Immortal by Clay Jones

Author:Clay Jones
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780736978286
Publisher: Harvest House Publishers
Published: 2020-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

Psychosis

When the lies we tell ourselves, when the denials and distractions completely fail—that’s when the wheels come off our emotional freight trains. As Becker puts it, “People have psychotic breaks when repression no longer works, when the forward momentum of activity is no longer possible.”45 The reality of death can become extreme, and when people’s immortality projects fail and they see no way to transcend their deaths, they may start to believe they have special knowledge or are special people—like Jesus or Gandhi—or that they are being persecuted by a government agency. When I worked for an insurance company, I reviewed a claim where the insured said the FBI was shooting lasers into his house. (No surprise, there wasn’t any laser damage.)

When I was a 25-year-old associate pastor, a tall, good-looking fellow came to see me. When I asked him if anything was wrong, he smiled and said everything was great. I kept asking in different ways what was bothering him to no avail. He kept smiling and saying everything was fine! Well, after this had gone on for some time, it became increasingly strange because I was the pastor on call that day, and he must have come in for some reason, so I finally asked, “Then why are you here?” At that, he leaned forward and whispered, “There’s a conspiracy and you can’t even tell the President of the United States about it.” Frankly—and I’m sincerely embarrassed about this—I couldn’t hold back my laughter, and he left in a huff (I probably wasn’t going to be able to help him anyway).

I think the social scientists are right that if your normal defenses against mortality fail, you might resort to delusions of grandeur. Psychiatrist Harold Searles (1918–2015) treated deeply psychotic patients for many years, and Yalom calls Searles’s work “deeply insightful” and “heroic.”46 In Psychiatry Quarterly, Searles writes an article entitled “Schizophrenia and the Inevitability of Death,” in which he claims, “Defense-mechanisms of psychiatric illness” are “designed to keep out of the individual’s awareness” the “simple fact of life’s finitude.”47 He continues, “The patient’s having become, and having long remained, schizophrenic” was “in order to avoid facing” the “fact that life is finite.”48

“The paranoid patient,” Yalom writes, manifests “delusions of grandeur and omnipotence, one of the primary modes of evading death—a belief in one’s own specialness and immortality.” He continues, “The patient’s primary shield against death, then, is a sense of omnipotence, a key feature in any schizophrenic illness.”49 As Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski put it, “If you are schizophrenic and think that ninjas are after you, or that you are the president, being routinely rebuffed by others’ skeptical disbelief…would surely intensify your already daunting psychological difficulties.”50 Thus, writes Yalom, “Nothing would so completely destroy the sense of personal omnipotence than the acceptance of the inevitability of death, and the schizophrenic patient clings to his or her denial of death with fierce desperation.”51 In the journal Diseases of the Nervous System, psychiatrist Karel Planansky and psychologist Roy Johnston penned an article entitled “Preoccupation with Death in Schizophrenic Men.

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