February 1971. Cogitations

The psychotic personality needs to have his awareness of sensuous experience brought home. The trouble may be the obtrusive and non-verbal nature of the experience; say, the buzzing of a fly. This is to be brought home together with the post-verbal awareness of the experience of the buzzing of the fly; for example, “You are feeling I am annoyed by the noise you can hear”. If I said, “… by the buzzing of the fly”, it would not be accurate because the patient does not know what I am annoyed at. ‘Unconscious’ and ‘conscious’ do not meet the problem. ‘Unconscious’ could sometimes be replaced by ‘obvious but unobserved’.

Fear and hatred = powerfully obtrusive feelings; they are therefore liable to draw attention to the ‘unknown self’ → premature and precocious ‘solution’ to obviate feelings of hatred and fear of the hatred and fear. Abolition of feelings → hatred of sense of unreality.

The messianic idea is an unknown idea; it is hated and feared. It is dealt with by projection, materialization. It is, as a result, not an idea but something less frightening, a person or thing. Persons, physically, can be put a stop to, either by idealization (and proved to be real) or by realization (and proved not to be ideal).

Thus a series of events begins to cohere. For example, Aristarchus conceives of the possibility that the earth goes round the sun. There are no instruments by which the idea can be further elaborated. In the course of centuries the idea again begins to form, and this time instruments can be fashioned – for example, by Galileo.

The established order is disturbed, including the established web of thought – the racial web of thought, including profound ‘religious’ beliefs such as that associated with sun worship. The belief in the sun as God is quite rational; if you must have a god, it is not a bad god to have. Therefore Galileo tends to menace the

existing web of thought, both scientific and religious – in so far as scientific thought can be regarded as relatively