A "Conversation" between Prof. F. A. Gerges
and J. Michael Mahoney
Gerges
How do you explain the fact that other researchers have not examined the subject of the bearded lady?
Mahoney
Frankly, it is amazing to me that schizophrenia has not been generally and decisively linked to the bearded lady syndrome, except in isolated cases. A handful of investigators, notably Dr. Edward J. Kempf (see quotation 001 herein) has certainly made note of this phenomenon in mental illness, but the writings of others on the subject have not been extensive enough to make an indelible impression on the general public, nor, for that matter, even on the psychiatric profession. Theories are a dime-a-dozen, so to speak, and one has to gather an overwhelming amount of evidence to convince people of a theory's correctness, which so far no one else has done in this particular case. Darwin's theory of evolution could have been stated quite simply in a few pages, yet, after developing his theory, he had to spend the remainder of his life documenting it extensively in such books as On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man.
The bearded lady syndrome in mental illness has been observed by many, yet no one has really been able to distinguish the forest from the trees; that is, the general applicability of the theory to all cases of mental illness and not just the few being observed at any one moment.
My favorite quotation (from Otto Fenichel's The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis) I think explains this investigative blindness: "And the hero who solves every riddle must have been wise not so much because of his intelligence, but because his emotional freedom, unhindered by repression, enabled him to recognize the hidden truth." Unfortunately, many investigators are still hindered by their own repressions, varying both in strength and depth. These repressions can be the result of both religious and personal problems which have never been satisfactorily resolved. The purpose of Freud's Psycho-Analysis is to resolve and dissipate these repressions, but how many people have been psycho-analyzed? If an investigator has issues with his own bearded-lady self, which he (or she) has never satisfactorily come to terms with, the ambivalence caused by this repression will make it much more difficult to recognize this conflict in others.
Charles Darwin, in his autobiography edited by his granddaughter, Nora Barlow, put it another way. He was explaining how easy it is to ignore phenomena, even though they are plainly visible, if you do not know what you are looking for. "On this tour," he wrote, "I had a striking instance how easy it is to overlook phenomena, however conspicuous, before they are observed by anyone. We spent many hours in Cwm Idwal, examining all the rocks with extreme care, as Sedgwick was anxious to find fossils in them; but neither of us saw a trace of the wonderful glacial phenomena all around us; we did not notice the plainly scored rocks, the perched boulders, the lateral and terminal moraines. Yet these phenomena are so conspicuous that, as I declared in a paper published many years afterwards in the Philosophical Magazine, a house burnt down by fire did not tell its story more plainly than did this valley. If it had been filled by a glacier, the phenomena would have been less distinct than they are now."
The same holds true for the bearded lady syndrome. Its phenomena are so obvious in every case of mental illness/schizophrenia, if one knows what to look for, that, as Darwin so strikingly put it, "a house burnt down by fire did not tell its story more plainly than did this valley."
Nowadays, of course, academic psychiatry is preaching a so-called bio-chemical theory of schizophrenia, namely, that the disease is caused by certain chemical imbalances in the brain and that the cure lies in somehow correcting these imbalances through drugs and other physiological treatments. The drugs in use today, however, are merely band-aids covering the basic pathogen, i.e., the severe bisexual conflict of the bearded lady syndrome. Drugs can be useful in certain cases to stabilize the patient to the extent that he or she can begin psychotherapy. If psychotherapy is not undertaken then the drugs truly remain nothing but band-aids, or chemical straight-jackets, and the bisexual conflict pathogen itself is never resolved, forcing the patient to remain on drugs for the remainder of his or her life. The vast majority of these drugs greatly diminish the sexual drive and of course this aids in eliminating much of the toxic effect of the undischarged homosexual libido, thereby substantially reducing the symptoms of the mental illness.
The only true cure for schizophrenia is long-term psychotherapy wherein the afflicted person can finally come to terms with his or her intense bisexual conflict and resolve it satisfactorily by either accepting one's homosexuality or else maturing into heterosexuality.
More at:
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