On Game Therapy.
Conventionally, one is apt to regard a game as an escape. It
is a means of which one’s temporary sedation and enjoyment is an ends.
Admittedly this is how most forms of Art are viewed by the public, except where
in the individual recognizes one AS Art. Then the game is at once a miraculous
manifestation of Nature, working through the device of Human Nature, and all so
indicative OF Nature and its own possibilities. The fascination is primarily
technological. That a computer game – and a computer really – could EXIST alone
appears miraculous when it is neither taken for granted consumeristically or,
in the case of the technician, “understood” through the perspective of computer
science (though of course some technicians never lose their wonder). If THIS is
possible, what is possibly lurking beyond my window, just behind the monitor?
The game seems, by occupying and ensnaring one’s focus, to suggest through
puzzles or adventures what the world holds. Its secondary significance is of course
MYTHO-logical. It mirrors one’s own unconscious predicament. The dreaming
psyche makes sense of the world through symbols; for this reason psychosis, a
kind of glitch in the internal matrix, is perceived at times as the invasion by
symbols used to make cohesion of reality of the conscious psyche. Sanity seems
to depend, as in the comportment of Heidegger or the archetypes of Jung, upon
the ability of the mind to refer to the sensory world by analogy to symbol: to
map. The map is in the case of a conventionally healthy psyche so clear that
one barely notices its presence. Yet when the map tears it becomes obvious. The
symbolizing portion of the mind is out of joint with the sensory, and so the
subjective phenomenon of schizophrenia is invasion by fantasy trying again,
this time Above the threshold of consciousness, probably soliciting its help, to
make again a cohesive mythological narrative that accords the senses and the
reason with the body and its spontaneous needs.
Perhaps it is this SOLICITATION however tentative in theory,
that is the reason we are morally obligated to listen to the lunatics story as
fact. The reason that fantasy is flowing into consciousness, rather than being
remedied unconsciously as per usual, is that the ego is required to inform it. Of
course, one might argue that to lend the ego such authority is too Judging an
attitude. Yet it is actually an assertion of existential responsibility. What
would be much worse than lucid fantasy is surely bleakness, the hellish
condition wherein the world is like a T.S. Eliot poem, retaining its normality
but lacking its meaning because the reason has repressed, or believed its self
tom the fantasy and kept it volitionally unconscious out of an all too
conventional fear of judgement. The noogenic depressive living in this
nihilistic duldrum retains the outward advantage of escaping persecution
(except for by those fascists that would condemn his depression as physical
illness, bullying him without even addressing his own responsibility for his
predicament), but he loses the capacity to HEAL. Only by allowing his self to
go nuts can he hope to reconcile Unconscious contents, now spilling into the
consciousness, with the consciousness: Imagination dancing with Logic and
Reason in the general. Some sort of accepted deviance: A rave club, a drug, a
concert, might help to provide the Dyonesiac liberation necessary to step into
the visionary world of spirits that Shamans navigated. Yet it cannot be enough.
Apollo must all so have his say. Poetry, philosophy, and other arts can help
the depressive, having gone through the stage of the lunatic, to make sense of
his neurosis and become again integrated.
A game does both. If embraced fully it engulfs the player.
The player forgets what Common Sense refers to as “reality” and again ventures
into the mythological forest of imagination. He is no different in this respect
from the philosopher, no less Sane in the grand sense, no less holy, and no
less AWARE. In fact he might learn the most important lessons about “reality”
through this kind of “escape” from the stultifying boredom of what really is at
heart simply his own neurotic ego with its negation of the imagination and its
fixation upon problem-solving. By engaging both this problem-solving ego, no
longer problematic, and the imaginative Unconscious that reasons in TERMS of
these fantasy patterns, the Self not only allows imagination again to appear,
dissolving reality and fantasy, inadvertently of course (for to be too
self-conscious of this progression is to still pretend the boundary into
existence), in a Dyonesiac fashion, but one can work WITH the fantasy
components if the game is engaging enough. A victory in the game is practical
and internal, for one has inadvertently, unless one is a master shaman, in
which case it would be lucid, all so created an internal metaphor that, like a
debugger in a computer software, now can be used to fix the system internally.
One does not solve a computer virus by tinkering with the
hardware, and so one does not resolve a neurosis by tinkering with the brain;
it is just as barbaric, and it has much more to do with the history of how
people have (miss)treated madness than with the rigour of genuine research and open
inquiry. One solves a virus by operating with it through the software: The
virtual spirit of which the hardware could be said to be the body.
If computer science its self works this way, is it any
longer archaic* to refer to the Soul of the individual as what should be the
focus of Psychology and Psychiatry, the respective study and (ideally
beneficent) treatment of the SOUL (Psyche)?
Surely not.
*Many things become less archaic over time, not more so.
Wine has taught me this surely.
Dm.A.A.
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