Socialist Quotes for Sunday Reflection pt 55

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" the motto of the rebel is: " hic et nunc " - being the rebel man of action, free and independent action. We have found that this type can only include a fraction of the masses, and however this is where the small elite is able to resist the automatism and to fail the exercise of the brute force. It is the ancient freedom in modern robe: substantial, elementary freedom, which is wakes in healthy peoples whenever the tyranny of parties or foreign conquerors oppress the country. It is not a freedom that is limited to protest or emigrate: it is a freedom decided to fight."

- Ernst Junger

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KIM IL SUNG ADVICE TO COMMUNISTS IN WESTERN EUROPE
(Credit to Giù le mani dalla Corea socialista who originally posted this)

From his Talk with the General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Ireland, July 26:

For Communist and Workers’ Parties in capitalist countries to give correct leadership to the revolutionary struggle of the masses of the people, their fighting goal should be clear. Of course, they should fight to establish socialism, but it is not enough to call on the people in general terms to fight against capitalists to establish a socialist system. You have just said that capitalist countries in Europe assert more strongly than before that they should pursue policies by their own decisions, so the Communist and Workers’ Parties in capitalist countries must pursue their countries’ independence as their immediate fighting task.

Any party must, first of all, free its country from any foreign domination, enabling it to exercise complete political sovereignty. It is very important to ensure the country’s political independence. Therefore parties in capitalist countries must struggle to free their countries from the control of great powers and win complete political independence. In this struggle they must form a common front with all patriotic forces.

In order to establish a socialist system, you should begin with the struggle to free your country from the control of great powers and make it independent. I think this is your first and foremost task.
After achieving the country’s political independence, you should fight to establish a social system under which all people lead equitably happy lives.

You should take the road to socialism in order to provide all the people with stable lives and continue to improve their standards of living. Only under the socialist system can all the people have genuine political rights and live in freedom and happiness.

On a recent visit to our country the leader of a communist party from a capitalist country said that from the developments in some socialist countries he could not understand what kind of socialism they were building. Probably he meant that some socialist countries are obscuring the distinction between socialism and capitalism. Quite a few socialist countries have now adopted capitalist methods in building socialism and, as a result the demarcation line between the socialist and capitalist systems is disappearing.

I said to him: “It is not difficult to understand the distinction between the socialist and capitalist systems. Building genuine socialism means establishing a society that champions the interests of all the people. If you stay longer in our country and see a lot of things you will clearly understand the advantages of the socialist system.”

In our country everyone acquires the right to eat and gets food supplies from the moment he or she is born, and all the working people are provided with stable jobs. We have neither unemployment nor taxation. Everyone in our country is accorded free education and free medical care. Thus in our country the state takes full responsibility for the people’s living and provides them with all their living conditions. That is why all our people place unbounded trust in our Party and government and are united solidly behind the Party. They are solidly united because our country provides them with all their living conditions. Without this the people’s unity and cohesion could not be expected.
It is true that productive forces in socialist countries are not so highly developed as in developed capitalist countries. Socialist countries can import technology from developed capitalist countries for economic progress, but the import of technology must not lead to introduction of the capitalist system itself. The former is one thing and the latter is another. The development of technology in capitalist countries on no account means the superiority of the capitalist system. Some people think capitalists or the capitalist system can develop technology at a high speed. They are wrong. It is not the capitalists, but the working people, including intellectuals, who develop technology.

If the socialist countries advance consistently along the road of socialism, giving full play to the masses’ creative power, they can develop technology more rapidly than the capitalist countries. If they raise the working people’s levels of ideology, culture and knowledge, the people will come up with more technological inventions. It is better for socialist countries to develop technology on their own by raising their people’s levels of ideology, culture and technology than to visit capitalist countries and kiss the capitalists in order to obtain new technology.

As communists are revolutionaries, determined to build socialism in opposition to capitalism, they must not abandon socialist principles. If they cock their heads, wondering if it is possible to build socialism by reform, they will become reformists in the end.

— Kim Il Sung, Works, vol. 41, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Pyongyang 1996, pp. 176-178.
(Giù le mani dalla Corea socialista)

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"We thus see that, even if we keep ourselves within the relation of capital and wage-labour, the interests of capitals and the interests of wage-labour are diametrically opposed to each other.

A rapid growth of capital is synonymous with a rapid growth of profits. Profits can grow rapidly only when the price of labour – the relative wages – decrease just as rapidly. Relative wages may fall, although real wages rise simultaneously with nominal wages, with the money value of labour, provided only that the real wage does not rise in the same proportion as the profit. If, for instance, in good business years wages rise 5 per cent, while profits rise 30 per cent, the proportional, the relative wage has not increased, but decreased.

If, therefore, the income of the worker increased with the rapid growth of capital, there is at the same time a widening of the social chasm that divides the worker from the capitalist, and increase in the power of capital over labour, a greater dependence of labour upon capital.

To say that "the worker has an interest in the rapid growth of capital", means only this: that the more speedily the worker augments the wealth of the capitalist, the larger will be the crumbs which fall to him, the greater will be the number of workers that can be called into existence, the more can the mass of slaves dependent upon capital be increased.

We have thus seen that even the most favorable situation for the working class, namely, the most rapid growth of capital, however much it may improve the material life of the worker, does not abolish the antagonism between his interests and the interests of the capitalist. Profit and wages remain as before, in inverse proportion.

If capital grows rapidly, wages may rise, but the profit of capital rises disproportionately faster. The material position of the worker has improved, but at the cost of his social position. The social chasm that separates him from the capitalist has widened.

Finally, to say that "the most favorable condition for wage-labour is the fastest possible growth of productive capital", is the same as to say: the quicker the working class multiplies and augments the power inimical to it – the wealth of another which lords over that class – the more favorable will be the conditions under which it will be permitted to toil anew at the multiplication of bourgeois wealth, at the enlargement of the power of capital, content thus to forge for itself the golden chains by which the bourgeoisie drags it in its train."

- Karl Marx

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The tax on childlessness (Russian: налог на бездетность, translit. nalog na bezdetnost) was imposed in the Soviet Union and other Communist countries, starting in the 1940s, as part of their natalist policies. Joseph Stalin's regime created the tax in order to encourage adult people to reproduce, thus increasing the number of people and the population of the Soviet Union. The 6% income tax affected men from the age of 25 to 50, and married women from 20 to 45 years of age.

The tax remained in place until the collapse of the Soviet Union, though by the end of the Soviet Union, the amount of money which could be taxed was steadily reduced. 

- ("Налог на бездетность, существовавший в СССР, предлагают восстановить") http://www.finiz.ru/cfin/tmpl-art/id_art-1054929

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"A second, and a very bold political measure of Lycurgus, is his redistribution of the land. For there was a dreadful inequality in this regard, the city was heavily burdened with indigent and helpless people, and wealth was wholly concentrated in the hands of a few.

Determined, therefore, to banish insolence and envy and crime and luxury, and those yet more deep-seated and afflictive diseases of the state, poverty and wealth, he persuaded his fellow-citizens to make one parcel of all their territory and divide it up anew, and to live with one another on a basis of entire uniformity and equality in the means of subsistence, seeking preeminence through virtue alone, assured that there was no other difference or inequality between man and man than that which was established by blame for base actions and praise for good ones. "

- Plutarch on Lycurgus’ land reform

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The UK is STILL trapped in the EU. The Brexit BETRAYAL deepens

On the 23rd of June 2016, the people of the UK voted by a significant majority to leave the EU.  We were told that our wishes would be implemented, but that was just a political lie.  If we had voted to stay as prisoners of the EU, then the politicians would have posed for the cameras with gleeful smirks, proclaiming how decent, democratic and all round 'super' they were for delivering what we demanded in the referendum.  But - against all their machinations - we didn't vote as they expected.  In spite of all the money pumped into coercing the people to vote to stay in the EU Empire; in spite of a glossy piece of pro-EU propaganda delivered to every single household; in spite of the mobilisation of the BBC and other state media to push lie after lie about the dangers of sovereignty and the glories of imperial servitude; in spite of this and much more, we voted to leave the EU.

The block leader of the concentration camp which the UK has become, David Cameron, resigned on the spot in protest at the people voting democratically against his masters.  The replacement leader, Theresa May, then waited for the best part of a year before even issuing the empire with a letter stating the will of the UK to return to the free world.  Tonight at 11pm, the process known as Article 50 comes to an end, and the UK becomes free - well, no it doesn't.  The colonial collaborators in Westminster, backed up by the bourgeois kapos in the media, have done everything to stop the will of the people being observed.  The pro-remain population of the UK, like the institutionalised prisoners they are, have been whipped into a media-devoured frenzy, calling for the Empire to be defended, and for our chains to be tightened.  The door was opened to the free world on 23.6.16, then slammed more tightly shut than ever as soon as we attempted to use it.

The traitors and collaborators have killed democracy in the UK - if it ever existed at all. Today is a day of shame.

Let all revolutionary patriotic socialists hold a minutes silence at 11pm, to note the death of the propaganda imagery of 'democracy' - not to mourn the passing of anything that mattered, but to acknowledge the vanishing of an illusion.

Treason is no longer being conducted in secret - it is being openly and boastfully practiced.  We need to grasp this opportunity to expose the kapos, the collaborators, the colonial governers and all the others who are doing all they can to keep us from escaping the EU Empire. But more important than the enemies of the people, we need to awaken the scared and institutionalised people of our own communities, into a realisation that the Empire is the enemy, and that Freedom is not only nothing to be sacred of, but that it is worth fighting for.




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Wilberg on Wednesday - The Illness Is The Cure pt 37/46

Philosophical Postscript
– Touch and the Essence of Bodyhood

“The tactile realm of perception is the same thing as the body.”

Samuel Avery

So far in this book I have used terms such as ‘lived body’, ‘felt body’ or ‘body of feeling awareness’ to present another understanding of what we call ‘the body’ or ‘a body’. I have also argued that the ‘body of our feeling awareness’ as a whole – our ‘soul’ – embraces the entire field or space of experiencing that we perceive as the ‘world’ around us. Here I wish to go a little further in exploring the single word ‘body’.

To most people, of course, this word has a self-evident meaning which is rarely questioned. They see the human body, like any other ‘body’, as a bounded ‘material’ object in space. I stress the word ‘see’, for it hints at the way in which the dimension of visual experiencing has come to dominate both our perception and conception of the body and of bodies, i.e. of ‘bodyhood’ as such, leading us also to think of bodies as ‘material’ objects ‘in’ space.

In reality however, nobody (‘no-body’) can see, hear or even touch ‘matter’. For what we call ‘matter’ is actually a purely abstract concept to which there corresponds no ‘objective’ reality we can directly experience or prove the existence of. Instead, what we think of as properties of ‘matter’ are simply qualities of subjective experiencing – in particular those qualities of tactile experiencing such as hardness or softness, weight and density, roughness or smoothness etc. In other words, it is only because something that we actually see in space is also sensed as something that can be potentially felt in a tactile way that we come to think of it as a ‘material’ body.

‘Space’ itself however, is no objective ‘physical’ dimension but rather the principal dimension of subjective visual experiencing. So again, what we ‘see’ in it is also only what we can also potentially feel or touch. Indeed we could go so far as to say that visual experiencing of and in ‘space’ is itself a sensory and spatial interpretation of tactile experiencing in all its dimensions, actual and potential - which include hearing, taste and even smell. For hearing is vibration that touches us - and gives us a sign of something that can potentially be touched. Similarly, smell gives us a sign of something that can potentially be tasted - taste itself being a form of touch. That is why a dog’s experience of space is shaped as much - if not more - by their acute sense of hearing and smell than by sight alone.

As human beings, whilst we can see a plant or even a single-celled organism under a microscope – neither the cell nor the plant can either see, hear or even smell. What the plant senses, it senses only in a directly tactile way – whether as a breeze, insect or chemical on its surface. What a single cell experiences – even a cell of our own ‘body’ and its multiple ‘sense organs’ (a retinal cell for example) it experiences through touch and feeling awareness alone. It is only through the sense of sight that has been developed by ‘multicellular organisms’ that they come to interpret their tactile experience in a visual and spatial way – or that human beings in particular come to perceive and conceive ‘cells’ themselves (and the tissues, organs and bodies composed of them) principally as visual and ‘material’ objects – rather than feeling them subjectively in the tactile way that they feel themselves.

Yet given the fundamentally tactile nature of cellular experiencing it is no surprise that both touch and herbal remedies are amongst the oldest forms of healing – affecting the very consciousness of our cells, tissue and organs, which is what I have termed ‘the physical soul’. For our cells themselves know of no other mode of experiencing but touch and taste, i.e. tactile experiencing and what Samuel Avery calls ‘chemical’ experiencing on the other.

The radical conclusion that all these reflections inexorably lead to is that bodyhood as such is touch, i.e. tactile experiencing in general and per se.

The radical conclusion that all these reflections lead to is that bodyhood as such is touch, i.e. tactile experiencing in general and per se. It is not just that our bodies are an instrument or object of touch. Instead, the very ‘body’ that we think of as touching or being touched is, in itself, a felt shape or pattern of tactile experiencing.

It is not sight but touch then, that can be said to be the true essence of all sensory and bodily experiencing. Thus not only sensations of hardness and softness, roughness or softness, lightness or heaviness, weight and density, warmth and coolness but also of air and respiration, taste and digestion, lightness or heaviness, movement and stillness, tension and relaxation, sound and silence, even pleasure, pain and emotional states, that are felt in a principally tactile way; as also are such senses as ‘pressure’ of time, of spatial expansiveness or confinement, closeness or distance – not to mention our sense of how inwardly close or distant, ‘in touch’ or ‘in contact’ we feel with ourselves and others.

All that we see from the outside and call ‘a body’ is in essence nothing but a realm of actual and potential modes of tactile experiencing – proprioceptive and kinaesthetic, respiratory, auditory, olfactory (smell) or gustatory (taste and digestive sensations), emotional and relational. There are many people however, whose consciousness is so much dominated by sight that these dimensions of tactile experiencing may be almost totally subsumed by visual perception – by objects that are ‘seen’ in three-dimensional space - or, as they increasingly are, only as two-dimensional images on an electronic screen – including medical images created through CAT and MRI scans. One can link the general decline of tactile awareness and experiencing to the way in which screen technology has markedly accentuated a primary identification of the human body (not least the female body) with something ‘seen’, a mere visual image and to which the realm of actual or potential touch, whether in the form of handling objects or sexual touch, is either subordinated to or, in the case of both pornography and medical scans for example, made dependent upon. As a result, one may ask whether the very word ‘body’, with its immediate connotation of something seen in the form of a visual, mental or technological image, has itself become an obstacle to a more basic understanding of what ‘a body’ essentially is.

The same can be said of the word ‘soul’ – which is why I prefer the term ‘feeling awareness’. In this context however, it is important to distinguish ‘feeling’ and ‘touch’. If we touch something we of course 'feel' it. On the other hand we can be 'touched' in a feeling way and not just in the physical way implied by the term 'tactile' – just as feelings can also 'touch' us in a non-physical way. What we call ‘soul’, therefore, can be understood precisely as this feeling dimension of tactile experiencing.

To say that “the tactile realm of perception is the same thing as the body” is to say that not just what we call ‘body’ but also what we call ‘soul’ are, in essence, anything ‘in the world’ that we experience as ‘touching’ us in a manner that is felt in what may be more than just a ‘tactile’ way – whether this be a visual image or perception, a sensation of pleasure or pain, a look on a person’s face or in their eyes, a sound, word or tone of voice, a painting, poem or piece of music – or a lived experience, event or encounter of any sort.

This is what makes it impossible to separate the ‘lived body’ and bodily self-experience from our lived or experienced world. For what most essentially constitutes our ‘life world’ is all that has the potential to touch us in a feeling way. Indeed any ‘world’ consists of nothing but particular potentials of felt, tactile experiencing – none of which arise from some ‘thing’ called ‘the body’ or ‘the soul’, but rather from ‘feeling awareness’ – an awareness which knows no bodily boundaries and yet is the essence of both ‘body’ and ‘soul’ – both of which consist essentially of felt shapes, patterns, tones and textures of awareness.

What we call ‘a feeling’ (singular noun) or ‘feelings’ (plural noun) is one thing. ‘Feeling’ (verb) on the other hand, is another. ‘Feelings’ are something we experience ourselves as ‘having’. Feeling on the other hand is something we do. Or rather not something that ‘we’ do but that awareness itself ‘does’ – for without a feeling awareness of a self or selves – of an ‘I’, ‘you’, or ‘we’ – there could be no self or selves to experience, just as without a feeling awareness of all there is to potentially experience, there would be nothing to experience – and so also no field or felt world of experiencing, tactile or otherwise. The terms ‘feeling awareness’ and ‘body of feeling awareness’ therefore remain an important reminder that it is not the visually perceived and seemingly ‘physical’ or ‘material’ forms (cellular and bodily, thingly and worldly) that feel or touch, but rather awareness itself in all its different shapes, patterns, tones and textures – and that what awareness feels and ‘touches’ are essentially nothing but other such shapes and patterns, tones and textures of awareness.

Furthermore, since it is only through an awareness of experiencing that we first come to experience any ‘self’, ‘body’ or ‘world’ whatsoever, it follows that this awareness itself cannot – in principle – be the property or product of any self, body or world we are aware of – let alone enclosed within the apparent boundaries of what we see as ‘a body’ or ‘brain’. This argument ‘in principle’, i.e. the recognition that awareness is fundamentally irreducible to any experienced phenomena – being itself the precondition or ‘field condition’ for experiencing in all its infinite modes and potentials – is what I call ‘The Awareness Principle’.

Acknowledgements to Samuel Avery for his insights into the relation between visual and tactile dimensions of sensory experiencing and their relation to the myth of ‘matter’.

References:
Avery, Samuel The Dimensional Structure of Consciousness Avery, Samuel Transcendence of the Western Mind Wilberg, Peter The Awareness Principle

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Socialist Quotes for Sunday Reflection pt 54

Excellent video series from CPGB-ML Red Youth:

Red Youth's youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCH0PNjYHsJq9rw81j93hPFA/featured

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Stalin: Every Leninist knows that equalisation in the sphere of requirements and personal, everyday life is a reactionary petty-bourgeois absurdity, for we cannot expect all people to have the same requirements and tastes. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1934/01/26.htm

Marxism proceeds from the assumption that people’s tastes and requirements are not, and cannot be, identical and equal in regard to quality or quantity, whether in the period of socialism or the period of communism.

To conclude that according to the Marxist plan all should wear the same clothes and eat the same dishes in the same quantity is to utter vulgarities and to slander Marxism.

It is time we understood that Marxism is an enemy of equalisation. Already in the Manifesto of the Communist Party Marx and Engels scourged primitive utopian socialism and termed it reactionary because it preached “universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form.”

Bourgeois professors have tried to make use of the concept of equality to accuse us of wanting to make all men equal to one another, accusing socialists of an absurdity which they themselves invented. But Marxists cannot be held responsible for the stupidity of bourgeois writers.

From: https://archive.org/details/@mixedforestzone

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MODERN POPULISM, by Alexander Dugin

"The people is neither left nor right. The people stands all at once for order and for freedom, for a powerful state and for social justice, for strength and for continuous holiday. The people easily unites opposites without even noticing. The people lives according to a particular logic that has nothing to do with the norms of modern political science or sociology. The people is always not what others think about it. It does not lend itself to be calculated or counted. It proceeds from a different logic than that of the Enlightenment and societies of modernity. In some sense, the people is very ancient. It is nurtured by the juices of eternity.

The people as a political concept is appearing today in opposition to liberalism. The liberals are hollering about a fascist or communist-fascist threat, and they are incapable of understanding the essence of the populist moment, which they interpret through old clichés. Hence why they are losing. Hence why they are doomed." ...

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"One curious thing about Venezuela that few people seem to have remarked upon is that Chavez and Maduro are not really all that hardcore about their class war. The latter assumed the powers of Congress in 2017, but didn’t send armed men to round up the querulous parliamentarians. They continued to yack and squawk in their assembly, and now one of them has declared himself President. Bourgeois speculators, comprador elites, and dark foreign powers are conspiring to keep food off the supermarket shelves, but there haven’t been any demonstrative shootings of saboteurs and wreckers. Economic populism ran amok in an unsustainable flood of gibs that has only been recently been devalued by hyperinflation, but there was no serious attempt to set up central planning organs. Even Salvador Allende began to do that from his first year in power."

—Anatoly Karlin, 'Shadows of the Past in Venezuela' (24 January 2019)

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With everything that’s happening, it’s as if the popular classes everywhere are realizing that the “dynastic powers” no longer have any other ideal but offering them the continual dissolution of their way of life - and their last social benefits - in the endless movement of globalized growth, whether it’s painted green or even in the colors of “sustainable development”, “energy transition”, and the “digital revolution.”

- Jean-Claude Michéa, Notre ennemi, le Capital

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The culture of narcissism, economic deregulation, the religion of human rights, the collapse of the collective, the theory of gender, the advocacy for hybrids of any kind, the emergence of “contemporary art”, tele-reality, utilitarianism, the logic of the market, the primacy of the just over the good (and right over duty), subjective “free choice” erected as a general rule, the taste for cheap junk, the reign of the disposable and programmed obsolescence, all that is part of a contemporary system where, under the influence of liberalism, the individual has become the center of everything and has been erected as the universal criterion of evaluation. To understand liberal logic is to understand what links all these elements together and how they derive from a common matrix.

(Alain de Benoist, "Contre le libéralisme", éditions du Rocher, 2019, p.11)

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What is Patriotism? Love of country, someone answers. But what is meant by ‘love of country’? “The rich man,” says a French writer, “loves his country because he conceives it owes him a duty, whereas the poor man loves his country as he believes he owes it a duty.” The recognition of the duty we owe our country is, I take it, the real mainspring of patriotic action; and our ‘country’, properly understood, means not merely the particular spot on the earth's surface from which we derive our parentage, but also comprises all the men, women and children of our race whose collective life constitutes our country’s political existence. True patriotism seeks the welfare of each in the happiness of all, and is inconsistent with the selfish desire for worldly wealth which can only be gained by the spoliation of less favoured fellow-mortals.

- James Connolly

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"What is peace? Did we borrow Palestine from them? Are we renting the land? Did they give it to us all those years back as an act of kindness?
There will never be peace with the confiscators of our lands, and if there ever emerges a supine coward among you who calls for peace with enemy, throw him in the river Nile."

- Leader Gamal Abdel Nasser

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What an absolute fucking joke to think just across the channel the french working class are fighting against the same thing the middle class are marching for in London. Disgrace. 

- source: https://www.facebook.com/TheEvilLeft/

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“Back in the chaotic collapsing scenery of the Soviet Union in the late Eighties, there occurred an event that signaled the eventual fate of the USSR, even if no one exactly knew it at the moment. A fairly unknown teacher named Nina Andreyeva published an essay in a political magazine called Sovetskaya Rossiya, or Soviet Russia. The brave Andreyeva leveled sharp criticism at Mikhail Gorbachev’s program of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness), a reformist agenda clandestinely aimed at dismantling the Communist Party and moving the country toward perhaps what would have been a vague form of European market-based social democracy. Andreyeva had understood where Gorbachev was headed and, as a committed communist, feared the dissolution of the workers’ struggle to build a truly communist society.”

- Jason Hirthler

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Wilberg on Wednesday - The Illness Is The Cure pt 36/46

What can I do if I am a Biomedical Doctor

Study more of the literature on Phenomenological, Existential and Psychoanalytic Medicine (See the list of ‘Further Reading’.)

If you are in private practice, consider extending at least your initial consultations with each patient to up to an hour – to allow time to gather more information about their lives, life world and life history.

If you are working as a GP in the public health system:

Recognise and talk with your colleagues about the counter-productivity of short 7 or 10 minute consultations and emphasise instead the potential of longer consultations to actually reduce the workload of doctors – as well as deepening and enriching doctor-patient communication.

Less medical testing and more talking with your patients!

Ask more questions about the patient’s life and not just the symptoms they present with.

In particular, take opportunities to ask questions of the sort listed in the section of this book called ‘What Most Doctors Don’t Ask’.

For even within a very time-limited consultation it is possible to gather at least some information on the life context of a patient’s symptoms by opening a consultation with a friendly general question such as ‘How are things going?’ – giving time for the patient to offer more than just a superficial answer.

When a patient reports symptoms, ask ‘Had anything been troubling you before the symptoms started?’

Allow yourself to reflect on and share with the patient any possible symbolic or metaphorical dimension to a patient’s symptoms, relating to their current life problems and circumstances.

Example: itching or sensitive skin :

“Anything you’ve been itching to do?” “Anything you’ve been feeling particularly sensitive to recently?”

Example: stomach, digestive or bowel symptoms:

“Anything you’ve found hard to stomach/digest/get out of your system recently?”

Ask for and make notes of dates – not just the patient’s date of birth but the birth and/or death dates of relatives, siblings or spouses. You can do this in the course of asking about diseases in the family such as diabetes, cancer or heart disease.

Be aware of the timing of appointments made by patients – these may coincide with the timing of significant events such as births and deaths of people whom the patient identifies or feels a strong connection with.

Be aware that genetic explanations of illness may disguise something completely different – a strong psychological feeling towards and/or identification with a member of the patient’s family. The fact that illnesses are transmitted across generations does not mean that the mode of transmission is principally genetic.

Always find a way to ask the patient what’s been going on in their mind in relation to their symptoms, for example the question:

“What sort of thoughts and feelings tend to accompany your symptoms and what thoughts do you tend to have about them?”

Menstruation, Migraine and Meaning –
A Short Lesson in ‘Life Doctoring’

The following case offers a further example for biomedical doctors, emphasising the importance of (1) asking the patient different type of questions to those they might normally ask a patient (2) being alert to symbolic dimensions of a patient’s symptoms and (3) seeing symbolic dimensions also to their own medical knowledge of a particular condition and its physiology (both in its typical and atypical manifestations in a given patient).

The aim is to show how taking this Life Medical approach can prove far more effective than simply approaching this condition in a standard way, e.g. by prescribing medications without consideration of either the life-context in which a patient’s symptoms or condition emerged, its life meaning for the patient and the individual significance of both its typical and/or atypical aspects.

Case Example 7

The patient: a married woman in her late thirties who suffered from migraine for almost twenty years, at first irregular and non-menstrual related and then later becoming regular and menstrually related.

Questions to the patient:

When did the symptoms first occur?

The patient experienced her first, non-menstrual migraine during a stay at home from university during the summer holidays.

What were the most important life encounters, events, experiences or dilemmas preceding the onset of symptoms?

In this period she was effectively given the responsibility of ‘head’ of the family by her parents – having to both sort out family affairs and also take care of an elderly relative who she found quite repugnant.

Was there any sort of underlying mood accompanying the symptoms?

Yes, one of general negativity toward the tasks with which she was burdened but also guilt about her own negative feelings.

What did the symptoms force the patient to do, stop her doing or allow her to do?

The first strong migraine made it impossible for the patient to perform the tasks relegated to her by her parents. They forced her to spend days in a darkened room. In this way they also allowed her to take ‘time out’ from her tasks and give time to herself.

At what times do the symptoms tend to recur, intensify or diminish?

The patient’s migraines had continued to recur irregularly for some years after the initial episode. Sometime after she embarked on her chosen career as a university lecturer, she got together with the partner she later married. The couple decided against having children because neither felt a need or wish to have a family. It was around this time that her migraines first began to recur regularly each month, before the onset of menstruation.

What did the patient do in response to her symptoms?

Taking medications in order to alleviate her symptoms sufficiently to able to ‘function’ in her work most of the time.

How did the symptoms, and the thoughts and feelings around them, affect the patient’s life, work and relationships?

At first the patient’s main aim was to use medication in order to not to let her migraines affect her work, which was an important medium of self-actualisation for her. As for her relationship however, though her husband had shared her choice to not have children, with the help of her psychotherapist the patient realised that she harboured some resentment about his seeming emotional indifference to the decision. After being encouraged by the therapist to feel her own feelings about her decision more deeply in her body – and to discuss the decision not to have children once again with her husband – the issue ‘came to a head’. The patient was surprised to find that both she and her husband harboured feelings of sadness and loss at not having a family and that he was prepared to rethink should she change her mind. This removed her resentment toward what she had thought of as her husband’s indifference and brought her closer together with him – whilst at the same time leaving her free to re-affirm her decision to stay childless. In the context of her long-term relationship, this did now constitute a concrete life decision in the true sense i.e. a definite choice between two available options.

What beliefs does the patient hold about their symptoms and the right way to respond to them?

The patient initially appeared to accept the standard socio-cultural beliefs made use of in the advertising propaganda put out by the pharmaceutical industry – beliefs which many doctors themselves are complicit in following. A principle belief is that with the help of the right ‘off the counter’ or prescription pill, patch, tampon, cream or pharmaceutical concoction there is never a need to not go sprightly and cheerfully out of the house and into the world and to stay economically active – whether you suffer from backaches, joint pains, headaches or even cyclical pre-menstrual symptoms. Indeed this applies particularly to menstruating women, who are given a graphic message through advertising that there is no need to not feel full of energy and unencumbered by the monthly ‘curse’. Yet for a woman who is aware of her bodily and emotional needs, menstruation is a time to feel her body more fully and in this way also ‘come back to herself’, listen inwardly to her body and either grieve or rejoice that no child is on the way.

The menstrual cycle of course, follows the lunar cycle i.e. a healthy and natural cycle that all living beings are influenced by: a cycle of waxing and waning. This is one of many natural cycles – the cycle of expansion and contracting that can even be observed in the amoeba, the natural cycle of waking and sleeping, and a no less natural cycle of moving out into the world on the one hand, and withdrawing into one’s self and body on the other.

Without phases of contraction no child would be born naturally. And without ‘coming back to’ or ‘going down into’ ourselves and our bodies we cannot feel ourselves or our bodies fully – and thus go out into the world and relate to others out of a fully re-embodied and authentic sense of self.

Current Westernised societies with their 24/7 culture however, no longer adhere to these cycles or natural rhythms and instead impose a constant ‘forward’ and ‘out-going’ movement as a normative way of living – negating the value of introspection, contraction or withdrawal from the world as unwelcome or even unhealthy and pathological conditions. That is why it is not surprising that both minor ailments such as headaches, colds and flues or even highly painful or discomforting symptoms or illnesses are so often needed as a ‘cure’ for what is effectively a pathological cultural norm – being the only socially acceptable way for individuals to break free of it – even if only by forcing individuals to take time out in which there is nothing to do but feel their bodies and thereby their own selves more fully – to give time to them.

Is there any positive and healthy side to the different mood and sense of self accompanying a patient’s bodily symptoms – or to what their symptoms force or allow them permission to do – or not to do?

Are there any other ways in which the patient could give expression in their life to this positive and healthy side of their symptoms – without needing those symptoms as a spur to do so?

With the help of her psychotherapist – acting in the role of ‘Life Doctor’ – the patient herself quickly realised that she had deprived herself all her life of the benefits of a natural and healthy cycle of expansion and contraction. This was a breakthrough for the patient. It allowed her to recognise that the migraines – particularly when not medicated – forced her to slow down, to spend time with herself without working, reading, talking or distracting herself in other ways. She wondered whether this was what her body was trying to cure her of through her ‘illness’ and decided to see what happened if she started using this cure independently of the illness itself – for example by pacing herself more, allowing herself more time to not ‘do’ and just be, taking breaks instead of hurrying from one task to the other etc. So even though she continued to work very hard she no longer allowed the needs of work to dictate the natural rhythm of her day – and of her body – but began following her own. Even when she had to work 14-hour days she still made time to intersperse tasks with short breaks during which she allowed herself to be more consciously aware of her body and how she was feeling. About 3 weeks after changing her daily habits in this way – and doing so without feeling guilty for no longer following culturally imposed norms – she experienced her first migraine -free onset of menstruation in 15 years. Through her illness and the insights that also ‘came to a head’ through it, she hasn’t had a migraine since – not because it was medically ‘cured’ but because she allowed the illness itself to help her ‘cure’ and overcome unhealthy beliefs and an unhealthy way of living.

What symbolic dimensions can be seen in the patient’s symptoms and their history and what light do they shed on both menstrually and non-menstrually related migraine?

Both the symptoms of menstruation and those of migraine ask people to take ‘time out’ from their regular routines – or rather to take ‘time in’ – time to go into themselves, just be with and feel themselves more fully from within. The typical symptoms of migraine – painful headache, nausea, feeling sick and vomiting, sensitivity to light and noise can be seen as having two principal symbolic dimensions. One is the service they perform in bringing the effects of a culturally normative but essentially unnatural and unhealthy way of living ‘to a head’ – through painful headaches. The other symbolic dimension has to do with how sufferers respond to migraine attacks, which is often by shutting themselves off in a darkened room – as if recreating a womb for themselves shielded from light and sound.

Herein lies a symbolic clue, not only to the frequency of so-called ‘menstrual migraine’ in women, but also to the unmet needs of male sufferers. In the specific context of the patient referred to, it is symbolically interesting to note also that hers was a profession – university lecturer – focussed on use of the head. And in an age in which sedentary ‘service’ professions and mental work dominates over farming or different forms of manual work, there is a far greater tendency for individuals to lose touch with their bodies – and in particular with the so-called ‘gut brain‘ as opposed to the ‘head brain ’. For this, like the uterus, is located in the abdomen – which contains more nerve cells than the brain. Finally it is to be noted again that the patient’s first episode of migraine, albeit non-menstrual, occurred at a time when, though supposedly on holiday, her time was filled with tasks that effectively demanded that she take on the role of parent in relation to her own parents. In this context, her migraine can be seen as serving an important and healthy balancing role by making her withdraw to a darkened room – thus allowing and encouraging her to both avoid and recover from the parental tasks placed on her by placing herself back in the position of a baby in a protective womb.

Though it is a not an uncommon condition, medical literature and practice never attempt to see any symbolic connection between ‘menstrual’ or ‘menstrually related’ migraine on the one hand, and a women’s relation to both her periods and to having or not having children. This is of no small significance in a time and a culture where women are under greater pressure than ever either to manage the highly demanding and stressful role of ‘working mother’ or else to put the interests of their careers and employers ahead of motherhood. Of symbolic note here is also the fact that the use of standard hormonal contraceptives to avoid pregnancy are known to worsen the symptoms of menstrual migraine and are specifically contra-indicated for women over thirty five i.e. precisely those women reaching a critical life phase in terms of deciding whether to stay childless or not.


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Socialist Quotes for Sunday Reflection pt 53 - Paddy's Day Special

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“Our freedom must be had at all hazards. If the men of property will not help us they must fall; we will free ourselves by the aid of that large and respectable class of the community - the men of no property.”

- Theobald Wolfe Tone

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“Educate, that you might be free. We are most anxious to get the quiet, strong minded people who are scattered throughout the country to see the force of this great truth.”

"A people without a language of its own is only half a nation. A nation should guard its language more than its territories, 'tis a surer barrier and a more important frontier than mountain or river."

- Thomas Davis

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"All men are born with equal rights, and in associating together to protect one another and share public burdens, justice demands that such associations should rest upon a basis which maintains equality instead of destroying it. We therefore declare that, unable longer to endure the curse of monarchical government, we aim at founding a republic, based on universal suffrage, which shall secure to all the intrinsic value of their labour.”

- The Fenians, Irish Republic - Proclamation! The Irish People to the World, 1867.

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"I want no mercy -I'll have no mercy . . .I'll die as many thousands have died, for the sake of their beloved land and in defence of it. I will die proudly and triumphantly, in defence of republican principals and the liberty of an oppressed people"

- William Allen, 1867.

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"We who hold his (Wolfe Tone) principles believe that any movement which would successfully grapple with the problem of national freedom must draw its inspiration not from the mouldering records of the past, but from the glowing hopes of the living present, the vast possibilities of the mighty future."

"We are out for Ireland for the Irish. But who are the Irish? Not the rack-renting, slum owning landlord; not the sweating, profit-grinding capitalist; not the sleek and oily lawyer; not the prostitute pressman - the hired liars of the enemy . . . but the Irish working class . . . The cause of labour is the cause of Ireland. The cause of Ireland is the cause of labour. They cannot be dissevered . . . Therefore, on Sunday, April 16th, the Green Flag of Ireland will be solemnly hoisted over Liberty Hall."

“If you remove the English Army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle., unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts will be in vain. England will still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs”.

- James Connolly

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"Self government is our right, a thing born to us at birth a thing no more to be doled out to us by another people then the right to life itself then the right to feel the sun or smell the flowers or to love our kind."

- Roger Casement.

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I do have a very deep sense of regret that there was a conflict and that people lost their lives, and you know, many were responsible for that - and a lot of them wear pinstripe suits in London today.

- Martin McGuinness

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 Goodbye dear Brothers and Sisters. Make no lament for me. Pray for my soul and feel a lasting pride at my death. I die that the Irish Nation may live.

- Seán Mac Diarmada

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Our leader, Pádraic Pearse, said that liberty is eternal. It belongs to all. Liberty can't be bartered for trade. Either we are entitled as a nation to the full unlimited control of our own destiny or we are not.

- Harry Bolland, 7th January 1922

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Standing on that fundamental right and again asserting it in arms in the face of the world, we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a Sovereign Independent State. And we pledge our lives and the lives of our comrades-in-arms to the cause of its freedom, of its welfare, and of its exaltation among the nations.

- THOMAS J. CLARKE, SEAN MAC DIERMADA, THOMAS MACDONAGH, P.H.PEARSE,   EAMONN CEANNT, JAMES CONNOLLY, JOSEPH PLUNKETT
Easter Monday, April 24th, 1916




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