Seth Farber - The Spiritual Gift of Madness

To my parents, Don and Ann Farber, in gratitude. And to Sri Aurobindo, whose vision of the divine life on Earth gave me the courage to endure the night of humanity and to herald the new dawn.

The Spiritual Gift of Madness

The Spiritual Gift of Madness is a work of extraordinary intellectual courage. Not since the death of psychiatrist R. D. Laing in 1989 has anyone written about mad people with such insight and respect. Like Laing, Farber will be accused of romanticizing schizophrenia. But his interviews with six mental patients speak for themselves. In 1970 Laing, a countercultural icon, publicly repudiated his trademark brand of spiritual-political activism, expressed most profoundly in his 1967 campus bestseller The Politics of Experience. In a manner of speaking, The Spiritual Gift of Madness may be regarded as the sequel to The Politics of Experiencethe book that Laing himself did not dare to write.

RAY RUSS, PH.D.,
EDITOR OF THE JOURNAL OF MIND AND BEHAVIOR

Seth Farber has dedicated his decades of professional life to not merely destigmatizing mental illness but to giving us an all-inclusive, spiritual perspective on the evolution of consciousness that will, hopefully, end the iatrogenic suffering caused to so many in the doctors efforts to heal. The existence of this book is, in itself, uplifting; its many cogent insights will surely inspire similarly dedicated readers to further this great humanitarian work.

STUART SOVATSKY, PH.D,
AUTHOR OF WORDS FROM THE SOUL, YOUR PERFECT LIPS,
AND EROS, CONSCIOUSNESS, AND KUNDALINI

Seth Farber makes a powerful case for the Mad Pride movement based on a challenge to the normative humanism of modernity. He draws on a number of thinkers, prominently the redemptive-messianic vision of Sri Aurobindo, who saw the human as a transitional being and earth as the habitation for a divine life. This is a valuable addition to the expanding library of handbooks for charting a new passage to the future through what Michel Foucault has called an insurrection of subjugated knowledges.

DEBASHISH BANERJI, RESEARCH FELLOW AT THE
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF INTEGRAL STUDIES,
SAN FRANCISCO, AND AUTHOR OF SEVEN QUARTETS OF
BECOMING: A TRANSFORMATIVE YOGA PSYCHOLOGY
BASED ON THE DIARIES OF SRI AUROBINDO

Seth Farber is one of the most provocative and original thinkers in America. Like his mentor, R. D. Laing, Farber believes schizophrenics are prophets. They called Laing mad, as they will Farber. This is often the fate of those who are crazy for God or fools for Christ in a secular culture. Farber brings us to the threshold of the only questions that really matter: the demarcation lines between imagination and objective reality and between madness and sanity. The Spiritual Gift of Madness is an important book that could revolutionize the way progressive religious people regard what is called mental health.

FRANK SCHAEFFER,
AUTHOR OF CRAZY FOR GOD: HOW I GREW UP AS
ONE OF THE ELECT, HELPED FOUND THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT,
AND LIVED TO TAKE ALL (OR ALMOST ALL) OF IT BACK

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to my editors at Inner Traditions: Jon Graham, Jennifer Marxwhose astute and thoughtful reading of the book made it considerably less obscureand Anne Dillon. I want to thank the following people for their support as friends or help with the book, or both: Hardina Dahl, Dr. Stuart Sovatsky, Peter Lehmann, Professor Daniel Burston, Claude M., Dr. John Breeding, Dr. David Cohen, Dr. Ray Russ, Ingrid Vien, Dr. Richard Gosden, Dr. Linda Morrison, my sister Pat and her husband Sal, Pasquale Galante, Elizabeth Smith, Antonia Dunbar, Harold Channer, Bill Kaufman, Steve Apodaca, Judith Greenberg, Tom Oakley, Danielle Deschamps, Carol Goss, Luisa Castaganara, Ruth Campbell, Laura Levine, Julian ONeill, Ady Linda, George Fish, J. Pavia, Steve Pearlman, Serine Forino, Chris Launois, Melissa Lande, Lauren Tenney, Mitch Cohen, Joe Dubovy, Van Howell, Jeff Levy, Francesca Spiegel, Dr. Mychael Gleason, and others to whom I am no less indebted but are too numerous to mention.

There were several very articulate people I interviewed whom I could not include in the book either because they had not had the requisite experience (e.g., Zool had not had a degrading experience in a psychiatric ward and had far more knowledge about the brutal foreign policies of our government than he did about the mental health system) or because I had too much material to include in one book. Dianne Dragon eloquently recounted a powerful story about her very extraordinary experiences in the military (in training)they were emotionally overwhelmingbut since many are exposed to the same stresses its surprising more soldiers are not driven crazy by them. The implications of her story would have required a discussion of many more pages.

The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life.

DERRICK JENSEN, ENDGAME:
THE PROBLEM OF CIVILIZATION

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie with the kid, and a calf with a lions cub and a fatling together, and a small child shall lead them.... They will not harm or destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.

ISAIAH 11:69

The Messianic outlook is rooted in the prophetic temper. It maintains that all people are made in Gods image, it is passionately concerned with social justice, and it is actually or incipiently democratic in character, expecting Gods will to be implemented in historical time in ways that disclose the truth and that will rally all of humanity to its senses.

DANIEL BURSTON,
THE CRUCIBLE OF EXPERIENCE

As Jung prophesied, an epochal shift is taking place in the contemporary psyche, reconciliation between the two great polarities, a union of opposites: a hieros gamos (sacred marriage) between the long dominant but now alienated masculine and the long suppressed but now ascending feminine.... We seem to be witnessing, suffering the birth of a new reality, a new form of human existence, a child that would be the fruit of this great archetypal marriage, and that would bear within itself all its antecedents in a new form.

RICHARD TARNAS,
THE PASSION OF THE WESTERN MIND

Foreword

Kate Millett

I have great respect for Seth Farber; his knowledge of historynot only American but world historyis extraordinary. Its as if he has been reading all his life and remembering everything, from Socrates to Plato to the modern Indian seer Sri Aurobindo, then putting it all aside toward his one purpose: the understanding of the human psyche. What motivates a human beingwhat fears, what depths of loneliness, what hopes and joys, what visions? He has read widely and deeply with that one question in mind. Dr. Farber is an uncommon man: he has had lots of time to think, to speculate also on America, with its diversity of religions, enthusiasms, and immigrant cultures.

Dr. Farber has read R. D. Laing and David Cooper (the inventor of the term antipsychiatry), Freud in his entirely, but also Ferenczi. There are social factors to consider: You lost your job, now you are homeless. How does that make you feel? The psycho-persons one tireless question turned on its head, over and over: How does that make you feel?