Ritalin on the way out?

Good to see that NICE, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, has published new guidelines saying UK doctors should only prescribe ritalin for children with ADHD (attention deficit disorder) if absolutely necessary.

I'm rather dubious about the huge rise of diagnoses in ADHD in the US and UK that we've seen over the last 30 years (ever since Ritalin first became commercially available).

Alot of the time, the diagnosis is a way for parents to get special treatment for their children, such as extra time in exams.

I know of one mother, for example, who is highly ambitious for her children, to the point of spending thousands of pounds on extra-curricular tutoring for her children.

Last time I saw her, she had managed to get her children diagnosed for both dyslexia and ADHD, which meant they got at least an hour extra in each of their public exams.

They were also put on ritalin, which supposedly helps them concentrate and work better.

Yeah, but at a cost! It's basically letting the children know that they don't / can't function effectively on their own, but need a chemical boost to be 'normal'. What a great way to make sure they have a cocaine habit, or some other form of substance abuse, later in life.

Never mind accepting if you're not the most academic person (and in fact they were both fine). Let's get a chemical upgrade!

Ritalin, let's remind ourselves, is basically amphetamine. Imagine, 5% of our children on speed...

If we need to drug up millions of kids just so they can fit into our society, then maybe its the society thats fucked, and not the kids.

Jonny Wilkinson and quantum physics

I'm definitely going to buy the upcoming autobiography of Jonny Wilkinson, one of my sporting heroes. The World Cup-winning rugby star's book doesn't sound anything like the usual sporting autobiography rubbish. Instead, it sounds like a deeply spiritual account of his struggle with a crippling fear of failure, and eventual arrival at a Buddhist outlook on life.

Wilco writes in The Times that his fear of failure was so powerful that he didn't feel any satisfaction or pleasure even after winning the rugy World Cup with a drop goal in the last minute.

He would practice obsessively:

"Each week leading up to the big day, I hit about 250 to 300 practice place kicks alone. I average 200 to 250 punts using my left foot and exactly the same number using my right. A daily total of 20 dropped goals with each foot and 15 to 20 restarts, six to seven times a week, would pretty much constitute a solid preparational build-up. That makes a total of about 1,000 kicks to prepare for just 20. That's near enough 50 rehearsals for each single defining event. To me that has been a totally acceptable ratio. My longest session on record ran for a hefty five hours and then another hour and a half later that same evening. I have been totally obsessive when it comes to getting things right, never stopping until I was happy."

"It worked in many ways but it was a fairly destructive method and the success made it an addictive one. It seemed to touch on my obsessive streak, taking it to a new level, and before long it was getting well out of hand. The final whistles had barely sounded and I had already begun sacrificing for the next weekend, afraid that if I stopped to celebrate and embrace it I would have severe consequences to face.

"I think [his fear of failure] was rooted in an even deeper fear of death,” he says. “I couldn't figure out how to avoid death: it was like a game I could not win. The closer I got to family and friends and the better things got, the more I had to lose."

But he arrived at a higher understanding after reading about quantum physics:

"I read about Schrodinger's Cat [a renowned thought experiment in physics] and it had a huge effect on me. It was all about the idea that an observer can change the world just by looking at something; the idea that mind and reality are somehow interconnected. It is difficult to put into words, but it hit me like a steam train. I came to understand that I had been living a life in which I barely featured."

"I do not like religious labels, but there is a connection between quantum physics and Buddhism, which I was also getting into. Failing at something is one thing, but Buddhism tells us that it is up to us how we interpret that failure. The so-called Middle Way is about seeing everything as interconnected - success and failure, victory and defeat. Who is to say that the foundations of success in the 2003 World Cup were not built on the failures that went before?"

Now, he says:

"my faith has given me a handle on it, based around the ideas of rebirth and karma. It has also given me the ability to understand that rugby, like life, will also come to an end. I guess I had been trying to block that out, hoping that it would last for ever. But I have accepted my career will finish one day and I am in a place that will enable me to make that transition comfortably. I will not have to reinvent myself to cope with life after rugby."

“My motivation today has nothing to do with status, money or ego. Before I wanted to be the best in the world and I would watch other players to see how I measured up. Now when I do something great on the rugby pitch it is not about being better than others but about exploring my talent. I look around at the spectators and their enjoyment at having seen a great game. I reflect on the fact that my club, Newcastle, has become stronger, something that is good for the health of the business and the staff. My fulfilment is no longer about self-gratification; it is about seeing the happiness of others.”

Here's some more stuff about how he learnt to control his moods:

"When I allow myself to feel great, letting in only the most positive and optimistic thoughts, then great things start to happen. When I decide to let instinct and compassion drive me instead of judgment, then good people seem to appear in my life and nice things begin to occur for them, too.

What helped me to notice this first, however, was in fact the flip side of the coin. It was the impact of my negative and self-pitying moods.

The mornings when I got out of bed the wrong side or woke up feeling a little off were so often followed by awful “why me?” days when everything just seemed to go wrong. Have you ever stepped back to look at the damage you cause in other people's lives when you are concerned only with moaning about your own misfortune or taking out your frustrations on them? I did, and I started to look at how all those bad days could easily have been great for me and those around me if only I'd shaken off the ill-feeling.

If I open my eyes and I feel a little low, with a touch of anger now, I take a bit of time to drive the negativity away. I concentrate on how lucky I am to be in the position I am, with the friends I have around me. I inspire myself by concentrating on thoughts of what might happen in my life if I really pull out all the stops and how I could help others to achieve their goals, too. I retain a memory of something which makes me laugh out loud and I make sure I leave my front door with a smile on my face. I choose to have a great day and in doing so I choose to help my colleagues at least have the option of a good one, too.

As long as I never stop trying to achieve more my route will be OK

If I stop to consider how any one of the many factors that make up my life today came into being, I will find its path littered with coincidences and chance. If I trace my life back far enough I will notice some nonsensical and, to be honest, unfeasibly ridiculous moments when my path crossed with someone or something at just the right time.

At other times important people appeared from nowhere and stepped into my life and made it better. There were also instances when my world was turned upside down, my trust tested and my ego crushed. I know now some of these moments actually saved my career in so many ways and others somehow managed to make me a better and stronger-performing person.

Back then I was blind and deaf to all this. Nowadays I try to listen to what my experiences are telling me - I truly believe the world has my best interests at heart - provided I am prepared to fight for those interests in the right way. I realise now I shouldn't be afraid when some new, unexpected (and probably unwelcome at the time) avenue suddenly opens up in front of me. I am on my way down a new road now, but my dreams and hopes are still the same as when I set off. As long as I never stop trying to achieve more, and to follow my dreams, then the route will be OK. It might not look exactly like the perfect map I envisioned at the beginning; I believe, instead, that it will turn out to be going somewhere far better.

That all makes sense to me now. Sort of, at least. But it certainly didn't for a very long time and I suffered because of it. If I hadn't worried so much, I would have made more of my time. And if I'd done that, I would have enjoyed life to a far greater extent and I might even have got to more or less where I was wanting to be a lot quicker.

I am still trying to make sense of all this. I probably never will. But I don't think that's a problem in the least. What I do know is that I feel a lot better in myself and enjoy life and success a lot more now. A lot more. And that's important. How can I explain? About how we can take in what is happening around us, the people, places and things, the good and the bad, and utilise them to move forward? It is a bit like creating a painting.

How we physically influence the outcome and mentally perceive what happens in front of our eyes determines the kind of picture of life that we will paint. Without our perceptions there is no real world out there. Our interpretations of what we see, taste, hear, touch and smell give us our attitudes, our limits, our successes and our failures. They give us the memories of our pasts and dreams of our futures.

These and all the emotions which go hand in hand with them become the colours from which we can choose when we want to begin the painting process. Our actions, which are driven by our feelings, offer us the opportunity to live; they let us go out and leave a mark, they put the brush in our hands. Actions cause things to happen and from those outcomes we learn, we improve and we find the best path for an amazing existence. We make our own masterpiece. And it all starts from a blank canvas.

I base my perceptions and beliefs on a natural desire for peace and the desire to experience exciting opportunities. The quality of how I see things determines how much of my zest for doing good stuff, for being brilliant if you like, manages to shine through. We can all shuffle our views and interpretations around a bit to make a better life. Just look at the way we are able to put the past behind us and reinvent ourselves, if we so choose. We can throw away yesterday's painting and begin afresh tomorrow.

To make the best of life, sometimes you need to run into a few dead-ends and sometimes you have to be prepared to drop back and look at your painting from different angles. Once or twice we may be required to go back to the start before the realisation of the helpful or unhelpful really sinks in.

How ambition can be infectious

“I don't want to lose” is not the same sort of thought as “I want to win”. The message that this focus emits is totally different. The first is almost a plea for mercy which gives away any power you have as you cry out to be spared by chance.

The latter is an eminently stronger, more proactive intention which forces you to look inside and uncover the innate strength we all possess for making things happen.

As a member of an underdog team I have been pipped at the post too many times because when potential glory loomed, the grip of fear was stronger than the liberating effect of ambition. Fear is negative and inhibiting; ambition is positive and motivating. The effect is manifested in a team as a whole.

Focus the key to putting mind over matter

What we focus our minds on is more often than not what we end up with - well, pretty much what we end up with. There is a slight difference. In my head I can hit the ideal kick over and over again. In real life I probably can't but I reckon with the right preparation, understanding and conditions, like the ones in my mind, I could get damn close.

Practising flawlessly in the mind without even venturing anywhere near a field can actually improve my physical skills and begin to close the gap between imagination and reality. There is no harm in striving for perfection, there is only good. With my thoughts and imagination I am drawing the experience towards myself. With great actions I can finally receive it.

Psychoanalysis and CBT

The most vociferous criticism of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) in the British media has emerged from psychoanalysts and those sympathetic to psychoanalysis - and none has been more vocal than Darian Leader, a psychoanalyst and literary critic (the two tend to go together these days), who recently came out with a book called The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression, which he has been promoting by writing scathing articles about CBT.

This month, Leader was at it again, in a feature in the Guardian's G2, which labelled CBT a 'quick fix' for the soul, and asserted that it could never have the depth, honesty and psychological insight which psychoanalysis possesses.

Let's go through Leader's charges one by one, and see how they relate to psychoanalysis. As Jung wrote: "Our unwillingness to see our own faults and our projection of them onto others is the source of most quarrels...Projections change the world into the replica of one's own unknown face."

1) CBT is simplistic

Psychoanalysis asserts that all neuroses are the product of infantile sexual desires. It asserts that our infantile sexual desires are repressed by mysterious automatic and genetic biological mechanisms of repression, which render these infantile sexual desires completely inaccessible to the conscious mind. This despite the fact that taboos vary greatly from one culture to another, which suggests that at least some of our mechanisms of repression are culturally constructed and not biological.

Psychoanalysis asserts that chief among these unconscious infantile desires is the desire to sleep with one or other of our parents. This desire is, supposedly, completely inaccessible to our conscious mind, despite the existence of a whole genre of pornography show-casing MILFs (mothers I'd like to f*ck), not to mention the widespread proliferation of incest-themed porn. The popularity of this sort of porn would suggest that, actually, the desire to sleep with older mother-figures is not repressed from the conscious mind at all, but merely repressed from public view - which is a very different thing.

Still, Freud clung resolutely to the view that our neuroses came entirely from infantile sexual desires repressed in the unconscious, that were inaccessible to our conscious minds. This is the central orthodoxy of psychoanalysis.

The only person able to access these infantile sexual desires in our unconscious is the psychoanalyst, who delves into our unconscious through hypnosis, dream-interpretation, free association and other techniques.

However, the psychoanalyst will know before the patient even lies down on the couch what he or she will find in their particular unconscious: repressed sexual desires from infancy, directed against one or other of the parents. This was the case for all neuroses, and must be shown to be true, over and over. All empirical phenomena must fit the theory, rather than vice versa.

Thus all dream phenomena are interpreted as supporting Freudian orthodoxy. Going upstairs in a dream is a symbol of copulation. Women's hats can, in Freud's words, "very often be interpreted with certainty as a genital organ (usually a man's)", as can overcoats and ties, tools, weapons, all forms of luggage, some forms of relative (particularly sons, daughters and sisters), and eyes, noses, ears and mouths. Likewise clocks and watches. Tables and cupboards refer to female genitalia because of their lack of curves. Naturally more obvious phenomena, such as umbrellas, cigars, artichokes and snakes, refer to male genitalia.

Phobias and anxiety disorders are the product of repressed and unconscious sexual desires. Agoraphobia in women, for example, was the repressed desire to be a prostitute, because prostitutes lean out of windows and beckon to passers-by.

All art and literature can also be reduced to symbols of the same highly limited set of infantile sexual complexes - in particular the Oedipus complex. In fact, all of human culture comes down to the Oedipus Complex, and our inability to face the fact we want to sleep with our mother.

Freud's obsession with sex and incest as the cause of most human behaviour often led him to characterize physical symptoms, such as epilepsy or appendicitis, as hysterical symptoms of sexual repression, despite the fact his patients would occasionally die shortly after his treatment of what were, in retrospect, clearly physical illnesses.

For example, his colleague Wilhelm Fliess believed there was a mystic connection between the nose and the genitalia, and that nervous disorders caused by masturbation could be corrected with operations on the nose. He attempted one such operation, by putting a metal tube into the nose of one young lady, who he and Freud diagnosed as suffering from masturbation-related neurasthenia. The operation was not a success, and the patient haemmouraged, and almost bled to death. Freud concluded that this too was a hysterical symptom of the girl's repressed sexual desire for himself - she "bled for love" of him.

Far from being profound or multi-faceted, psychoanalysis is in fact incredibly, wearyingly, simplistic.

2) CBT is authoritarian 'brain-washing'

Freud wrote in 'The Psychotherapy of Hysteria' that "it is of use if we can guess the ways in which things are connected up and tell the patient before we have uncovered it". Since the truth will always out, there is no danger of false trails. "We need not be afraid, therefore, of telling the patient what we think his next connection of thought is going to be. It will do no harm."

In other words, because the empirical facts had to be made to fit the ideological theory, it was often necessary to suggest the 'right', that is, the psychoanalytic, interpretation to patients.

In the early stages of psychoanalysis, when Freud believed all neuroses came from the patient's sexual abuse as a child, that meant forcing the patient to accept that they had been sexually abused by one or both parents, even if they denied any such memory. "The principal point", he wrote, "is that I should guess the secret [of sexual abuse] and tell it to the patient straight out."

In one famous case, Freud treated an 18-year-old girl, 'Dora', who was suffering from catarrgh, stomach troubles and a dragging right-foot. These could have been caused by the appendicitis which Dora suffered from as a child, which in its pelvic form can lead to dragging feet. It could also have been a nervous reaction to the fact her father was trying to set her up with a much older man, with whose wife Dora's father was having an affair.

However, Freud dismissed the possible environmental or physical causes of the girl's distress, claiming both the present symptoms and the supposed appendicitis were both hysterical symptoms of the real cause - Dora was a bed-wetter and a masturbator. Her nervous cough, he insisted, was a symptom of a repressed desire for fellatio.

Janet Malcolm writes: [during the Dora case], Freud often conducted himself more like a police inspector interrogating a suspect than like a doctor helping a patient. 'Aha!' Freud would say to Dora, an attractive and intelligent 18-year-old girl suffering from a nervous cough, migraine, and a kind of general youthful malaise. 'Aha! I know about you. I know your dirty little secrets. Admit that you were secretly attracted to Herr K. Admit that you masturbated when you were five. Look at what you're doing now as you lie there playing with your reticule - opening it, putting a finger into it, shutting it again!'

Either the patient signed up to a confessional which supported Freud's psychoanalytic ideology, or, if they declined to pay any more to listen to this guff, then they were 'in denial'.

The same went for followers of Freud. Either they signed up to the one true ideology of psychoanalysis, or if they criticized it then they were demonized as deviants, perverts and maniacs. Adler, for example, was characterized by Freud as "an abnormal individual, driven mad by ambition...his influence on others depending on his strong terrorism and Sadismus".

Jung likewise, when he broke with Freud's theories, was denounced as being "crazy" and "out of his wits", and even of suffering from "anal erotism". As Jung noted, "Anything which might make them think is written off as a complex...This protective function of [psychoanalysis] badly needs unmasking."

3) CBT is consumerist and market-driven

Psychoanalysis holds that the only way for a person with mental health problems to return to health is to undergo months or, more likely, years of one-on-one psychoanalysis at the hands of a psychoanalyst. Self-analysis is impossible - Freud alone was capable of this superhuman feat. Only those trained in Freud's theories and given his blessing were, supposedly, capable of understanding the unconscious' riddles (which always referred to infantile sexuality). The patient was therefore totally dependent on the psychoanalyst to guide them back to something resembling health.

As some of Freud's followers observed, this created a big temptation for the analyst to continue analysis for as long as possible, in order to get as much money as possible. Sandor Ferenczi, one of Freud's earliest and closest followers, wrote of the danger of psychoanalysts having "no concern for how long the analysis lasts, in fact the tendency to prolong it for purely financial reasons; in this way, if the analyst wishes, the patient is made into a lifelong taxpayer."

The danger is particularly acute because the patient is in such an unprivileged position versus the therapist - only the therapist understands the patient's unconscious, only the therapist knows how much progress the patient is making, or how long the 'cure' may take.

We note, in passing, one particularly outrageous incident in the 1920s, when an American psychoanalyst, one Horace Frink, was having an affair with a patient of his, the bank heiress Angelika Bijur. Rather than telling him to break off the affair, as ethics would suggest, Freud told Frink he was a borderline homosexual and should divorce his wife and marry Bijur immediately.

As Frederick Crews wrote in the New York Review of Books: "Freud's transparent aim was to get his own hands on some of the heiress Bijur's money. As he brazenly if perhaps semifacetiously wrote to Frink in steering him toward divorce and remarriage to Bijur, 'Your complaint that you cannot grasp your homosexuality implies that you are not yet aware of your phantasy of making me a rich man. If matters turn out all right let us change this imaginary gift into a real contribution to the Psychoanalytic Funds.'"

CBT, by contrast, is far more DIY. Indeed, it allows what psychoanalysis never allowed - that people could recover from emotional disorders through their own effort, without ever seeing a therapist. They could learn the basic techniques of CBT via tape courses, podcasts, the internet, books, or self-run support groups. This is how I overcame social anxiety - through a tape course which I downloaded for free through the net, and through a support group which I attended, which was also free.

So, in a way, psychoanalysis and CBT are both market-driven, but they are driven by different models of the market. In one, you have to buy your self-respect back from the monolithic corporation of psychoanalysis. In the other, the market is disintermediated (ie the middle man is rendered unnecessary) and, in an ebay or Napster version of the market, people access for free the information they need to make themselves better. It is DIY therapy.

4) CBT peddles rose-tinted, vacuous positivity

Freud wrote of depression in Mourning and Melancholia:

"The patient represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable; he reproaches himself, villifies himself and expects to be cast out and punished...It would be equally fruitless from a scientific and therapeutic point of view to contradict a patient who brings these charges against his ego. He must surely be right in some way...Indeed, we must at once confirm some of his statements without reservation. He really is as lacking in interest and as incapable of love as he says...It is merely that he has a keener eye for the truth than other people who are not melancholic."

Freud's disciple, Darian Leader, has just such a rosy view of human nature, declaring that "the very core of the self" was "self-sabotage, masochism, and despair".

As many critics have noted, the view of human nature which Freud was putting forward was little different from that put forward by Saint Augustine in the fifth century - we are born tainted with original sin, with the win of our violent and perverse infantile sexual desires. There is no escaping from them, we can only confess them to our psycho-analyst-confessor, and try to suppress them with our reason and morality. It is a deeply Judeo-Christian vision of humanity, and a deeply pessimistic vision, a Medieval vision.

By contrast, CBT emerges from a Hellenistic vision of humanity. The main influence for Albert Ellis' ideas was Stoic philosophy. Tim Beck likewise tells me that the inspiration for the 'Socratic technique' that is at the heart of CBT is from Greek philosophy.

He told me: "I came across the notion of Socratic Dialogue when I read about it in my college philosophy course – I believe it was in Plato’s Republic. I also was influenced by the Stoic philosophers who stated that it was a meaning of events rather than the events themselves that affected people. When this was articulated by Ellis, everything clicked into place."

Socrates, and the Stoics, Platonists and Aristotelians after him, put forward a radical view of mankind, that humans were blessed with divine reason, and that this made them capable of self-knowledge. They could - possibly with the help of a philosopher-mentor, but also on their own - analyze their thoughts and beliefs, challenge them, test their consistency and strength, and if they proved to be irrational or illogical, then replace them with wiser or more rational beliefs.

The Greeks believed there was nothing inherently 'sinful' about the self. It could certainly be stupid, irrational and self-destructive. Indeed, the Stoics believed that, in the words of Albert Ellis, '99% of the world are out of their fucking minds". But the potential for emancipation through reason and self-knowledge is almost always there.

I sign up to this vision of humanity. I am aware, from my own life, how difficult it is to change our mental habits, how much struggle and suffering is involved, how great are the barriers to self-knowledge. But I have also had direct experience that the mind does respond to rational self-inquiry, that some progress in self-knowledge is possible, that we can free ourselves from some of the torture chambers we have invented for ourselves.

This isn't a vacuous or facetious view of existence. It's the basis of western civilization, and a much sounder basis than the 15 or so very dodgy case studies on which Freud constructed his great edifice of pessimism and gloom.

Gurdjieff and Stoicism

I've been trying to find a parallel for Stoicism's unusual theory of tonos, or tension. As far as I can understand it, ancient Stoics believed that all beings had the sacred fire of the Logos within them, vibrating at different tensions.

In rocks, the tension is very low, because they are without consciousness, although they are still animate, in that the Logos is in them. In plants the rational fire vibrates at a greater tension, but still below consciousness. In animals, the level of tension and speed of vibration is greater still. But only in man does the Logos have the potential to vibrate into such a level of tension that it becomes self-aware, and can even - in the very advanced - continue to exist after the death of the body, if only for a short time.

To use an analogy - we are like cavemen, trying to create fire, by rubbing two sticks together. The two sticks are how we react to external impressions. Do we get swept away by them, in which case the sticks are damp, no tension is caused and no spark is created, or do we assert our rational autonomy from them, in which case friction is caused, and a spark of the sacred fire bursts out?

Most of us spend our whole lives sitting around on our haunches, rubbing two sticks together, trying to create a fire. Sometimes we get a spark, or a small plume of smoke, and we leap around celebrating, until the fire quickly goes out, and we have to get rubbing again. Yet perhaps, in one or two isolated spots around the earth, sages have succeeded in actually creating a fire, which lights up the night of ignorance around them, a pleasing site to the gods above. And people can journey to these fires, and light tapers, in an attempt to light their own fires back home.

Is there any similar teaching in ancient or modern sources? The only one I can think of is Gurdjieff, the early twentieth century magus from Armenia. I've been re-reading his disciple Ouspensky's accounts of their conversations in Moscow, in his book In Search of the Miraculous, and realizing quite how influenced by Greek, Gnostic and Hellenistic thought it is - it really is a crazy fusion of Platonic, Neo-Platonic, Pythagorean, Gnostic, alchemical and Stoic thought, with some eastern ideas thrown in.

Gurdjieff claimed that the vast majority of humans were simply reacting automatons. Something happened in the external world, and they reacted, blindly, automatically, and were swept along by impressions. In most cases, the 'I' simply did not exist - man is a chaos of competing impulses and reactions, one replacing the other every few seconds, so there is no coherent, responsible self.

How can such a coherent, responsible self be created?

He said: "Fusion, inner unity, is obtained by means of 'friction', by the struggle between 'yes' and 'no' in man. If a man lives without inner struggle, if everything happens in him without opposition, if he goes wherever he is drawn or wherever the wind blows, then he will remain as he is. But if a struggle begins within them, and particularly if there is a definite line to this struggle, then gradually, he begins to 'crystallize'."

He uses the image of creating an inner fire that alchemically fuses the elements in our personality:

"It is impossible to stabilize the interrelation of powders [ie the elements of our personality] in a state of mechanical mixture. But the powders may be fused, the nature of the powders make this possible. To do this, a special kind of fire must be lighted under the retort which, by heating and melting the powders, finally fuses them together....

"The fire by means of which fusion is attained is produced by 'friction', which in turn is produced in man by the struggle between 'yes' and 'no'. If a man gives way to all his desires, or panders to them, there will be no inner struggle in him, no 'friction', no fire. But if, for the sake of attaining a definite aim, he struggles with desires that hinder him, he will then create a fire which will gradually transform his inner world into a single whole."

Gurdjieff also believed that, if the necessary level of fire was created and the self crystallized sufficiently, it was possible for this self to survive as an 'astral body' after death. However, like the Stoics, he believed this astral body would only exist for a brief time until it too returned to the source.

Transformer

Am sitting in my living room drinking coffee and listening to Lou Reed's Transformer. Suddenly, it struck me that the title refers, in part, to the album's theme of transvestitism, the transformation from male to androgynous. It's also about the aesthetic transformation of oneself into a work of synthetic art, which I guess is also sort of transvestite.

And yet transvestites, while seeing themselves as a work of their own creation, also occasionally see themselves as wild childs of nature ('Yes I am mother nature's son', as Reed puts it). So there's a tension there, between the idea of being true to one's nature, as a homosexual, and the idea of creating oneself as a synthetic product, as say Andy Warhol did.

I Googled to find out if Reed was, in fact, gay, and came across this interesting account of how his parents tried to cure him of his homosexual tendencies with electro-shock therapy! As the song goes, 'White heat, white noise':

Nineteen fifty-nine was a bad year for Lou, seventeen, who had been studying his bad-boy role ever since he'd worn a black armband to school when the No. 1 R&B singer Johnny Ace shot himself back in 1954. Now, five years later, the bad Lou grabbed the chance to drive everyone in his family crazy. Tyrannically presiding over their middle-class home, he slashed screeching chords on his electric guitar, practiced an effeminate way of walking, drew his sister aside in conspiratorial conferences, and threatened to throw the mother of all moodies if everyone didn't pay complete attention to him. That spring, Lou's conservative parents, Sidney and Toby Reed, sent their son to a psychiatrist, requesting that he cure Lou of his homosexual feelings and alarming mood swings. The doctor prescribed a then popular course of treatment recently undergone by, among many others, the British writer Malcolm Lowry and the famous American poet Delmore Schwartz. He explained that Lou would benefit from a series of visits to Creedmore State Psychiatric Hospital. There, he would be given an electroshock treatment three times a week for eight weeks. After that, he would need intensive post-shock therapy for some time.

In 1959 you did not question your doctor. "His parents didn't want to make him suffer," explained a family friend. "They wanted him to be healthy. They were just trying to be parents, so they wanted him to behave." The Reeds nervously accepted the diagnosis.

Creedmore State Psychiatric Hospital was located in a hideous stretch of Long Island wasteland. The large state-run facility was equipped to handle some six thousand patients. Its Building 60, a majestically spooky edifice that stood eighteen stories high and spanned some five hundred feet, loomed over the landscape like a monstrous pterodactyl. Hundreds of corridors led to padlocked wards, offices, and operating theaters, all painted a bland, spaced-out cream. Bars and wire mesh covered the windows inside and out. Among the creepiest of these cells was the Electro Shock Treatment Center.

Into this unit one early summer day walked the cocky, troubled Lou. He was escorted through a labyrinth of corridors, unaware, he later claimed, that his first psychiatric treatment session at the hospital would consist of volts of electricity pulsing through his brain. Each door he passed through would be unlocked by a guard, then locked again behind him. Finally he was locked into the electroshock unit and made to change into a scanty hospital robe. As he sat uncomfortably in the waiting room with a group of people who looked to him like vegetables, Lou caught his first glimpse of the operating room. A thick, milky white metal door studded with rivets swung open revealing an unconscious victim who looked dead. The body was wheeled out on a stretcher and into a recovery room by a stone-faced nurse. Lou suddenly found himself next in line for shock treatment.

He was wheeled into the small, bare operating room, furnished with a table next to a hunk of metal from which two thick wires dangled. He was strapped onto the table. Lou stared at the overhead fluorescent light bars as the sedative started to take effect. The nurse applied a salve to his temples and stuck a clamp into his mouth so that he would not swallow his tongue. Seconds later, conductors at the end of the thick wires were attached to his head. The last thing that filled his vision before he lapsed into unconsciousness was a blinding white light.

In the 1950s, the voltage administered to each patient was not adjusted, as it is today, for size or mental condition. Everybody got the same dose. Thus, the vulnerable seventeen-year-old received the same degree of electricity as would have been given to a heavyweight ax-murderer. The current searing through Lou's body altered the firing pattern of his central nervous system, producing a minor seizure, which, although horrid to watch, in fact caused no pain since he was unconscious. When Lou revived several minutes later, however, a deathly pallor clung to his mouth, he was spitting, and his eyes were tearing and red. Like a character in a story by one of his favorite writers, Edgar Allan Poe, the alarmed patient now found himself prostrate in a dim waiting room under the gaze of a stern nurse. "Relax, please!" she instructed the terrified boy. "We're only trying to help you. Will someone get another pillow and prop him up. One, two, three, four. Relax." As his body stopped twitching, the clamp was removed, and Lou regained full consciousness. Over the next half hour, as he struggled to return, he was panicked to discover his memory had gone. According to experts, memory loss was an unfortunate side effect of shock therapy, although whatever brain changes occurred were considered reversible, and persisting brain damage was rare. As Reed left the hospital, he recalled, he thought that he had "become a vegetable."

"You can't read a book because you get to page seventeen and you have to go right back to page one again. Or if you put the book down for an hour and went back to pick up where you started, you didn't remember the pages you read. You had to start all over. If you walked around the block, you forgot where you were." For a man with plans to become, among other things, a writer, this was a terrible threat.

The aftereffects of shock therapy put Lou, as Ken Kesey wrote in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, "in that foggy, jumbled blur which is a whole lot like the ragged edge of sleep, the grey zone between light and dark, or between sleeping and waking or living and dying." Lou's nightmares were dominated by the sad, off-white color of hospitals. As he put it in a poem, "How does one fall asleep/When movies of the night await,/And me eternally done in." Now he was afraid to go to sleep. Insomnia would become a lifelong habit.

Lou suffered through the eight weeks of shock treatments haunted by the fear that in an attempt to obliterate the abnormal from his personality, his parents had destroyed him. The death of the great jazz vocalist Billie Holiday in July, and the haunting refrain of Paul Anka's no. 1 teen-angst ballad, "Lonely Boy," heightened his sense of distance and loss.

According to Lou, the shock treatments helped eradicate any feeling of compassion he might have had and handed him a fragmented approach. "I think everybody has a number of personalities," he told a friend, to whom he showed a small notebook in which he had written, "'From Lou #3 to Lou #8 - Hi!' You wake up in the morning and say, 'Wonder which of them is around today?' You find out which one and send him out. Fifteen minutes later, someone else shows up. That's why if there's no one left to talk to, I can always listen to a couple of them talking in my head. I can talk to myself."

At the end of the eight-week treatment, Lou was put on strong tranquilizing medication. "I HATE PSYCHIATRISTS. I HATE PSYCHIATRISTS. I HATE PSYCHIATRISTS," he would later write in one of his best poems, "People Must Have to Die for the Music." But in his heart he felt betrayed. If his parents had really loved him, they would never have allowed the shock treatments.

Stoicism in the American presidential election

It’s interesting to note the extent to which Stoicism still infuses American politics, by taking a brief look at the American presidential election. Nearly all the main candidates have been billed as ‘Stoic’ by their supporters, or detractors, in the American media.

John McCain, closet Zeus worshipper

John McCain, for example, claimed in his 1999 autobiography, Faith of My Fathers, that he was taught “stoic acceptance” by the absence of father in the US Navy.

Back in 2000, when he first bid to be the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, McCain’s stoicism, or Stoicism, was a point of contention in the campaign. One of George W. Bush’ advisors, the born-again Christian Martin Olasky, caused mischief by claiming that McCain wasn’t a Christian so much as a ‘Zeus worshipper’, like the tough guy heroes of Tom Wolfe’s novel, A Man In Full, which was published in 1998, and which Olasky reviewed when it came out.

The two heroes of Wolfe’s novel convert to Zeus-worshipping Stoicism after one of them happens to pick up a book on the Stoics while in prison. Tom Wolfe, in turn, got the idea for introducing his characters to Stoicism when he read the memoir of Admiral James Stockdale.

Stockdale, of course, is a similar figure to McCain – both were shot down as pilots during the Vietnam War, and both made their experience of surviving imprisonment and torture the foundation of their resilient moral attitude. For Stockdale, this moral attitude was explicitly Stoic – he memorized the sayings of Epictetus and used them to survive his seven years behind bars. Both also went on to be involved in presidential campaigns – Stockdale was the ill-fated VP candidate for Ross Perot’s bid in 1992.

Tom Wolfe, interviewed in BeliefNet back in 2000, said he saw something of Stockdale’s Stoic resilience in McCain as well. He said: “Epictetus says other philosophers will tell you [that] you have thousands of choices to make in life; it's up to you to make the right choices. I'm here to tell you [that] you probably don't have many choices, but you always have the choice of never saying 'yes' to what is wrong, and never saying 'no' to what is right. And always maintaining your honor. Of course, this fits McCain."

The BeliefNet article went on: “Today, McCain talks of restoring the confidence of Americans in their government, and inspiring young people to live nobly. McCain's Stoic vision is ideally suited for re-moralizing a rich, secular nation in which the familiar vocabulary of religion is greeted with cynicism when employed by a politician. Wolfe calls McCain's apparent Stoicism "a good, bracing draft of cool air in a country that is as plush, lush, and humid with wealth as this one is”.”

This billing of McCain as a Stoic, or even worse, a Zeus-worshipper, was rather controversial, seeing as McCain had in 2000 already denounced the Christian Right as “an evil influence” over the Republican party. Oops. This time around, he has been more careful to keep the Christian right sweet, and we have heard no mention of either the Stoics or Zeus.

Barack Obama, the smooth Stoic

Barack Obama, meanwhile, while not as explicitly linked to a Stoic or Roman republican tradition by political commentators, has been associated with the S-word thanks to his cool and apparently unflappable demeanour.

Jodi Kantor of the New York Times, for example, has written of him in terms resonant of Epictetus: “In the way Mr. Obama has trained himself for competition, he can sometimes seem as much athlete as politician. Even before he entered public life, he began honing not only his political skills, but also his mental and emotional ones. He developed a self-discipline so complete, friends and aides say, that he has established dominion over not only what he does but also how he feels. He does not easily exult, despair or anger: to do so would be an indulgence, a distraction from his goals. Instead, they say, he separates himself from the moment and assesses.”

Obama himself has said: “I have learned that I have what I believe is the right temperament for the presidency, which is I don't get too high when I'm high, and don't get too low when I'm low".

But is this the Stoic training of a man, or the Ciceronian training of an orator – the training always to keep their cool in front of an audience, to control their stage-fright, and ultimately to master, not their emotions, but the emotions of their audience?

The Clintons, unlikely Stoics

The Clintons also lay claim to the Stoic heritage. Bill Clinton, some might remember, named Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations as one of his 21 favourite books when he opened his library in 2003. Its message, of controlling our impulses in the name of austerity and virtue, obviously goes to the heart of Clinton’s modus vivendi.

Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has also frequently been labelled ‘stoic’ by the media, as in ‘Facing Her Doubters, Clinton Remains Stoic’ (IHT, May 8 2008).

Apparently, Clinton is often considered stoic because of her typically steely control of her emotions, her toughness (voters considered her the toughest Democratic candidate) and, perhaps, her quiet endurance of her husband’s marital infidelity.

In fact, the Today Show on NBC claimed that Clinton was perhaps “too stoic” in that “she doesn't reveal enough of herself” (a criticism that has also been directed at Obama). Cue Hillary’s toe-curling sobbing when asked ‘how do you do it’ by a voter in New Hampshire. Her non-Stoic tears were enough to win the voter over. “"She allowed herself to feel," the voter said. “I was surprised and I said, 'wow there's someone there.'”

Everyone’s a Stoic

But it’s not just the three main figures of the presidential campaign who are labelled Stoic. Joe Biden is, according to the Canada Gazette, ‘the stoic senator’; Rudy Giuliani was, of course, ‘stoic’ in the face of September 11; Dick Cheney was “told to look stoic” by an aide in the debates of the previous presidential campaign.

Clearly the ideal of the Stoic ruler, who holds his or her emotions in a firm grasp, still resonates in American political life. As long as the grasp isn’t too firm, and allows the occasional well-timed tear to creep out.

Philosophy is...a wrinkle-free face

I love the utter cultural debasement of our times. Latest example of it - if you type in philosophy into Google, the first entry is the website www.philosophy.com, which is for a range of skin-care products designed by leading plastic surgeons...