What is a Ghost?
What is a ghost, really? Here is my theory of ghosts. They are not the souls of the departed. They are not evil spirits that have come to torment us. Ghosts are virtual people, analogous to virtual particles in physics, that don't really exist in a positive and enduring sense, but that nevertheless have a form of being that is not just nonbeing. Virtual people – ghosts - are possibilities of who we are, who we have been, and who we might become - possibilities that are never allowed to become actualized into realities. So there is a ghost physicist named George Atwood, who followed that science for his career, and who made his father very happy and proud. There is also a radical anarchist named Atwood as well, who gave his life to tearing down all existing societal structures. We live with our own lost possibilities, and they can come to visit and even attack us, sometimes with a vengeance. I spoke to a brilliant psychiatrist acquaintance of mine about this, and he told me that he thought so-called bipolar disorder was ultimately caused by the sudden arrival of powerful ghost possiblities from the past that had been crushed. This idea seemed interesting, so I decided to interview him about it. He asked that his name not be used so that he could speak freely.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
G.A. You say bipolar discorder is caused by the arrival of ghosts from the past?
Dr. E. A person is strolling along in his or her life, a possibililty of who that person might have been suddenly gathers power, and then it bursts in upon the present. Voila!
G.A. But what about the old idea that mania is a defense against depression?
Dr.E. Nope. There may be instances where someone is in flight from something really depressing, and in the intensity of that flight produces transitory euphorias, but the real deal with mania is that it is a ghost attack.
G.A. Where does the ghost come from?
Dr. E. It comes from a possibility of oneself that has been crushed.
G.A. But what crushes it, and what is it then that empowers the ghost for the attack?
Dr. E. It is the very person who suffers the attack that does both. First the person absolutely obliterates one of his possibilities, a way of being that might otherwise have materialized, and then, later, that way of being, energized by a part of the person’s innermost core, strikes back against the crushing and blows the person’s mind.
G.A. So all this has something to do with the core of a person?
Dr. E. Yes, the core splits. The original crushing occurs in a primordial division of the individual’s selfhood, in which one part, generally allied with and embodying the agenda to maintain secure connections to other people, comes down hard on the other part, which is at odds with other people and seeks its own independent destiny. The former crunches the latter, and is initially victorious – but the latter comes back and has its revenge: it throws a charge of C-4 explosive into the cozy little world of the former, and then, we are off to the races! Ghost Invasion!
G.A. Your theory flies in the face of all the contemporary thinking one hears about regarding the genetic and neurochemical basis of bipolar disorder, doesn’t it?
Dr. E. That is all bullshit. I know this because it is my own field, and I have to say it is an embarrassment, a manifestation of what in future years will be looked back on as the paradoxical dark ages of psychiatry.
G.A. Why are they to be called the “paradoxical” dark ages?
Dr. E. Because the standard narrative regarding the dark ages is that they were times of superstition and ignorance, preoccupied with things like souls and ghosts, but that the light came with the arrival of natural science – whereas in modern psychiatry, we have what presents itself as enlightened science, but is actually a kind of magical thinking, whereas the serious scientific understanding of these matters focuses on ghosts. So there is a seeming paradox, but all that is superficial. Bipolar disorder is caused by ghosts, like I said, and the ghosts involved come armed with explosives.
G.A. Why is it, though, that smart people buy into the magical thinking then, if what you say is true – what creates the beliefs that the biology is the key?
Dr. E. The answer, my friend. resides in what lies beneath. There one finds the barricades against the very ghosts we are talking about, erected in the dark territories of the doctors’ own souls. Do you know what is required of a person to endure and survive medical training? This training is a locomotive that rolls over the personality. Every particle of rebellion and resistance has to be vanquished, and this is possible because it is a replication of an original crushing of the soul that occurred long before. So doctors are in the business of crushing and destroying ghosts, within and without, and they have a vested interest therefore in denying their existence and fortifying that denial by pouring poison into the bodies of those the ghosts inhabit. What goes on is just awful.
G.A. Well you are a doctor, and how is it you escaped this situation?
Dr. E. I have a different history.
G.A.: What is that history and how did it lead you to understand all this?
Dr. E. Let’s just say it was what it was, I am who I am, and I am qualified to speak on this topic.
G.A. Is there anything more you can tell us about ghosts?
Dr. E. Ghosts are everywhere, and they control pretty much everything.
G.A. Give us the lowdown on ghosts being everywhere.
Dr. E. Well, okay. First, there actually are ghosts not only of one’s own lost possibilities, but also of the interrupted possibilities of those we have lost, those beloved souls who have died and not had a chance to fulfill their dreams, or ours for them. These ghosts come to us in our dark moments, and our suffering in the face of their inability to live becomes unbearable. At precisely that time, the ghost of the lost person may enter into us and become transformed into our own purpose in living, which is a way of completing the interrupted journey. Many of us are inhabited by such ghosts.
Often, though, the occupying ghost becomes such a presence as to usurp the one being occupied, in which case that person’s displaced possibilities give rise to still another ghost. A dialectical process then ensues, ghost against ghost, a back and forth that goes on and on.
G.A. Please don’t stop.
Dr. E. Ghosts of the dead often take up residence inside children. I knew a young man whose body was invaded in such a way. He had, at the age of seven, witnessed his older brother hit by a car and killed. His brother was his mother’s first child, and her favorite. That evening he came to his mother’s darkened bedroom, where she lay softly weeping. She saw him standing there, and terrible words came from her mouth: “WHY COULD IT NOT HAVE BEEN YOU?” At that instant, he perceived himself from outside, and his eyes were all brightly lit up, almost as if his head had become a jack-o-lantern. He was radiantly alive, and his life was shining out of his eyes into the darkness of the room. But his brother lay dead, at the morgue. Later that night he had a strange vision: he stood in a cave deep in the earth, filled with soft clay. Invisible hands began shaping that clay into a human form, legs, arms, hips, chest, head, until a golem had materialized. He and I, looking back from a time much later, recognized that golem as the soul of his dead brother, returned to life within a seven year-old’s heart, and thenceforth he lived for both of them. The offending light of his life and his eyes had thus been dimmed. A very sad story.
G.A. So what happened to the young man?
Dr. E. He spent some time with me, crying , and the light became brighter.
G.A. And?
Dr. E. Ghosts are sometimes pretty heavily involved in creativity; in fact, without ghosts, probably there would be nothing created and the world might freeze up into patterns of the same.
G.A. You have to explain that.
Dr. E. A ghost invades someone, crowding him or her out of the picture, and the person displaced wants to come back in. And so he paints pictures. But the pictures he paints might be images of his own absence, which, if you think about it, is just perfect. Van Gogh illustrates this in his painting of an empty chair. As in the sad story I just told, he was inhabited by the ghost of an older brother who had died, and was even given that brother’s very name; and in reincarnating a dead boy, he became absent, his light dimmed and began to go out. But in the painting of a chair with no one sitting in it, that light was flickering and brightening, however dimly. Creativity can be an illumination of what previously has been shrouded in darkness.
G.A. Give us another one.
Dr. E. Martin Ramirez. He was also an artist, and a catatonic schizophrenic, confined in California psychiatric hospitals for the last decades of his life. A recurring theme in his strange drawings is that of a train, emerging from a dark tunnel in a mountainside, and headed into another one. The train in each of his creations appears illuminated in sunlight, but only briefly, as it continues on a journey back into darkness. These are ghost trains. They carry the unrealized possiblities of his own being, symbolized in that short part of the journey outside of the tunnels. You can see from the images that this man never had much of a chance to establish his own life, that he was for the most part enveloped in nonbeing. The act of drawing, during his hospitalization, was probably the only expression there was of the purity of his own life spirit. The emergence of the train from the tunnel is a birth symbol, a coming into being through drawing, so that the artistic work is actually creating a picture of its own function. Martin Ramirez was the little engine that could – exist - but only fleetingly.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
G.A. You say bipolar discorder is caused by the arrival of ghosts from the past?
Dr. E. A person is strolling along in his or her life, a possibililty of who that person might have been suddenly gathers power, and then it bursts in upon the present. Voila!
G.A. But what about the old idea that mania is a defense against depression?
Dr.E. Nope. There may be instances where someone is in flight from something really depressing, and in the intensity of that flight produces transitory euphorias, but the real deal with mania is that it is a ghost attack.
G.A. Where does the ghost come from?
Dr. E. It comes from a possibility of oneself that has been crushed.
G.A. But what crushes it, and what is it then that empowers the ghost for the attack?
Dr. E. It is the very person who suffers the attack that does both. First the person absolutely obliterates one of his possibilities, a way of being that might otherwise have materialized, and then, later, that way of being, energized by a part of the person’s innermost core, strikes back against the crushing and blows the person’s mind.
G.A. So all this has something to do with the core of a person?
Dr. E. Yes, the core splits. The original crushing occurs in a primordial division of the individual’s selfhood, in which one part, generally allied with and embodying the agenda to maintain secure connections to other people, comes down hard on the other part, which is at odds with other people and seeks its own independent destiny. The former crunches the latter, and is initially victorious – but the latter comes back and has its revenge: it throws a charge of C-4 explosive into the cozy little world of the former, and then, we are off to the races! Ghost Invasion!
G.A. Your theory flies in the face of all the contemporary thinking one hears about regarding the genetic and neurochemical basis of bipolar disorder, doesn’t it?
Dr. E. That is all bullshit. I know this because it is my own field, and I have to say it is an embarrassment, a manifestation of what in future years will be looked back on as the paradoxical dark ages of psychiatry.
G.A. Why are they to be called the “paradoxical” dark ages?
Dr. E. Because the standard narrative regarding the dark ages is that they were times of superstition and ignorance, preoccupied with things like souls and ghosts, but that the light came with the arrival of natural science – whereas in modern psychiatry, we have what presents itself as enlightened science, but is actually a kind of magical thinking, whereas the serious scientific understanding of these matters focuses on ghosts. So there is a seeming paradox, but all that is superficial. Bipolar disorder is caused by ghosts, like I said, and the ghosts involved come armed with explosives.
G.A. Why is it, though, that smart people buy into the magical thinking then, if what you say is true – what creates the beliefs that the biology is the key?
Dr. E. The answer, my friend. resides in what lies beneath. There one finds the barricades against the very ghosts we are talking about, erected in the dark territories of the doctors’ own souls. Do you know what is required of a person to endure and survive medical training? This training is a locomotive that rolls over the personality. Every particle of rebellion and resistance has to be vanquished, and this is possible because it is a replication of an original crushing of the soul that occurred long before. So doctors are in the business of crushing and destroying ghosts, within and without, and they have a vested interest therefore in denying their existence and fortifying that denial by pouring poison into the bodies of those the ghosts inhabit. What goes on is just awful.
G.A. Well you are a doctor, and how is it you escaped this situation?
Dr. E. I have a different history.
G.A.: What is that history and how did it lead you to understand all this?
Dr. E. Let’s just say it was what it was, I am who I am, and I am qualified to speak on this topic.
G.A. Is there anything more you can tell us about ghosts?
Dr. E. Ghosts are everywhere, and they control pretty much everything.
G.A. Give us the lowdown on ghosts being everywhere.
Dr. E. Well, okay. First, there actually are ghosts not only of one’s own lost possibilities, but also of the interrupted possibilities of those we have lost, those beloved souls who have died and not had a chance to fulfill their dreams, or ours for them. These ghosts come to us in our dark moments, and our suffering in the face of their inability to live becomes unbearable. At precisely that time, the ghost of the lost person may enter into us and become transformed into our own purpose in living, which is a way of completing the interrupted journey. Many of us are inhabited by such ghosts.
Often, though, the occupying ghost becomes such a presence as to usurp the one being occupied, in which case that person’s displaced possibilities give rise to still another ghost. A dialectical process then ensues, ghost against ghost, a back and forth that goes on and on.
G.A. Please don’t stop.
Dr. E. Ghosts of the dead often take up residence inside children. I knew a young man whose body was invaded in such a way. He had, at the age of seven, witnessed his older brother hit by a car and killed. His brother was his mother’s first child, and her favorite. That evening he came to his mother’s darkened bedroom, where she lay softly weeping. She saw him standing there, and terrible words came from her mouth: “WHY COULD IT NOT HAVE BEEN YOU?” At that instant, he perceived himself from outside, and his eyes were all brightly lit up, almost as if his head had become a jack-o-lantern. He was radiantly alive, and his life was shining out of his eyes into the darkness of the room. But his brother lay dead, at the morgue. Later that night he had a strange vision: he stood in a cave deep in the earth, filled with soft clay. Invisible hands began shaping that clay into a human form, legs, arms, hips, chest, head, until a golem had materialized. He and I, looking back from a time much later, recognized that golem as the soul of his dead brother, returned to life within a seven year-old’s heart, and thenceforth he lived for both of them. The offending light of his life and his eyes had thus been dimmed. A very sad story.
G.A. So what happened to the young man?
Dr. E. He spent some time with me, crying , and the light became brighter.
G.A. And?
Dr. E. Ghosts are sometimes pretty heavily involved in creativity; in fact, without ghosts, probably there would be nothing created and the world might freeze up into patterns of the same.
G.A. You have to explain that.
Dr. E. A ghost invades someone, crowding him or her out of the picture, and the person displaced wants to come back in. And so he paints pictures. But the pictures he paints might be images of his own absence, which, if you think about it, is just perfect. Van Gogh illustrates this in his painting of an empty chair. As in the sad story I just told, he was inhabited by the ghost of an older brother who had died, and was even given that brother’s very name; and in reincarnating a dead boy, he became absent, his light dimmed and began to go out. But in the painting of a chair with no one sitting in it, that light was flickering and brightening, however dimly. Creativity can be an illumination of what previously has been shrouded in darkness.
G.A. Give us another one.
Dr. E. Martin Ramirez. He was also an artist, and a catatonic schizophrenic, confined in California psychiatric hospitals for the last decades of his life. A recurring theme in his strange drawings is that of a train, emerging from a dark tunnel in a mountainside, and headed into another one. The train in each of his creations appears illuminated in sunlight, but only briefly, as it continues on a journey back into darkness. These are ghost trains. They carry the unrealized possiblities of his own being, symbolized in that short part of the journey outside of the tunnels. You can see from the images that this man never had much of a chance to establish his own life, that he was for the most part enveloped in nonbeing. The act of drawing, during his hospitalization, was probably the only expression there was of the purity of his own life spirit. The emergence of the train from the tunnel is a birth symbol, a coming into being through drawing, so that the artistic work is actually creating a picture of its own function. Martin Ramirez was the little engine that could – exist - but only fleetingly.
G.A. One more.
Dr. E. Jacques Derrida. He too had a sibling who died, shortly after being born. Derrida’s mother responded to the loss of her child by rushing to become pregnant, and she gave birth to Jacques. But she did not grieve, and when she looked at the new child, she saw the soul of the one who did not make it. Jacques let himself flow into the tragedy, without even knowing he was doing so, and comforted his mother by becoming the child who had been lost. But was his identity then his own? That is the question underlying Derrida’s deconstructionism. Deconstructing a vision, a doctrine, an answer to any great or small question breaks open what may appear to be a definitive conclusion, a finalizing closure, and sets the stage for something creatively new to appear in this world. Derrida was always in search of the opportunity for the birth of his own soul, and his story is a sad one, because he never fully arrived. You might say he also was a train, forever in the act of coming out of a tunnel. I met someone recently who told me she had intimate relations with him a few years before he died. She said it felt like he wasn’t really there.
Come back some other day and maybe I will tell you more about ghosts, or other cool things. You are fun to talk to, G.A., because you make me feel like you are really interested. I don’t expererience that very often.
Dr. E. Jacques Derrida. He too had a sibling who died, shortly after being born. Derrida’s mother responded to the loss of her child by rushing to become pregnant, and she gave birth to Jacques. But she did not grieve, and when she looked at the new child, she saw the soul of the one who did not make it. Jacques let himself flow into the tragedy, without even knowing he was doing so, and comforted his mother by becoming the child who had been lost. But was his identity then his own? That is the question underlying Derrida’s deconstructionism. Deconstructing a vision, a doctrine, an answer to any great or small question breaks open what may appear to be a definitive conclusion, a finalizing closure, and sets the stage for something creatively new to appear in this world. Derrida was always in search of the opportunity for the birth of his own soul, and his story is a sad one, because he never fully arrived. You might say he also was a train, forever in the act of coming out of a tunnel. I met someone recently who told me she had intimate relations with him a few years before he died. She said it felt like he wasn’t really there.
Come back some other day and maybe I will tell you more about ghosts, or other cool things. You are fun to talk to, G.A., because you make me feel like you are really interested. I don’t expererience that very often.