Jack Kerouac and psychiatry PART 2 - for merge

Jack Kerouac and Psychiatry: PART 2. I found him . . . extremely capable, possessed of a refreshingly alert intellectual capacity and an ability to think independently. Mr. Kerouac adds to these qualifications a distinctly engaging personality which makes him win friends easily. He is a young man of fine moral character and good breeding. His self-reliance and resourcefulness have been demonstrated by his ability to fend for himself, and give evidence of the qualities of leadership you are undoubtedly seeking among your candidates. (From a letter of recommendation by Kerouac’s French Instructor at Colombia University) To begin with, let’s see how others viewed Kerouac before his short period in Boot Camp making of course necessary comparisons. While one describes a young man of intelligence and character, the last of these another way of indicating masculinity as women are rarely described as possessing character and certainly were not then, the hospital file accepts he was gifted. This final positive surely completes extensive recommendations. To begin with, Kerouac had received a football scholarship from Colombia University, no mean feat given he stood about 5´8 and was slim most of his life. He was praised by teachers and professors for his unusual brilliance, loyalty, citizenship, important to Americans, character (sic) and good breeding. The last of these was perhaps a testimony to his politeness, which he clearly possessed (YouTube provides chances to see him when alive). While the achievements are clear and came early, he dropped out of Colombia University and joined the Merchant Navy, returning to his studies (1942), dropped out again a little later, rejoining the Merchant Navy. At this point it is necessary to revisit my comment in the first paper that normality or mental stability concerned a normative attachment to the ability ‘to make money and live the settled life.’ Marry, settle down and have the regulatory 2.5 children and work, if possible, in an undemanding middle class profession (of course all professions are middle class). There is a foundation for this as a perquisite of sanity in the West as the conventional life provides ongoing support networks and placed the individual within the lived experience of millions of others. Kerouac and all others in the Beat movement reinvented the lived life and would therefore have been more subject to pressure from others and of course harassment. The fidgety nature of Kerouac, based on his desire to be a writer and live the writerly life as it was conceived at the time, was employed against him as evidence of his mental instability. Now, psychiatry tends to view their patients (and indeed others not under their control) as not possessing a plan or intellectual examination of their life and choices. By this time, Kerouac had been reading a great deal of material on alternative viewpoints, which were informing his actions. There seems no understanding of this in his doctors as, I suggest, this indicated independent viewpoints. The descriptions thrown at him and of him indicate judgemental minds with limited genuine knowledge. This is Kerouac’s reasoning: I am wasting my money and my health here at Columbia . . . it's been one huge debauchery. . . . I am more interested in the pith of our great times than in dissecting "Romeo and Juliet." . . . These are stirring, magnificent times. . . . I am not sorry for having returned to Columbia, for I have experienced one terrific month here. I had a gay, a mad, a magnificent time of it. But I believe I want to go back to sea . . . for the money, for the leisure and study, for the heart-rending romance, and for the pith of the moment. From this extract it is possible the role of reading and study, outside of university control, was very important to him and informed his actions. He wanted the freedom to think by himself, not to be instructed in Western interpretations. He pushed back against control and convention. Gaining experience, the great Melville had after all been a sailor, was essential to his life, to his concept of living and being himself. The dullard doctors, sedate and inconsequential, saw, it seems, the desire to experience and understand a sign of mental instability as well. Kleiman reproduces another letter of 1942: For one thing, I wish to take part in the war, not because I want to kill anyone, but for a reason directly opposed to killing—the Brotherhood. To be with my American brother, for that matter, my Russian brothers; for their danger to be my danger; to speak to them quietly, perhaps at dawn, in Arctic mists; to know them, and for them to know myself. . . . I want to return to college with a feeling that I am a brother of the earth, to know that I am not snug and smug in my little universe. While this is perhaps an easy response to these matters, to what extent did Kerouac’s ‘disturbed mind’ depend on altruistic tendencies and the inability to settle down, and the need for independence to think? Go and get a job, you lazy sod perhaps and stop that silly thinking. (This response can be found in Kleiman’s references to Kerouac’s parents). Productivity is the old and new normalcy. Here, I will connect Kerouac to an English writer and thinker, Colin Wilson, who was slightly younger than Kerouac but with some of the same generational experiences. Although Kerouac was far more important to literature and ideas, Wilson was a deprived working-class youth who imbibed the same ambitions. He had the same high opinion of himself but was lucky not to come into conflict with residual authorities, ones with fascist inclinations. This will be considered later as well as briefly the connection between the Beat Generation of the USA and Angry Young Men of the UK. Wilson achieved early fame putting him beyond the clutches of authoritarian and policing health services although he was later referred to as autistic, a direct consequence of his intellectual claims. Another English writer, Jeannette Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit) , did likewise and too received negative comeback. While the English respond badly to excessive self-praise, probably Americans do too. Both Wilson and Kerouac declared themselves to be genius’, indeed a declaration likely to induce hostility in others, especially if done to a powerful narcissistic group that had the capacity to ruin you and for whom words were indicative only of assumed reality rather than fun. Psychiatrists take words at face value in my experience without evident awareness of subtlety and complexity. As a member of the Angry Young Men group of writers, Wilson felt out of step with the rest of society producing books to a small convinced audience and long rejected by serious writers and thinkers (whether he should have been is another matter), he had little in common with the rest of the largely press manufactured group who were similar for what they were against. mainly the previous and still present ruling or managerial class. Kingsley Amis’ ‘Lucky Jim’ sets out to undermine the ruling class who will not let his class in (Lower Middle and highly educated, a new man: the English then were obsessed with these classifications protecting the country from the lower classes, while Americans seem still to be obsessed with race, extending this preoccupation beyond colour ), and the lower class John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter in ‘Look Back in Anger’ trying to infiltrate the same class through sex and bullying. Salwak, Dale. Interviews with Britain’s Angry Young Men. Wildside Press. LLC. 1984. Although less consumed by negativity, Kerouac too stood outside his society. Like his older compatriot, Henry Miller, he rejected American materialist values. In The Colossus of Maroussi , Miller’s autobiographical travelogue of Greece he wrote (pages 5-6) in response to a European group who exulted American materialism and acquainted it with happiness: I found in him an expression of the American spirit at its worst. Progress was their obsession. More machines, more efficiency, more capital, more comforts-that was their whole talk. I asked them if they had heard of the millions who were unemployed in America. They ignored the question. I asked them if they realised how empty, restless and miserable the American people were with all their machine-made luxuries and comforts. The rejection of American and British societies, in the latter concerned with class and surprisingly Britain’s decline, is implicit in Kerouac, of French extraction while Ginsberg was Jewish. They were searching for a new social and political identity through observations on the then present American society and creating an alternative American society based on cultural backgrounds different from the old Anglo and Germanic strata. The Beats rejected American prosperity in the same fashion as Miller above seeing materialism rather than the comforts it brought. Where Miller had taken himself off to Europe, the Beat Generation studied the American hinterland and borders. Unlike the writers after WW1, they were concerned with America, not Europe. Tramps/hobos, the least in American society of the time, and especially the 1950s, were here the heroes. As too, latter, was the junkie. The American billionaire was despised and rejected. Kerouac´s difficulties probably had something to do with these changes. Irreverence was an element both groups shared, particularly irreverence towards authority, to those in power. The lack of interest in regular work, drifting through jobs was a way of life recorded by many of the Angry Young Men, but none of their characters were sent to mental hospital nor the authors. The anger towards Kerouac by the military and doctors must have been immense and although the profession claims it does not make such errors of judgement as it has a scientific base, I must deny that and insist it is an ideological instrument structured upon belief, not evidence. Transforming class subjectivity into scientific objectivity and unwilling to investigate their group behaviour they blunder on. Added to this, indeed part of this project, is the recognition of psychiatry, especially the form rising out of America at this time, as the first business model-based health service intent on profit and money creation through health issues and, it must be admitted, the control of those outside of society, or simply freely engaged in experience and independent thinking. Psychiatry stands within the above because of its tendency to invent illnesses for money. The American and British controls over their populations were in essence not dissimilar from the Soviet Union of the time, although both were capable of change with limitations on state brutality. Psychiatry arose from each state’s need to control outliers. In Western culture these emerged from social and economic factors. Here, it is the Beat Generation’s engagement with psychiatry through a shared engagement with drugs, although this is slightly later, that can perhaps show the popularisation of both and allows for the examination of their connected natures. The importance of recreational drugs accompanied the popularity of psychiatric drugs. The separation of virtually the same drugs for medical and recreational use, the processes merely changed as well as packaging, aided the growth of criminal activity with these and other drugs. In the following decade, a place for and purpose for drugs had to be found in psychiatry, in part to warrant the profits gained for using them in mass. The legitimisation of what were actually street drugs, or started off that way, and used for war, was the goal and means were found to create a new and massive industry. The need to make fortunes from drugs coalesced with the need to make money from the more deprived regions of the American population, the mentally ill. Where before, the treatment of the mentally ill (sic) was little more than a cottage industry, it was soon, within decades, an ever-expanding money pit, with new mental illnesses discovered for new drugs. In doing so, those outside of society (also found in the Soviet Union) gradually became ‘the mentally ill.’ It is here we find Kerouac whose intellectual independence and passionate dislike of authority played into the hands of authoritarian groups. Drugs While drugs have probably been a factor in human cultures since palaeolithic times our understanding of that relationship remains limited to internal engagement involving the mind, which may have evolved through drug use, and physical engagement involving addiction or strange behaviour ascribed to drug use. It is interesting that normal behaviour reflects a still personality unaffected by substances rather than an active reaction to the environment consisting of striving, ambition and fortitude. At no time before have drugs been employed so extensively and equally their actual effects ignored and desired effects imposed. While this does not represent the totality of their effects, or identify other affects dependent entirely on the first known effects. Although plant-based drugs heal, we believe, do chemical pot-pourri heal? While the first largely involved social status, the second involves money and the market place and the prescribing effectiveness to a particular chemical mixture when the market demands it. Mosher, Loren R. et al, Drug companies and Schizophrenia: Unbridled Capitalism meets Madness, 'Drug companies and Schizophrenia: Unbridled Capitalism meets Madness', in Models of Madness: Psychological, Social and Biological Approaches to Schizophrenia edited by John Read, Loren Mosher and Richard Bentall, Brunner-Routledge, New York, 2004, pp. 115-130. The pharmaceutical companies understanding of how their drugs work, in effect often an array of drugs with similar aetiologies and related effects, are vigorously sold to doctors with selected evidence. The role of the latter in the effects of certain drugs, insists on learning more about the drugs. Not the pharmaceutical understandings which largely insist on the single effects of drugs, other unwelcoming exist but remain unsaid in polite company. Science, followed quickly by medicine in the form of psychiatry, understood immediately how drugs mediated through big business could be harnessed to create a believable treatment programme. While the patient could not easily articulate their processes, the professional could and did. The patient experienced this and that. The patient did not have a vocabulary to express their own experience but relinquished their understanding of the experience to doctors. Doctors did not try the drugs themselves so employed scientific methods using various checks alongside projection. The establishment of a mode of delivery and functioning is akin to myth. 2 Kleiman further notes regarding Kerouac, one of the initial victims of industrial and organised corporate medicine: "Fine Moral Character and Good Breeding" Kerouac's military personnel file includes glowing letters of recommendation. His school record was "one of unusual brilliance both scholastically and athletically," gushed Lowell High School Master Joseph G. Pyne. Kerouac was "an ideal pupil with an unusual combination of brilliance and athletic ability," Pyne added. And he was an overachiever—earning 88 credits when only 70 were required for graduation. Horace Mann Prep principal Charles C. Tillinghast praised Kerouac's reputation in a letter of recommendation written in November, 1942: John Louis Kerouac . . . had with us a most excellent reputation. His academic record was in every way satisfactory, and his record for character and citizenship was of the finest. I am sure that he will be found loyal and dependable in any position of responsibility. Nothing here indicates the ‘disturbed’ Jack Kerouac of legend and the difference in time between the Kerouac of the positive declarations and those of instability is minimal. The impact of the Boot Camp and hospital seems extreme, but how else can the matter be explained? Something occurred in one or both of the above. 3. The first rejection involved the Navy Boot Camp where incompatibility was immediate. Kerouac wrote about it later in his semi-autobiographical novel and travelogue Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935–46, in which he described interaction within the Boot Camp. Kleinman reproduces a short section indicating if nothing else a humour failure of those running the Boot Camp, understandable in such circumstances. I entrain to Boston to the US Naval Air Force place and they roll me around in a chair and ask me if I'm dizzy. "I'm not daffy," says I. But they catch me on the altitude measurement shot. "If you're flying at eighteen thousand feet and the altitude level is on the so and such, what would you do?" "How the screw should I know?" So I'm washed out of my college education and assigned to have my hair shaved with the boots at Newport. From this point, his irreverence to authority is evident here. He responded, see above, with irreverent humour, possibly viewed as disrespectful. Henry Miller, becoming a known figure at the time Kerouac had entered the Boot Camp and hospital, is also described as irreverent and demonstrated many of the characteristics associated with Kerouac. Clearly, irreverence is a crime of sorts in this environment but unless the recipient is humourless not evidence of mental illness. Nevertheless, with implacable ignorance, Kerouac’s next stop was into mental hospital, and that’s when his life in many ways changed. You must not offend the powers that be! Negative reinforcement proceeded, with the golden boy of a short time before reduced to a mentally unstable reject. Kerouac viewed himself as becoming restless, apathetic, seclusive, suffering with headaches (perceived also as evidence of mental illness), results of stress from those who ran the Boot Camp. While there is no doubt, he wanted to get out of the Boot Camp, feeling it was a mistake, others could not simply accept that the golden boy was not suited to a military environment. The rejection was on both sides and they wanted to alter his character to one of submission. From then, his irreverence and showy humour became something more sinister and he needed to pay the price. Sent to the Naval Hospital, arriving already with descriptions of mental instability, it may be that he did not reign in his exuberance or attempt to be more respectful towards those with authority and power. Like many, he may not have realised the extent of doctor’s power, especially psychiatrists with their power over reality. Tolstoy could have been changed from a great writer to a psychotic who exaggerated his own worth, or, if a lesser writer, simply deluded. Psychiatry would make that decision not posterity. Taken into a dark environment, his every quality altered to illnesses, through deliberate alteration of identity, removed from the outside world and their support network, their positive reality, would they have fared any better than Kerouac? He may not have realised the importance of being normal in a conformist environment, and thereby chosen not to express humour or enthusiasm except amongst his friends or on stage before an audience. Compare here the similar enforced conformity of the Soviet Union and the similarities between present day MAGA and Russian society. The Soviet Union too based itself on production and profit, they simply failed to understand the human engagement with materialism.. The legend of Kerouac’s mental instability was now formulated, affecting him all his life. We now arrive at diagnostic efficiency and find popular essential drives behind it rather than scientific judgement. Social, religious and gender prejudice! And….not working regularly, in that time, rejecting monogamy, not living in the same house or home for several years or achieving a stable social identity, not accepting orders, and not accepting authorities rights over your life and decision making, essentially not embracing the mores and customs of your native country. Not fitting in. Oh, and being artistic. Psychiatric disorders are constructed out of these lacks. In 1955, Eric Fromm wrote The Sane Society which is about the insane societies of the time connecting this to Kerouac’s belief that we cherish the wrong people, not the damaged who can offer insights but the wealthy and powerful who have nothing worth saying (I am extrapolating here). Fromm illustrates his position through both America and the Soviet Union, noting the similarities rather than differences, such as the elevation of a state to perfections of conformity. The worship of consumption and production rather than human life and values. He expressed concern that psychiatry instead of helping people rebel, a sign of health, was encouraging people to conform to this mad world. This I suggest is clear in Kerouac’s case and added to that, unknown to them, the authorities sought also to destroy him by changing him by establishing a new malleable identity. His virtues, intelligence, independence of thought and humour were reconstructed as elements of madness, his personality negated and made completely subject to negative understandings. Look over to Soviet the Union and all the talented writers and artists who suffered under Stalin. Same time, different place, different methods with similar results. Gaining knowledge through independent thinking The approach below is elemental to the social construction of the mentally ill, although problems are reintroduced through ‘identity’, as established by psychiatry. Again, the identity of Kerouac was altered during his stay in the hospital and a competent individual became a disturbed one based it appears not only on his playacting but to his responses to authority. The actions of the Soviet state against troublesome individuals were equally constructed around identity change especially if the proscribed individual was articulate and verbalised their insights. George Orwell’s 1984 is about identity change. Psychiatry imposes another identity, not to heal but control. Here psychiatry functioned and functions as an arm of the state. The division in Kerouac consisted of his attempts to engage with American society, Colombia University and the American Navy, and stints in the merchant navy and on the road gaining experiences, separating himself from conventional American society. This crack in his ideological self was perhaps exploited by psychiatry without the latter demonstrating any understanding. Psychiatry thinks through the nature of individualism, although connecting each to a group, that is schizophrenia, neurosis, etc, whereas personality development can be group based. Brainwashing: Kerouac and others! Added to this is within the policy of identity change then and now psychiatry engages in brainwashing, indeed of both staff and patients. The victim is taken out of their or the environment and kept in another (forbidding environment), kept away from support mechanisms, and degraded through the use of psychiatric descriptive which, without fail, are negative, and thereby breaking down a positive character and replacing him or her with a degraded character. The artist or writer is told they cannot write, it is a delusion. In fact, everything positive they believe about themselves is delusion while all the bad is accepted and reinforced. Artists are supported because most psychiatrists have little understanding of painting or plastic arts, and several important artists, like Van Gogh, were heroic madmen. They are less threatened by, what they may regard, as talented imbeciles. Kerouac would have been repeatedly told he was unwell or unstable or disturbed, which he may have worried about anyway. If he challenged his persecutors, he might have been told he was projecting, thereby unable to trust his own thoughts. Such rhetoric and drama are fundamental to psychiatry as is its control of patients. Only the doctor has knowledge and access to truth. In capitalist societies this negative reinforcement pays dividends to therapists, workers and doctors. Likely, the patient leaves the hospital, like Kerouac, broken. Nevertheless, the supplying of people for the processes of drug production is relatively new. The prescription nature of drug treatments means control by General Practitioner and several levels of administrative health authority, drugs adverse effects disregarded. Getting prescriptions involves the reinforcement of the diagnosis. In the manner of a crime an individual is accused of, but which the individual never did, their new mentally ill identity is constantly reinforced. The mirroring of concentration camps is admitted to, certainly regarding, for example, Severalls Hospital, Colchester, Essex UK. (ttps://gloopa.co.uk/severalls-hospital/#google_vignette, 9-9-2024). Drugs were and are employed to imprison people in the community through a drug fuzz. Degradation of patients was evident in Colchester and remains part of psychiatric practice, just covered up better. The Navy doctors changed Kerouac’s original diagnosis from dementia praecox , or Schizophrenia, to Constitutional Psychopathic State, Schizoid Personality, but did any of it reflect Kerouac or perhaps his just his relationship with and to them. Are these descriptive or identity changes just meant to sound grand, signifying nothing. Since entering the hospital, Kerouac achieved three different identities within 67 days. The Navy throwing irony to the winds told him as he left that he would not be allowed to return. Before going to Boot Camp he had been a Golden Boy expected to achieve wonders but after his time in the hospital he was at the bottom of the heap, out of sight of any class distinctions and at a bottom rarely seen or known, created by psychiatry. In a letter noted by Kleiman, Jack notes: The pathos in this hospital has convinced me, as it did Hemingway in Italy, that "the defeated are the strongest." Everyone here is defeated, even this "broth of a Breton." I have been defeated by the world with considerable help from my greatest enemy, myself, and now I am ready to work. I realize the limitations of my knowledge, and the irregularity of my intellect. Knowledge and intellection serve a Tolstoi—but a Tolstoi must be older, must see more as well—and I am not going to be a Tolstoi. Surely I will be a Kerouac, whatever that suggests. Knowledge comes with time. He claims he has been defeated one assumes by the experience but equally by the hospital as in the latter he failed to retain his identity intact. They not only defeated him, they robbed him. But he has been, he writes, ‘defeated by himself’ not understanding that was the result of brainwashing because he could not blame his aggressors. His reference to the ‘irregularity of his intellect’ also belongs to them as they made him doubt himself. YouTube film of Kerouac show a nervous, uncertain man who constantly looks away, unable to overcome the dreadful experiences in his early adult years and look others in the eye, a victim who internalised the views of his aggressors, psychiatry. As far as creative powers go, I have them and I know it. All I need now is faith in myself . . . only from there can a faith truly dilate and expand to "mankind." I must change my life, now. The above is less a testimony than an indicator of how deeply he was damaged and his difficulty in acknowledging the source of that damage. Brainwashing: A means of changing ideas, forced re-education, changing or destroying aspects of an existent personality by undermining that personality and creating another through psychological means. Often, this is done for the target’s good, in their best interests as well as the interests of a powerful group. This process can leave the target or subject in a state of uncertainty, for example as with Kerouac, he never knew who he was anymore, psychopath, schizoid, schizophrenic, mentally ill or this potentially great writer with a host of new ideas? He constantly swayed from one identity to the other after entering the Navy Mental Hospital. 12