You know the legend of Daphne who turned into a tree. That is a psychosis. The person she couldn't face the lice crisis cut herself off and went back. A person goes back in his own biological past also even back to the womb and becomes a little a little infant. But then in the following this and in the course of it there come great feelings of uniting with the universe. What Freud calls the oceanic experience. Feelings also of new knowledge things that had been mysterious to you fully understood in affable understandings come through and they do. This is no fooling. These are coming through. I've been amazed to read accounts of these experiences that parallel Hindu mythology perfectly. The person gets a sense of having lived many lifetimes of having lived forever. The person has actually united his consciousness I was left of it with that consciousness of the species the consciousness of biology the consciousness of the rocks and plants out of which we've come. And he is one with this which has indeed been forever and as we all have been goes back. Into this world. Then there comes a sense of a tough task and danger to be mastered. Also of divine presences that will help one through this and. If one has the courage to go on. That come the final crises. There are four typical file crises and these will vary according to the kind of difficulty that led the person to the experience.
For instance a person who has been brought up in a home with very little tenderness very little love. Very little test for him but only off Dorothy and regular. And do this do that. Or are. Too mild and wrath in the house. Drunken father ranging around the place all this. This person is seeking a reorientation a re centering in the scent of love. And they fear combination there will be the discovery of a centering himself of tenderness of love and that will be his discovery. We can call this the discovery in terms of the image of the sacred marriage the union of. The pair of opposites in their rhotic loving way. Or if it has been a household where the father has been a nothing. No force in the home at all. Where there has been no sense of father or authority and someone of the masculine order whom you can respect. But. A kind of. Mass of. Domestic. Details and feminine concerns the quest will be for a father image and this will be what will be found. The motif not of the Union in marriage. But of the discovery and atonement. So to say with the father.
Another point. Of problem is when the child has felt himself to be excluded a person with no family let's say or a person who has been treated as though he work outside the family. I've noticed this occasionally when there is a second family a marriage and another family comes off they excluded one of the earlier one is outside. One seeks center and there comes the sense of having found the center of having been the center and being the center. Of Dr. Perry told me of one case a schizophrenic who was absolutely cut off. Nobody could communicate with him at all. And this poor new person he drew a little circle for. And he just put his pants in the middle of the circle and Perry said to him you are in the center aren't you aren't you. And this started it. Now that's a very interesting example of. A psychosis at this time in the next to last chapter of Ronald David Laing book The Politics of Experience And the Bird of Paradise. It is an actual account of psychosis by a adult man who went in and out.