A 'vicious double bind': Updated

Reflecting on ‘No Comfort Zone’....and ...'the Betrayal Bond'...and 'Hope'

                                        Stay In Touch

 I noticed that the Finger of God in the painting is reaching out to the finger of the hand below the fractured crack in the wall.  Did you?   [The painting was removed.]

Both the body and the spirit of man are constantly reaching out for a sense of touch, so much so that the consequences become serious wherever there is any extraordinary frustration of this drive.  To be in a foreign country without friends, to be alone for a long time in a deep fog, or to be in a fogbound plane that is trying unsuccessfully to contact the hidden earth below---these are passing hints of the terror of being out of touch.  It is not the sick alone who are out of touch, but all of us.  

And now we know, more clinically and in greater detail, to what degree men can and cannot tolerate deprivation of actuality.  We can put deep gloves on a man [..the Rabbit lost his gloves and his fan…Alice put on one of the gloves and almost shrunk to ‘disappearing’!...down the Rabbit-Hole..], cover his eyes […blinders…], close his ears, separate him from events, and introduce scheduled monotony; the psychic results of all this will often be extreme, to the point of creating hallucination in the victim.  He cannot do without the touch of reality […’Divine Spark’…], and when he is this much separated from it, he must do something desperate.  Through hallucination, he creates a substitute world that he calls reality.

   We may conjecture that, in all those situations of illness where human beings hopelessly thrash about within structures of endlessness, they are seeking that sense of contact without which there is desperation.  But the methods of search are always indirect, and intensify the hopelessness.  They handle the present by living in a past that screens the present; they try to heal the terrible image of the self by seeking approval in a thousand places but cannot give it to themselves; they cannot find any beginning or end to their circles of action.  It is a thrashing in a vacuum where nothing is touched.⁷  The important thing is that all these endless processes, whatever their concrete or clinical form, create helplessness, partial or total.

   I propose that the sick person is really helpless, and that there is nothing more human than to be helpless.  He is helpless.  For he is operating within his own fractured, closed system of fantasy and feeling, unable, as a result, even to see or to imagine what is on the outside.  He needs another’s imagination that will begin to work with his own, and then the two can do it together.  He must put on another’s imagination in order to rediscover his own.

   Being helpless, being unable, that is, to help himself, he suddenly finds himself confronted, at so critical a moment, with a culture, and sometimes a medical situation, which tells him that he must help himself, that the help must come from within.  It was bad enough that he be told that hope needs the help from the outside world.  Now the final blow falls: he is told that even the help must come from within.

This is what a Japanese analyst looking at our culture from the inside and the outside calls a “vicious double bind.”  The entrapment of the double bind will become clearer….but our present example is classical: you who need help....       p.78       ~William Lynch, Images of Hope

...from another, it asserts, must help yourself---“…the philosophy of self-help, as it is understood today,” says Dr. L. Takeo Doi, “is entirely a Western product.”

          I believe that the idea of self-help or the intrinsic autonomy of a

          person gradually became popular in western Europe during the

          early Renaissance.  One may perhaps associate the development

          of this idea with the saying, “God helps those who help themselves,”

          which seems to have become popular by the seventeenth century.

          It was used by Algernon Sydney, in his political essay, Discourses

          Concerning Government, written around 1680, and a similar saying

          appears in George Herbert’s Outlandish Proverbs, first published

          in 1640.   

                    Interestingly enough, this saying in another form can be

          found in old Greek authors, but NOT in authentic Judeo-Christian
         literature, including the Bible.  One might well argue, then, that the

          “God” of “God helps those who help themselves,” who does not

           take the initiative in helping people, but only waits for them to

           help themselves, is NOT the Judeo-Christian God.  Incidentally, such

           an interpretation is quite possible from Sydney’s book, since he uses

           the saying primarily to point to the grim, skeptical, almost cruel reality of the

           hostile world, and scarcely a helping God.  Such a God can easily be

           dispensed with, because He cannot be depended upon, and what

           counts, after all, is whether one helps oneself or not.⁹

                                        .......................
 Added:
The rich and the happy can choose to keep silent, 
no need to bid for attention. 
But the desperate must reveal themselves, must say: 
I am blind or: I am going blind or: 
It's not good for me here on Earth or: 
My child is sick or: 
I am not holding it together... 
But when is that really enough? 
So, lest people pass them by like objects, sometimes they sing. 
 And sometimes their songs are beautiful. ~Rilke, Book of Images
===
'But what can I do?' he said.

"Shudder.
But what can you do, in the face of such horror? The answer, obviously, is: take a stand."
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"Love one another AS I HAVE LOVED YOU."  -Jesus