The Psychology of Insanity : Part 2

Freedom Talks No. II
by Julia Seton, M.D.

(Page 5 of 13)

There are many psychics who are also great geniuses. Lord Byron and the "Mad Painter" of Belgium were psychics. History is rife and galleries of art and temples of literature stand as testimonials to some of the constructive productions of their minds, but beside them run dark stories born of their psychic uncertainty.

Criminals of certain types are psychics with no power of physical control and they pass into subjective control and live and do the things that are given them to do from the psychical mind and are often ignorant of their own condition.

Those whom the medical profession call paranoids are simply psychics, over-developed in the subjective faculties - a prey to all the disembodied forces of the subjective plane, and also to every floating thought on the physical plane; they are obsessed by ideas from within and without and their actions bear witness to this statement. Some very meddlesome women, and those who are the terror of a quiet community, are nearly always those who are in the control of the slower psychic forces and unable to consciously direct their own normal states of mind.

In science the psychics are called diseased. Science gives all actions a physical basis, but it is time to know that abnormal states of consciousness, that are only changes in the functional side of the mind and which have no apparent physical basis, are found in thousands.

Neurasthenics and psychasthenics present the mildest picture of disordered states of mind. All neurasthenics and psychasthenics are psychics and their diseases can only be fully understood by the psychologist. The scientist has long ago exhausted his knowledge of the cause and cure of these diseases and this is why all branches of metaphysical healing are overcrowded.

To understand this abnormal thing called "insanity," one must fully understand the normal, called "sanity." There are four distinct states of consciousness in every individual; these must be kept co-related and all of them manifest through the common everyday mind. These four states of consciousness are instinct, reason, emotion and intuition. These four states of consciousness are functions of the normal mind. When a patient becomes over-intensified in either one of these parts of the mind, mental disease results. The psychic is over-intensified in the emotional and intuitional functions of his mind, thus rendering his common sense states uncommon, and according to the degree of over-activity, he is either a "freak," a creature of "temperament," a "genius" or a "dementia."

The ordinarily insane individual has lost all relationship with his natural, instinctive and reasoning mind. He is disassociated. Reason, instinct, emotion and intuition are all in conflict within him. The emotional and intuitional faculties over functioning distort his common understanding. His idea centers are not able to distinguish between the real and the unreal in thoughts. He becomes possessed and obsessed by ideas born of emotion and intuition that have no foundation in fact, and as time goes on, he loses complete control of his idea centers.

Every individual has definite idea centers within his own brain, and it is through these centers that ideas are coordinated, received or rejected. As over-intensification of feeling and emotion goes on, the normal action of the idea centers is interfered with and the individual has super induced emotional and intuitional states which are no longer guarded by reason and thought. The emotion senses a purely imaginary condition and the idea centers have no power to reduce it to truth. As time goes on, all power of association is lost and the individual passes along, the plaything of his subjective states of mind. As he becomes more and more intensified subjectively, he opens the deep psychic currents both within and without himself, and loses his connection with his common mind and his physical body, and becomes a prey to all the psychic currents.

There are lives everywhere open to subjective thought currents, and all unknown to themselves they are allowing themselves to become disintegrated by the daily and hourly response they are giving to the stimulus of a plane they should master instead of allowing it to master them.

The psychic plane may become a pathway to power, or it may become the open doorway to a body and mind full of disease, insanity and absolute loss of power and poise.

There are many patients confined in the asylums today, who would never have been there, and who would be released and cured, if those in charge fully understood the truth of this unnaturally natural development and directed their attention to its control.

The first truth is, people are born into what is to them natural relationship with this psychic plane and go on for years misunderstood, pained and repressed, unable to rescue themselves from what they do not understand, and in the end the physical body does become diseased by the continual inroads of strain and repression; functional disorder and anatomical changes result. The farmer's wife loses her mental balance through repression of the fine emotional, intuitional side of her mind which finds no expression in the dull environment of the farm. The over-worked mother loses her mental poise; disassociation follows over-stimulation of the practical and repression of the artistic; and in emotional patients exaggerated states of feeling go on into greater disassociation for lack of strong sensible thought control.

And the second truth is, that many are born so close in relationship to the unseen plane and in such psychical correspondence, that some slight thing which weakens the will-power - sorrow, a disease that devitalizes the physical, some shock, or some prolonged or strained mental condition, breaks down the remaining law of separation, and the life is astray in the psychical world, manifesting abnormal, physical laws.