Complete mental health

What is normal? A simple question but a whole bunch of misunderstandings surround it. When we say something is normal, or someone is a normal person, we mean the thing or the person is inconspicuous, the “way it should be”. Therefore “normal” is understood in the meaning of average and average stands for “good”. But such a definition of normal is always orientated on the masses. Good is how everybody is. From a psychological point of view this is catastrophical. The average person in any society is sick, has a complicated sexual life and is having various neurosises. People don’t recognize it because everybody is having it. In a society of the sick, it is normal to be sick and the ones who are even sicker or who are healthier are the ones who shine out. Both are considered “abnormal” and any society tries to bring them into line or to get rid of them in one or the other way. As paradoxical as it may sound: A society is more interested to stay how it is, even if it is sick, than to change for the better.

When we face the world and ourselves we all have to ask: What is going out there in the world and inside of me? All we have are frameworks to cope with the surrounding and it feels very comfortable for us, if other people support our point of view, we get a feeling of being right. The need for security gets fulfilled. But people who challenge the society and its norms become nuisance. They don’t let the others go away the way they where used to. But without such people there would not have been any progress, neither in politics, philosophy, economics, science or even religion.

The better a person lives in reality, the more he or she lived in concordance with the world, the less neurotic or psychotic he or she is. Reality for us on a subjective level is what our brain is making out of the input we get through our senses. Our thinking is forming certain patterns which are characteristic for the individual. But the more energy, the more feelings, we put into such a pattern, the stronger it gets. A negative side effect of this mechanism is that the stronger a patter is, the more difficult it gets to replace the pattern. Most patterns in relation to life are formed very early in life. The period of 15 to 25 of age is critical because it is the time where people form up the ideal outside appearance of the inside pattern. The pattern itself regularly gets formed up to the age of six of seven, not later. So you can see, that people who are between 15 and 25 make the outside world very easily into there inner world and they have little problem there. But the older they get, the more incompatible the inner image is with the very quickly changing world outside. So whenever you see a person with a certain worldview, ask yourself how old the person is, go back in time when he was around the age of 20 and than look, if there is correlation between the person’s ideal world and the picture of the world when he was in the mentioned age. The completely mentally healthy person is not building up any inner pictures of the world and is always living in the world which is perceived by the sense. But this individual is extremely rare, especially in the sick societies of the western world.

Of course that does not mean, that the older a person gets, the more neurotic he is. Not at all. The acceptance of life grows with age. Young people try to make the world according to there own view, older people are better in coping with circumstances, which they don’t like. But back to the healthy persons. Erich Fromm wrote that the sick person is more normal than the average adjusted person. The sickest are probably the healthiest people in society. For the ones who are sick, who feel that something is not okay, are still sensitive enough to feel the lies he has been taught and the pressure which is used to suppress individuality which is very quickly becoming a threat to the community.

What is the ideal person? In history we have had a lot of ideas of the ideal human being. The religious being of the middle ages, the intellectual being of the renaissance, the economic and heroic being of the 19th and 20th century. All these ideals did not look at the real needs of human beings, they all where created by science of mind, religion etc. What we really need, is an ideal which considers the nature of human beings in its entirety. So I use the definition of Abraham H. Maslow, the great psychologist of the humanistic psychology movement. The ideal person is a self-actualized person. Every behaviour which fulfils human needs in a proper way is healthy and supports the growth of personality. Every behaviour which denies human needs or fulfils them in an ineffective way is not healthy. The really healthy person is free of neurosies, psychosises and personality disorders. We have never seen such a society but we also have never seen a society which believed in human beings. There was always the belief that human beings are evil or at least they have some part of evil within them by nature.

That is not true. There is the potential for evil and good within humans. For we can sin, but we also can do good things. The root of evil is not inherited, but learned. A baby gets born into a sick society (every society in the world is sick only the degree of sickness is varying). Evil is the good which is not developed. The reason for evil is that one generation passes on its corrupt and defect ways of thinking, speaking, feeling and behaving onto the next generation. We create the evil anew in every generation. Such patterns can be traced back in families over generations. I strongly recommend the books of Alice Miller, the famous Swiss psychologist, who concentrated on this topic (examples of the development of people like Hitler, Nietzsche et. al.).

One point I want to mention at the end. A critical issue is language. Nowadays we use language exclusively in a descriptive way. We pass on information from brain to brain but we have forgotten the heart. Words can be used in another way also. They have the power to create reality. A communication between heart and heart is very well possible; also most people are not used to. If you read poetry or novels of former centuries you will get an idea of what I mean. We have used language as a tool to create a distance between us and the world and other human beings. Even emotional terms like love have become words alone. You say love but you don’t mean it. It is just like if you would say: “My shoe-size is 29”. I thing we have corrupted one of the most precious things which make us human: The ability to communicate with each other through language, especially by speaking. It should be a job of the 21st Century to change this thing.