The Queen of Wonderland

Many people like to amuse themselves with the idea that we live in an enlightened age where all the superstitious beliefs and unfounded fears of bygone days have been explained away as being nothing more than meaningless products of imagination. Our secret fears, however, betray a lingering darkness still clinging to the mind that is reminiscent of the Dark Ages for which our almighty science is useless to either explain or banish. One of the most perplexing manifestations of this mysterious darkness took the form of an epidemic of eating disorders and compulsive blood letting in some otherwise normal individuals. Psychiatrists have not been able to find any rational way to adequately explain these strange occurrences that does not come up against contradictions. Every officially recognized explanation devised to explain self-harming behaviour was so full of contradictions that it became necessary to save face by confusing the issue with suggestions that imply that “many things” contribute to causing self-harming behaviour. The authorities have no worthwhile answers for this curious epidemic because our cultural belief system has no suitable context in which to comprehend what they are trying to deal with.

When viewed from a scientific standpoint, this epidemic of self-harm should not be happening in our enlightened age. Common sense, on the other hand, would suggest that the mind-bending inspiration that leads to self-harming behaviour is coming from a dark corner of the psyche that is beyond the reach of scientific understanding because modern science — in deference to sociological engineering – is encouraged to ignore the very existence of the psyche. Consequently, modern psychology is based upon a psychology of the ego that only knows about self-harming symptoms, and nothing about the nature of psychic background that produced the symptoms.

Psyche is the ancient Greek word for the soul, which is the enigmatic spiritual aspect of the mind that governs life itself. Self-harm suggests that the individual developed a cynical attitude toward life as a result of some sort of duress, or having conformed to some cultural influence that is contrary to the principle of life. Although a self-harming complex can cause an individual to experience strange beliefs, the self-harming individual is not insane because most of the individual’s conscious thinking remains connected to reality. The bizarre thinking behind this mysterious anomaly appears to be expressed in the same style of fantasy that is found in fairytales, mythology and dreams. Autonomous fantasy thinking and feeling of this sort is a product of the psychic realm, which is beyond the boundaries of rational understanding, or conventional scientific investigation.

Because conventional science ignores the psychic factor in its investigation of anorexia nervosa and cutting, all they have left to work with is a curious collection of symptoms that are based upon fantasy, or what they call “delusions.” While the scientific authorities take the standpoint that phenomena like anorexia nervosa are nothing but meaningless delusions, I am taking the standpoint that a self-harming individual’s bizarre symptoms and irrational fantasies possess a symbolic meaning. The strange phantasmagoria that is behind anorexia nervosa and cutting appear to originate in a nether realm of the psychic background where nothing obeys the laws that apply to matter, or the will of the ego. In this sense it could possible be that this bizarre phantasmagoria was created by the psyche for the purpose of resisting the soulless dictates of our culture of scientific realism that is busy wrecking the world’s ecology, and running roughshod over psychic sensibilities that took eons to develop in harmony with nature. In other words, the greed that promotes this kind of “science” may very well have an interest in avoiding wanting to understand the underlying nature of eating disorders and all the other forms of self-harming behaviour.