The Psychology of Insanity : Part 3

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

(Page 6 of 13)

There is one great connecting link between the physical and the psychical through which all abnormal conditions can be corrected, and this is will power. When this power of will is broken, the life must become a manifestation of error, according to the generally accepted idea of normal relationship.

The will-power of an individual is dependent upon his ideation. Weaken his power to carry an idea, and his will grows correspondingly weak; the will must follow the idea; it is not a separate entity - will only exists in partnership with the idea.

Ideation, willing and motion are the great human trinity from which everything else originates. When we inspect our minds, we find that a voluntary motion is always preceded by the idea of that motion. The idea is first and the will follows the idea. Ideas have definite sensory centers in the cortex of the brain and conscious ideation may be induced to produce a particular form of willing. All voluntary action depends, first, upon the ideas of action, then the willing to do, then the doing. The will-power, in its accelerating and restraining impulses, is modified by the degree of the intensity of the idea. Grief, fear, worry, anger, despondency, anxiety, hate, resistance are all negative ideas that weaken the idea centers and produce weakness of willing. These ideas persisted in at first produce indecision and after a while absolute inaction because the patient has lost the perfect co-relation of his idea centers, which associate instinct, reason, emotion and intuition.

In order to get complete control of the will we must get complete control of the idea centers and induce strong, positive ideas which the will cannot refuse to follow.

When we associate all states of consciousness - instinct, reason, emotion, and intuition, in one strong, centralized idea, it is impossible for physical expression to do anything else than follow this idea.

When one has come into certain conditions of being negative in any part of his mind, and continues in it for any length of time, it takes more than his own power to modify these intensified conditions and bring about an inhibiting power of mind which will crowd them out, and allow the idea centers to receive a new thought-form and intensify it so that the will can pass it into action.

The abnormal individual is always weak in obeying his ideas and carrying out his impulse because there is a dissociation of idea centers and his mind becomes mixed in its responses and he cannot make for a true, harmonious expression on all of the planes of mind within himself - this is the condition of the neurasthenic and psychasthenic, and he needs some mind stronger than his own to hold his ideas true to what he knows to be true.

The first lesson for the diseased mental patient to learn is that if he wants to keep his mental balance or restore it, he must first inhibit all negative ideation and refuse to allow himself to be driven into wild bursts of psychical or mental energy along any one line. He must force himself to interest his mind in other things and to inhibit the over-active states of thinking. This is best done by a complete change of environment, and often a change of friends. Friends and environment, more than any other things, have the greatest power of keeping the mind intensified in its old thought ruts.

There is little hope of receiving a new ideation and acting upon it, when one allows himself day after day to drag through the same central sensations and receive the same nerve impulses, and register the same responses. By removing to a new environment, and substituting new mental and psychical vibrations the old states of consciousness are allowed to rest while a new unworked state of mind begins.

Psychical development is not a disease; it is an attribute of individual growth; no one is to blame if he has it or has it not; all that anyone needs to know is the truth about it and just how to control it and direct it. Subjective hearing and vision come just as naturally to us as life and death - they are a part of the great plan of unfoldment.

In teaching man to co-relate his many states of developing consciousness into one powerful state of mind, we use our everyday common sense. We give him a place of mental power and after such training he opens or shuts his mind to suit himself; he can live in either extension of consciousness at will and extending his understanding into the transcendent side of his own mind, he can become the modern mystic or seer. He can function in the purely material side of himself or he can become an intensified psychic or mystic by simply suspending and intensifying different centers within himself.

Concentration, centralization in ideas, conscious mental substitution, creation of strong mental ideas, and psychic displacement of the negative with the positive, both by the patient within himself and from the attendant or physician without, will bring insanity under control.

When men fully understand their own mind's scope, they will find that what the world calls un-natural states of consciousness, are only cerebral and psychic disassociation.

The greater freedom of the race, and the cure and control of insanity will be found in the deeper study of all levels of mind rather than the one or the few. Only as physical science unites with metaphysical, and these both unite with scientific psychical investigation, will humanity pass toward a solution of its insanity problems. Insanity, delusions, hallucinations, the so-called mental diseases will pass just because they have been naturally displaced by our higher scientific preventive psycho-therapy.

The asylum doors will only open as a place of refuge where men and women will be taught the psychology of the self; there will be schools not cells. Outside the asylum doors there will be an ever increasing crowd of intelligent men and women psychologists, who will be awake to the first hint of psychic disassociation in an individual. With keen insight and scientific direction, they will teach the beginning paranoid, melancholic, neurasthenic, clairvoyant and psychasthenic the truth about themselves and the first hint of disassociation will be replaced by association, and rest homes, asylums and sanitarium doors will close forever!