Show description

102 More generally, since it is the unpredictable which is held to be a particular source of terror, the primitive can only be expected to recognize such a category of events as deviations from a view of nature as a continuously functioning and integrated order—the very conception, that is, denied to him by the intellectualist tradition. The bourgeois world, of course, as a rational order, ought already to have transcended fear. The intellect, as the instrumental mastery of nature, ought to have superseded the magical or religious techniques of coping with threats to life.

It was not, however, simply another term for the intellect. Reason was the instrumental use of intellect; a practical intelligence. It was only in pursuit of a practical goal that thought became reason. More 28 FUN specifically, it was the form given to thought in the process of our gaining mastery over the natural and social world. 4 Capitalism is viewed more as the means of producing commodities and less as the universal system of their exchange. Reason, modelled upon this process of production, becomes the most general ‘means’ at our disposal.

52 The patient begins to ‘see’ causal relations where none exists, and, in consequence, his perceptual world becomes distorted. The process, if unchecked, ends in individual cases of ‘animism’. 54 Once the process of association becomes disordered, ‘fancy rules without control’ and reality, as the savage myth world, becomes ‘a waking dream’. Quoting Reil with approval he argues that ‘Fools have no ruling idea…. 56 The madman was then, like the savage, a poor scientist. He formed hypothetical connections among things without ever subjecting them to 38 FUN the test of experiment.