Heresy Channel

[mads]

So last Friday was the feast of St. Joan of Arc and I did a little more reading on her online, plus started a second readthrough of Mark Twain's little-known book 'Joan of Arc'. I also found a small History Channel article about her called '7 Things You Didn’t Know About Joan of Arc'. Most of it was factual and harmless enough, but one of the items

Comments

[lirazel]

I have often wondered whether the "experts" who speculate thusly have ever worked with people whose mental illness takes the form of religion-based hallucinations? I have, and based on that experience and reading material such as her trial testimony, I say St. Joan was sane. Samples of insane behavior I have personally experienced include a woman who wanted to kill local children "while they were still innocent," another woman who walked into the woods in a snowstorm without a coat as she followed "God's voice," and a man who saw angels in every shiny surface. Compared to these and others, St. Joan's visitors gave her... well, you know all that.

[mads]

Exactly. By these armchair experts' logic, you should see tide-changing battle commanders at least once a year.

[shachihoko]

I came to the conclusion about two decades ago that "psychologists" are mostly concerned with trying to fit people's mindsets into certain boxes - trying to take everything about someone's personality and behavior and break it down into discrete, manageable categories, whether "healthy" or "unhealthy".

That's not to say the profession is a useless one ... just one that I don't have a lot of patience for dealing with unnecessarily. Getting "expert opinions" on historical figures like Joan of Arc is one of those cases.

Although I'm tempted to say the "experts" might have been on the payroll of the Church of England ...

[lirazel]

Don't know about across the Pond, but she's in our Calendar as "Visionary and Soldier."

[mads]

You've hit on something when you say psychology tries too often to forcibly fit people into boxes-- as a science, it is not as exact as the more empirical fields (and never will be) because it deals directly with a human element that makes a hash of all patterns and equations and otherwise dependably consistent variables upon which rational conclusions can be drawn from. I'm talking of course about free will. It is the same thing with sociology, historical science, and certain flavors of anthropology and paleoanthropology, all of which have their boxes into which they want to put the human person, and from which he is constantly escaping.

And, haha, perhaps, but even when reading the histories, I try to stay away from putting France and England in a box myself. French saints may have advised Joan, but after all, there were English saints at the time too, and I'm certain they were no less patriotic than their French counterparts.