Descent Into Darkness, the Psychodynamics of Mental Illness

Abstract

Richard D. Chessick: Descent Into Darkness, the Psychodynamics of Mental Illness, XLIBRIS, Bloomington, IN, 2011, 261 pp. $9.99 (in e-Pub format), ISBN: 978-1-45353-049-8 Descent Into Darkness, the Psychodynamics of Mental Illness, is a Greek Tragedy in a contemporary setting. The trip to Turkey by Martin, a bereaved psychoanalyst suffering the loss of his wife and the unrequited love of J, a former patient, is a metaphor for the tragedy of his life as well as the decay of Western Civilization - a journey into the Abyss of Nietzsche. This is a didactic novel, the purpose of which is to teach psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy, utilizing relationships common to human everyday experience, to interested persons. Thus, this book represents a new contribution in psychoanalysis. The author presents discussions among proponents of differing theoretical orientation using the voices of the participants in his travel group. The richness of the material is supplemented by substantially cogent discussions of philosophy, such as Spinoza's perspective of psychodynamic issues as discussed in his work Ethics. This is the underlying idea of Descent Into Darkness, the human lack of power in moderating and checking the emotions. The material is representative of how human beings function as a reflection of unconscious intrapsychicphenomena. This is accomplished both didactically and illustratively in the context of the behavior of the individual group members. The issues are of universal human significance with regard to a humanistic perspective as well as the very survival of civilization. The various philosophical viewpoints are conveyed through discussion and the dramatic interaction of the protagonists. Martin, the tragic hero of this novel, leads a group consisting of mosdy psychoanalysts on a tour of Turkey. He obtains a travel grant and muses ... as middle age waned and old age loomed up, that we are not to be distinguished from animals by any capacity for rational insight into nature (p. 17). We differ from animals only in degree and not in kind. The idea of an intellectual tour of Turkey arose because it cradles the remains of civilizations from the very beginning of human history that we have information about, to the present time. This might lend itself to a comparison of the development of the psychic apparatus and its archaic origins. Martin wished to discuss the various stages of civilization and by introducing archaeology to demonstrate Freud's concept of the unconscious as a buried city. In Turkey a number of civilizations from the most archaic to the most modern are mixed together and must live together with compromises, thus an illustration of Freud's conception. Arnold Modell, in his book Object Love and Reality (1968), discusses the analogy between the historical development of society's gradual acceptance of an inanimate, unmoved world, and the developmental process in the individual that permits the acceptance of reality. In Totem and Taboo (1918), Freud showed magical thinking to be common to both the inner world of modern man and the sodai institutions of prehistoric man. Magical thinking serves analogous functions in neurotic symptoms and primitive social institutions. …