Posted by Willful on October 27, 2012, at 11:37:01
In reply to Lou's response-ahntgdzm » Phil, posted by Lou Pilder on October 27, 2012, at 10:16:06
Phil was saying not that Lou's mental illness is a result of his being religious, but that his religiousity was a result of his mental illness.
He wasn't speaking of Jews, but of Lou. Lou is not 'Jews", and in many respects, he is not pure and simple a Jew. Lou is Lou. When I say that Lou is mentally ill-- if I say it-- I don't say that a Jew is mentally ill. His being Jewish has nothing to do with it. Even if his illness relates to religiosity, curiously, it has nothing to do with his being Jewish
This is true because his Jewishness is caught up by this illness-- it is not causal or even crucial to the illness. It may make the illness more pernicious-- and more inflammatory-- I doubt we would be so disturbed if Lou were saying that postings on the board made him check his stove 100 times before he left the house. So his saying that there are nameless posts, or that any criticism of him is anti-semitic and tends to whatever the most extreme results of anti-semiticism could be, does arouse a lot of disruption. But the Jewish aspect is far from the root cause. One might say it is the rhetorical or symbolic container for his illness, but as such, is divorced from Jewishness itself.
If I won't eat, it's not because I'm Jewish; it's because I have problems that have nothing to do with Jewishness. If I"m obsessed by the persecution of Jews in the early 1900's, it has nothing to do with my Jewishness per se-- it simply is an outgrowth of some obsessivenss that has selected Jewishness as it object. (It may locate you in relation to the persecution-- as a victim of it-- but amounts to that.) (I add, just for the record, that I am Jewish.)
Being Jewish doesn't mean that everything about you is defined by your Jewishness. Many aspects of your self are simply human, and shared with every other human on the planet-- in one variety or aspect or another. And your being Jewish is in some sense incidental to your general humanity.
So let's dispense once and for all with any pretense that Jewishness or anti-semiticism is more than peripherally involved in anything we're saying about Lou, or that Lou really cares about. It's just a vehicle for talking about what Lou cares about, a very effective vehicle, that gets a lot of attention.
Lou is more interested in persecution than he is in Jewishness. I have always assumed that --anyway. We all know Lou suffers from some very serious mental illness-- at least I have always assumed that we all know that-- except for newcomers on the board who are assaulted by Lou and then don't know why or what to think.
We shouldn't kid ourselves about this. What we have here is someone who has a sense of persecution, and who is in full bloom of spreading this poison through this board, because he is unable to contain it himself. And his claims about Jewishness are a way at best of expressing the pressing sense of this poison, and of making us all (and himself) drink a whole lot of it.
I don't know what can be done about Lou, because he simply is using us as instruments of his own craziness. His persecution and rescue phantasies have nothing to do with any of us or what we're doing-- yet they waylay us, drive newcomers from the board, and sow a lot of confusion and pain. Why do we (why does Bob) let this happen?
Is it helping (or supporting) Lou to let him carry out- and to reexperience this onslaught?
I surely don't see the kindness in letting him do this here to us and to himself. Apparently Bob thought that was kinder-- to Lou, and not detrimental enough to the community. At this point, I think the ratios have turned. But it remains, I guess, for Bob to be convinced--since he has the power to intervene, as he sees fit.
Emsam.
Abilify
Provigil
Rilutek
poster:Willful
thread:1029828
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20121018/msgs/1029998.html