We're neurotic, sorry.
Last summer I taught a course on the prevention of neurosis as part of the Hik Hasi educational meetings. Many people signed up because the title was attractive, the safest, because it implied that mental health (or lack of health) is not something random, but something that can be seen beforehand and that is precisely why we have to take care of it from the beginning.
Neurosis can be prevented. The causes of human psychological suffering are well detected and, beyond this decisive social, political and economic dimension, there is an origin that has to do with our psychological configuration, which necessarily leads us directly to question the current and here way of caring for childhood and to make profound changes.
However, this is what we call neurosis. Yes, it is a concept that we usually understand in relation to mental disorders, as it is a term used in the realm of clinical and psychological diagnosis, created to reflect and name a type of pathology. So far, all right. But what do we consider pathological, or neurotic?
We attribute the function of differentiation between disease and health to the symptomatology. Thus, if a symptom indicates that something is not well, we believe that there is a level of pathology, that is, that there are no symptoms we have to understand everything as if it were well; we identify health with the mere absence of symptoms. But are they really the same?
Normality is not synonymous with mental health or being out of insanity.
We identify mental health with behavior and life within a normality, measured in terms of a person's mere ability to adapt to society. The concept should be broader: the ability to relate satisfactorily to ourselves, to others and to the world. But mental health is true, it is an area very closely related to ideology and politics, because to decide what is treatable, they have to judge people's behaviors, necessarily making a classification between healthy and pathological.
In general, the population that works and behaves well in a society is considered normal and healthy, but normality is not synonymous with mental health or being out of insanity. The tacit consensus of normal behavior can support a society and a lifestyle unable to respond to the basic needs of the human being, and I believe that this is the case in us.
We would need to continuously review what we consider healthy and rational, normal and habitual. In fact, many pathologies can be hidden under the label of normality and consider very pathological functions, in this healthy way. Normality does not guarantee anything except the functioning and control of a specific society and lifestyle.
Our society and our way of life are so dysfunctional, far from being organized according to the needs and rhythm of human beings, that not only do we have to qualify the normal functioning of our society as neurotic, but we also have to develop a level of neurosis, to integrate ourselves into society, to accept a pathological life.
That's why we're all neurotic. Because all these characteristics of being told they are success values through education would be considered pathological in a minimally healthy society. For social (and school) success, the price of neurosis has to be paid.
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