Derek
"These seizures, then," asked Ilse, "were your therapy for Post-Vietnam Syndrome? Isn't that how they say it in America?"Derek laughed effusive as an egg-beater set at too high a speed. "In flashback we have an organism with an overwhelming need to discharge -- in spite of the fact that the brain is not allowed to transit deeply into the required state. Flashback is the organism trying to develop an abreaction, trying to electro-chemically unload through autogenic discharge, trying to engage in autogenic neutralization when the necessary prerequisites are not being fulfilled."
"You mean for all those veterans who are suffering from the guilt of the things they did in the war?"
"Double veterans, among a considerable class of other individuals... But I think that 'atrocity guilt' and even 'survival guilt' is much overplayed. In many cases there is no guilt at all, but anger -- enduring rage, actually -- at the institutions responsible for creating the situation within which atrocities were committed and friends lost. Rage at the flawed metaphysics and infantile psychologisms sustaining the institutions. Guilt, frequently, is no part of it; no sense of having freely chosen to do a wrong. The attribution of guilt is a politically depotentiating strategy of the psychiatric establishment."
"Hmmmm." Wasn't that a rather strange notion.
"Look, I believe that the human need for war arises out of the denial to experience of the collective aspects of consciousness. These become buried in the unconscious and, since they cannot find healthy social expressions, emerge in regressed form as collective violence. The allure of war is to taste momentary loss of self in collective awareness -- like the petite mort of sexual orgasm. The mass hysteria involved is very like a state of collective demonic possession. The person participating in an atrocity action, for instance, is simply not an individual for the duration of the experience -- even if the act is perpetrated by a single person: the collective unconscious does not require the physical presence of a group. Many of the 'psychopathological' aspects of PTSD, I believe, relate to the continued constellation of collective contents. The collective energy gestalt associated with the mass violence and activated by the dissolution of individual identities is recorded as archetypal patterns of neuronal facilitation in the brains of the participants: electrical predispositions imposed on the cortex, a collective induction. You might say that a kind of electromagnetic 'ghost' is made to cling to the brain. Some primitive rites may have been designed to dissipate this specter; various psychotic behaviors may represent a struggle with it. . . And this 'ghost' is not just an after-the-fact residue of the killing; it's right there on the battlefield when the murder goes down. Drivin' your luuuuurp inta Injun Cuntry! If you're tuned-in, you can sense its presence: sixth sense. Deep serious shit, mon! Ain't no time ta sweat da small stuff, diddy-bop, dream about DXin' a gook. It's a pattern of psychic energy in the neighborhood of the coming kill. You can smell it, taste it, feel it crawl along the hairs on the back of your neck. Knowin' your dork is in the wrong hole, ya drop some Special Forces popcorn, swallow a greenie, take some uppers, gulp a green bomb. Some people find sensitivity to the presence of this 'ghost' is as good as radar; it's either boogie time and adios motherfucker, time for a little E & E shuffle, right you should un-ass and dee-dee-mau, Hotel-Alpha most ricky-tick, sky, make-yoarsel'-a-hat, beat feet, or necessary you get on the horn and ask your buddies back in the camp to crank up the four-deuce, forget the smoke, and come walzin' right on in with the HE. Comprende?"
"In spite of the un-understandable jargon, the message comes through."