THE POLITICS OF ECSTASY Timothy Leary, Ph.D.
6. The Emotional Question
A. The Scientific Answer
What should I move toward? What direction my motion? What should I feel? The emotional and feeling questions.
Here science fails miserably to give us answers because there is little objective data, and the accepted theories of emotional behaviour-the psychiatric-are naive, inadequate, pompously trivial. The best-known theory of emotions, the Freudian, is a hodgepodge of platitude, banality and rabbinical piety.
All that Freud said is that modern man and society are completely dishonest. Society lies to the individual and forces him to lie to himself. Freud called this process of self-deception the unconscious. The unconscious is hidden. Freud (the lie detector who lied) conscientiously listed the various ways in which man prevaricates and then developed a system of humiliating cross-examination and spirit-breaking brainwashing which forces the rare "successful" patient to give up his favourite pack of lies (which he chose as being the best solution to an impossible situation) and grovelingly to accept the psychoanalyst's system of dishonesty. Have you ever noticed how unbearably "dead" and juiceless psychoanalysts and their patients are? The only cheerful fact about psychoanalysis is that most patients don't get cured and are stubborn enough to preserve their own amateur and original lie in favour of the psychoanalyst's conforming lie.
If anyone has any lingering doubt about the superstitious and barbarian state of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, reflect on this fact. Today, fifty years after Freud, the average mental hospital in the United States is a Kafkaesque, Orwellian, prison camp more terrifying than Dachau because the captors claim to be healers. Two hundred years ago our treatment of the village idiot and nutty old Aunt Agatha was gently utopian compared to the intolerant savagery of the best mental hospital.
So where do we find the scientific answer to the emotional question? Can you really bear to know?
Emotions are the lowest form of consciousness. Emotional actions are the most contracted, narrowing, dangerous form of behaviour.
The romantic poetry and fiction of the last 200 years has quite blinded us to the fact that emotions are an active and harmful form of stupor.
Any peasant can tell you that. Beware of emotions. Any child can tell you that. Watch out for the emotional person. He is a lurching lunatic.
Emotions are caused by biochemical secretions in the body to serve during the state of acute emergency. An emotional person is a blind, crazed maniac. Emotions are addictive and narcotic and stupifacient.
Do not trust anybody who comes on emotional.
What are the emotions?
In a book entitled Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, written when I was a psychologist, I presented classifications of emotions and detailed descriptions of their moderate and extreme manifestations. Emotions are all based on fear. Like an alcoholic or a junkie, the frightened person reaches for his favourite escape into action.
Commanding, competing, punishing, aggressing, rebelling, complaining, abasing, submitting, placating, agreeing, fawning, flattering, giving.
The emotional person cannot think; he cannot perform any effective game action (except in acts of physical aggression and strength). The emotional person is turned off sensually. His body is a churning robot; he has lost all connection with cellular wisdom or atomic revelation. The person in an emotional state is an inflexible robot gone beserk.
What psychologists call love is emotional greed and self-enhancing gluttony based on fear.