backwoodsnotes: November 2021

have just finished medieval thought and I will have to read it again to gain the full value.

from St Augustine to Ockham although the foundation is in Plato and how we think in the first place. Think maybe this old brain is not as nimble as it used to be but I plod along and generally get the gist of it and all those lectures so long ago make sense now. hallelujah.

Up to Okham and past the main pathways of mans thought had begun with the religious schools keeping the learning tradition alive after the dissolution of the Roman empire, the closing of the academy in Athens and the burning of the great library at Alexandria and then as the crucifixion of christ and the apostles grew dimmer how learning revived and the breach between faith and reason ensued.

Several other major steps followed in mans advancement towards unravelling the mystery of science viz the renaissance and the enlightenment.

The last bastion of knowledge to be assaulted was the mind of which there were meany misleading and useless theories.

Not until Freud began unravelling the complexities of neurosis, pschosis and character disorders did there any comprehension of how the mind actually operated and on which particular aspects were the important ones.

As Dylan says the bird is chained to the sky and so our minds are chained to the inputs that formed them. There is an etiology.

Freud is heavy going for the uninitiated and those who only seek to dabble without any long term goal or therapeutic intent.

There are shortcuts for the serious reader who wants to know without plowing through the however many volumes of the standard works.

Lucy Freemans Freud Redicovered is an excellent portal to begin with and The Uses of Enchantment is another. Both works setout to explain the fundamentals of dynmaic psychiatry for the layman.

However the best one volume introduction is Mind Medicine and Man by Gregory Zilboorg. A russian emigre physician to the US in the early 20th c who discovered psychoanlaysis. His magnificent history of Medical Psychology has long gone from the library at VUW and is prohibitively expensive to buy but the short work is the way to go. When you read this book you have to think. How is it that the zygote produces cells in the organism that not only produce the axons the the brain but also the keratin that grows out of fingers and toes. If we love something where is that love located?

Now the phiosophers say that mind and thought is privileged by which they mean no one else knows exactly what anyone else is really thinking about. This is an excuse really for not wanting to know the truth about ourselves and desires but whatever the truth of that we all think about mainly the same things. i.e. food shelter clothing sex in any order. It is how we think about those things that counts and where the mind can become disordered and fall into illness.

to be continued,