuals, the implications of the two poems of Browning should be studied—as was done somewhat this evening.