The author of this article needs to hit the books--yesterday.
The conditions she describes as 'perversity' is just the heightened response of an over-stressed brain.
The suicidal thoughts (that still horrify the person thinking them) aren't due to a so-called Freudian perversity as the author implies, but are a first step towards total mental breakdown (which actually ends up in suicide, due to to the struggle with such thoughts--which is a form of depression).
When I was extremely stressed for long periods of time, with no solution in sight, I did enter this stage. Photos I took for a mugshot in this period show a slight shine in my eyes that I hadn't before (that's another sign the brain is disintegrating). I'd stand over overpasses and watch cars drive by, and then a little voice would tell me: jump! jump! while another thought which felt more stronger, would consider this horrifying and made me reflect on why I was thinking such thoughts.
It wasn't limited to the visible possibilities, either. Frequently when the stress would become unbearable, a little strange thought would make me think of tall buildings and let me imagine that by jumping from one, my problems would cease.
I've recovered from those thoughts now -- because luckily my stressors were eliminated -- and I no longer experience such thoughts or voices. I mention all this to help others realize that they need to seek help and solve their stressors instead of falling back on the quack-doctor Freud's ideas that "oh it's in our nature to be perverse!".
I have the impression you could be confusing suicidality with the little voice that says "what if I stuck my finger in the candle wax?" or "what if I forgot to put on clothes before going to work?" and only mentions tall buildings once or twice a year.
I'm pretty sure the latter is really common. I've always thought it was my brain generating failure cases for risk assessment. We think "What if I dropped this bottle of water on my lap while driving and crashed?" and then we take more care not to drop it.
GP mentions concurrent extreme stress and multiple variations of suicidal ideation, along with a prediction of the relief that would bring. Also, that the thoughts stopped once the stress did.
Not sure how they could describe suicidality more clearly. Speaking as someone who has also experienced it due to chronic health conditions that had gotten particularly bad for a while.
Yes, intrusive thoughts are common, and are fairly independent from actual self-destructiveness. You can have intrusive thoughts without being especially self-destructive, and you can be self-destructive without thinking much.
What if it is one and the same ?
The anticipate danger background thread getting a concious foreground role due to the danger/stress beeing "lower" on the attack then the foreground threads relentless predation.
What if suicide is a predator scratchpost response?
These are called intrusive thoughts. I have learned about these through a family member with ADHD. With ADHD, you can have the dual problem of both the wandering, intrusive thoughts, with sometimes the lack of impulse control. It can be really dangerous for some.
What the poster is talking about is different, something that occurs in a deep depression where your mind is struggling to find a way out of the situation. Sometimes the will gives out completely and you're just a zombie to the world, only slogging forward out of habit and maybe guilt.
I know that the poster is talking about something that occurs in deep depression, but I don't think Edgar Allan Poe was and I don't think TFA was either.
This is "call of the void". Note that other replies simply call it "intrusive thoughts", but I think that's an overgeneralization, because call of the void is a specific response to keep you wary of hazards, not generic random background noise or self-harmful impulses or anything that "intrusive thoughts" traditionally implies.
I fail to see how the author of this piece is the one who called those things “perversity”, here is a direct quote from the piece that refutes your claim:
> he wrote about what he called perverseness: the “unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself”—the mysterious desire he felt, and believed we all feel, to get in our own way.
> Perverseness, Poe thought, was as fundamental a drive as hunger or libido, with its own dedicated region of the brain. When we are perverse, we turn not only against our better judgment but also against what are apparently our desires. “The Imp of the Perverse” begins with an essay defining the concept and giving examples that range from the harmless to the unsettling; Poe classes as perverse both procrastination and the impulse to kill oneself by jumping from a great height.
Where does the author define the things that are perverse? All are attributed to Poe.
I also feel like they don't understand what self-destructive impulses are. Forgetting your wallet on your car and driving away? Seriously?
I think it's better captured by this line from a Tunng song:
When I see land you will conjure up a storm
They clearly haven't seen self-sabotage in action if they think forgetting your wallet is it! Think more throwing away a long term relationship whose stability you've longed for all your life, or getting drunk on the day of your bar exam.
I think about that article of the travel-blogger who admired Anthony Bourdain and her experience with self-sabotage. Partying out late at night in a sketchy unfamiliar country. Letting herself head home alone at 3 AM with her senses impaired just from a sense of not-caring clearly bordering on severe negligence. I've brushed on some thoughts the same and it's nothing like forgetting my wallet or keys, sometimes you're aware with what you're gambling and just don't really care about the outcome.
It stumbled there, but I think the author was just trying to capture the chilling feeling of recognizing something already beyond your control.
I also thought it was silly. It would be a bit like talking about Poe and then that time I was a little kid and saw the scoop of ice cream fall off and splat on the ground. Yes, I learned something about entropy. No, I didn't really resonate with the existential horrors of a good Poe story.
Now, maybe if I'd been halfway into an absinthe stupor when I dropped the ice cream, I might have been able to close the gap...
Psychology is so much more complex and varied in its manifestations and etiologies than you're suggesting here.
I'm glad that you found a framework that helped you with your experiences, but it's very important that you understand that many other people had deeply different experiences than you did for very different reasons. Suggesting a single cause of suicidality as due to stress is profoundly irresponsible, and enforcing that framework on other people could quite literally kill them.
I agree with you that the author of the article is wildly off base, but so are you. Suggesting she needs to "hit the books" and then describing your personal journey as universal is a particular study in not taking your own advice.
> With a peak circulation of forty thousand—enormous for its time
How was it possible to make a living - I imagine a full editorial team, writers, printers, office workers - with this volume of sales, while today, magazines with zero distribution cost, and with millions of subscribers are going under. Were magazines insanely more expensive at the time? What gives?
> Were magazines insanely more expensive at the time? What gives?
The standard of living was much lower and people’s expectations of reasonable income were lower too. It was common in those days for blue collar workers to do 12 hours of hard physical labor and live in cramped conditions with multiple people per room. What we would now consider worse than a homeless shelter.
In comparison just working a desk job was already a luxury. Even if you were barely making ends meet
Quick Google search says a newspaper writer would make $400 to $800 per year in Poe’s time. That is about $20k/year in today’s money, which is just above poverty level
Writing professionally was basically gambling in the 19th century. An “advance” was a loan from your printer and you paid it back even if the book failed.
I was reading about 19th century Russian writers recently. Very few of them made much money and some like Turgenev and Tolstoy were personally wealthy.
Poe's life had many complications due to poverty and jealousy that made his being a literary genius almost irrelevant. Researching his death produces even more questions than answers, as a strong case could be made that he was made to appear to have died of a morphine overdose in a ditch.
> what is the psychological label for people who do not distinguish artist from art?
There isn't one because you can dislike a person and/or their works for literally any reason you want.
Is there a label for insisting that people put aside their feelings and engage with something because you have deemed their reason for not doing so invalid?
I only implied that implied psychological traits of a fictional character are not evidence of the same psychological traits in the author. It's merely evidence that the author is capable of observing or imagining such traits in others.
> Hmm, what is the psychological label for people who do not distinguish artist from art?
It is called reading with context. Famous examples being, writing "Age Ain't Nothing but a Number" song and then their career ends with long term sentence over underage abuse. Or making movies that center old men in relationships with young women again and again and then ending up in host of scandals over similar.
That's terribly bad. Badly written, barely three pages long, bad references... Half of the list of references are of himself, but almost all of the references in the text are just from one book from 1965.
And lots of affirmations of that text aren't unsustained or don't make sense.
Amazed to see it's from TCD. I don't think posthumous psychological diagnoses are particularly helpful. To diagnose someone you need to interact with them, observe them etc.
I just checked that guy's page in Research Gate [0] and it's a collection of hundreds of two page essays where he reads a biography of a famous person and ends on a "conclusion" declaring that person was autistic. They're so badly written than some of them declare the "autism" in the title, but then on the "conclusion" say something else.
On his website he says that in 2010 reached "...a milestone of diagnosing over 5,000 individuals with autism and Asperger’s syndrome, showcasing his extensive clinical expertise and commitment to patient care.".
Even if I do the math from the beginning of his research in the 70s, that's a diagnose every two or three days non stop including weekends. He's either a) counting all the diagnoses done on the clinics he owns (I've seen referrals in Reddit), b) Counting his quick diagnoses that he makes from a biography he reads in the morning, c) really doing 3 or 4 diagnoses a week, while doing his research, giving interviews, appearing in Hitler documentaries [1] and writing books.
>...a milestone of diagnosing over 5,000 individuals with autism and Asperger’s syndrome
Maybe he spent an afternoon browsing HN?
Seriously, I agree, remote diagnosis of psychological conditions is wildly unprofessional, and in this case the schtick this guy is working is a huge red flag. Nobody should take him seriously.
From what I can tell, autism is so still woefully undiagnosed within Ireland, so that's maybe why he's so keen to expand that figure. (Scotland too, by the way... Unless you're a child here, they make you jump through umpteen hoops before they even consider assessing you.)
Good grief, his diagnoses include Akhenaten, David Bowie, Salazar, Derrida, Rachel Carson, Boole, and that's just page one. Page two features Frankie Howerd, Kissinger, Gaudi, Georgia O' Keefe, Steinbeck, Jeremiah (from the Bible), Cézanne, Henry Ford, Shakespeare, Eisenstein, Anthony Burgess and Hawking. He casts his net wide and the question remains which historical personages did not have autism or neurodivergence according to Prof. Fitzgerald.
I'm sure it's a great consolation to many autistic people that Lord Haw Haw, Goering, Hitler and Eichmann are all declared by him to be on the spectrum.
p.s. He's probably right about Al Capone having Antisocial Personality Disorder.
Is there anyone not suspected to be autistic these days? Including me. Personally my finger points more in the direction of Emily Dickinson and James Joyce.
The author of this article needs to hit the books--yesterday.
The conditions she describes as 'perversity' is just the heightened response of an over-stressed brain.
The suicidal thoughts (that still horrify the person thinking them) aren't due to a so-called Freudian perversity as the author implies, but are a first step towards total mental breakdown (which actually ends up in suicide, due to to the struggle with such thoughts--which is a form of depression).
When I was extremely stressed for long periods of time, with no solution in sight, I did enter this stage. Photos I took for a mugshot in this period show a slight shine in my eyes that I hadn't before (that's another sign the brain is disintegrating). I'd stand over overpasses and watch cars drive by, and then a little voice would tell me: jump! jump! while another thought which felt more stronger, would consider this horrifying and made me reflect on why I was thinking such thoughts.
It wasn't limited to the visible possibilities, either. Frequently when the stress would become unbearable, a little strange thought would make me think of tall buildings and let me imagine that by jumping from one, my problems would cease.
I've recovered from those thoughts now -- because luckily my stressors were eliminated -- and I no longer experience such thoughts or voices. I mention all this to help others realize that they need to seek help and solve their stressors instead of falling back on the quack-doctor Freud's ideas that "oh it's in our nature to be perverse!".
I have the impression you could be confusing suicidality with the little voice that says "what if I stuck my finger in the candle wax?" or "what if I forgot to put on clothes before going to work?" and only mentions tall buildings once or twice a year.
I'm pretty sure the latter is really common. I've always thought it was my brain generating failure cases for risk assessment. We think "What if I dropped this bottle of water on my lap while driving and crashed?" and then we take more care not to drop it.
GP mentions concurrent extreme stress and multiple variations of suicidal ideation, along with a prediction of the relief that would bring. Also, that the thoughts stopped once the stress did.
Not sure how they could describe suicidality more clearly. Speaking as someone who has also experienced it due to chronic health conditions that had gotten particularly bad for a while.
Yes, and I'm saying that is clearly suicidality, but I think TFA is talking about something else.
Yes, intrusive thoughts are common, and are fairly independent from actual self-destructiveness. You can have intrusive thoughts without being especially self-destructive, and you can be self-destructive without thinking much.
What if it is one and the same ? The anticipate danger background thread getting a concious foreground role due to the danger/stress beeing "lower" on the attack then the foreground threads relentless predation.
What if suicide is a predator scratchpost response?
These are called intrusive thoughts. I have learned about these through a family member with ADHD. With ADHD, you can have the dual problem of both the wandering, intrusive thoughts, with sometimes the lack of impulse control. It can be really dangerous for some.
What the poster is talking about is different, something that occurs in a deep depression where your mind is struggling to find a way out of the situation. Sometimes the will gives out completely and you're just a zombie to the world, only slogging forward out of habit and maybe guilt.
There's another term for the certain-death variety which I prefer - the "call of the void". I think that captures it nicely.
I know that the poster is talking about something that occurs in deep depression, but I don't think Edgar Allan Poe was and I don't think TFA was either.
This is "call of the void". Note that other replies simply call it "intrusive thoughts", but I think that's an overgeneralization, because call of the void is a specific response to keep you wary of hazards, not generic random background noise or self-harmful impulses or anything that "intrusive thoughts" traditionally implies.
I fail to see how the author of this piece is the one who called those things “perversity”, here is a direct quote from the piece that refutes your claim:
> he wrote about what he called perverseness: the “unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself”—the mysterious desire he felt, and believed we all feel, to get in our own way.
> Perverseness, Poe thought, was as fundamental a drive as hunger or libido, with its own dedicated region of the brain. When we are perverse, we turn not only against our better judgment but also against what are apparently our desires. “The Imp of the Perverse” begins with an essay defining the concept and giving examples that range from the harmless to the unsettling; Poe classes as perverse both procrastination and the impulse to kill oneself by jumping from a great height.
Where does the author define the things that are perverse? All are attributed to Poe.
I also feel like they don't understand what self-destructive impulses are. Forgetting your wallet on your car and driving away? Seriously?
I think it's better captured by this line from a Tunng song:
They clearly haven't seen self-sabotage in action if they think forgetting your wallet is it! Think more throwing away a long term relationship whose stability you've longed for all your life, or getting drunk on the day of your bar exam.I think about that article of the travel-blogger who admired Anthony Bourdain and her experience with self-sabotage. Partying out late at night in a sketchy unfamiliar country. Letting herself head home alone at 3 AM with her senses impaired just from a sense of not-caring clearly bordering on severe negligence. I've brushed on some thoughts the same and it's nothing like forgetting my wallet or keys, sometimes you're aware with what you're gambling and just don't really care about the outcome.
It stumbled there, but I think the author was just trying to capture the chilling feeling of recognizing something already beyond your control.
I also thought it was silly. It would be a bit like talking about Poe and then that time I was a little kid and saw the scoop of ice cream fall off and splat on the ground. Yes, I learned something about entropy. No, I didn't really resonate with the existential horrors of a good Poe story.
Now, maybe if I'd been halfway into an absinthe stupor when I dropped the ice cream, I might have been able to close the gap...
Her personal example was odd, but there are many other valid examples of destructive impulses cited by her (and Poe) in the essay
Psychology is so much more complex and varied in its manifestations and etiologies than you're suggesting here.
I'm glad that you found a framework that helped you with your experiences, but it's very important that you understand that many other people had deeply different experiences than you did for very different reasons. Suggesting a single cause of suicidality as due to stress is profoundly irresponsible, and enforcing that framework on other people could quite literally kill them.
I agree with you that the author of the article is wildly off base, but so are you. Suggesting she needs to "hit the books" and then describing your personal journey as universal is a particular study in not taking your own advice.
> then a little voice would tell me
You may not answer if you don't want to but from an idle curiosity: do you have an inner monologue in your regular life?
> Photos I took for a mugshot in this period show a slight shine in my eyes that I hadn't befor
It's always fascinated me how 'the mirror of the soul' not only a very apt metaphor but how we see it even when it's a still shot.
[dead]
A little tangent, but
> With a peak circulation of forty thousand—enormous for its time
How was it possible to make a living - I imagine a full editorial team, writers, printers, office workers - with this volume of sales, while today, magazines with zero distribution cost, and with millions of subscribers are going under. Were magazines insanely more expensive at the time? What gives?
> Were magazines insanely more expensive at the time? What gives?
The standard of living was much lower and people’s expectations of reasonable income were lower too. It was common in those days for blue collar workers to do 12 hours of hard physical labor and live in cramped conditions with multiple people per room. What we would now consider worse than a homeless shelter.
In comparison just working a desk job was already a luxury. Even if you were barely making ends meet
Quick Google search says a newspaper writer would make $400 to $800 per year in Poe’s time. That is about $20k/year in today’s money, which is just above poverty level
Writing professionally was basically gambling in the 19th century. An “advance” was a loan from your printer and you paid it back even if the book failed.
> Writing professionally was basically gambling in the 19th century.
Plus ça change...
I was reading about 19th century Russian writers recently. Very few of them made much money and some like Turgenev and Tolstoy were personally wealthy.
Chekhov went from rags to riches. But this was closer to the end of the century.
Very few people made a living on writing. Poe was one of the first to attempt, and it didn’t go well for him.
The expression "starving artist" does exist for a reason.
What percentage of Condé Nast's or Bertelsmann's gross receipts do you think goes directly to editorial and print workers?
Poe's life had many complications due to poverty and jealousy that made his being a literary genius almost irrelevant. Researching his death produces even more questions than answers, as a strong case could be made that he was made to appear to have died of a morphine overdose in a ditch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe_Toaster
OK so there is a better angle to look at all this, there really is:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357868645_Edgar_All...
Hmm, what is the psychological label for people who do not distinguish artist from art?
It's one thing for a biographical analysis to look at the person's real life experiences and relationships.
It's another thing entirely when you start conflating the characters in the fiction with the author's own character...
> what is the psychological label for people who do not distinguish artist from art?
There isn't one because you can dislike a person and/or their works for literally any reason you want.
Is there a label for insisting that people put aside their feelings and engage with something because you have deemed their reason for not doing so invalid?
I said nothing about like or dislike.
I only implied that implied psychological traits of a fictional character are not evidence of the same psychological traits in the author. It's merely evidence that the author is capable of observing or imagining such traits in others.
‘Shoulding’?
[flagged]
> Hmm, what is the psychological label for people who do not distinguish artist from art?
It is called reading with context. Famous examples being, writing "Age Ain't Nothing but a Number" song and then their career ends with long term sentence over underage abuse. Or making movies that center old men in relationships with young women again and again and then ending up in host of scandals over similar.
That's terribly bad. Badly written, barely three pages long, bad references... Half of the list of references are of himself, but almost all of the references in the text are just from one book from 1965.
And lots of affirmations of that text aren't unsustained or don't make sense.
Terribly bad angle.
Amazed to see it's from TCD. I don't think posthumous psychological diagnoses are particularly helpful. To diagnose someone you need to interact with them, observe them etc.
I just checked that guy's page in Research Gate [0] and it's a collection of hundreds of two page essays where he reads a biography of a famous person and ends on a "conclusion" declaring that person was autistic. They're so badly written than some of them declare the "autism" in the title, but then on the "conclusion" say something else.
On his website he says that in 2010 reached "...a milestone of diagnosing over 5,000 individuals with autism and Asperger’s syndrome, showcasing his extensive clinical expertise and commitment to patient care.".
Even if I do the math from the beginning of his research in the 70s, that's a diagnose every two or three days non stop including weekends. He's either a) counting all the diagnoses done on the clinics he owns (I've seen referrals in Reddit), b) Counting his quick diagnoses that he makes from a biography he reads in the morning, c) really doing 3 or 4 diagnoses a week, while doing his research, giving interviews, appearing in Hitler documentaries [1] and writing books.
--
>...a milestone of diagnosing over 5,000 individuals with autism and Asperger’s syndrome
Maybe he spent an afternoon browsing HN?
Seriously, I agree, remote diagnosis of psychological conditions is wildly unprofessional, and in this case the schtick this guy is working is a huge red flag. Nobody should take him seriously.
> Maybe he spent an afternoon browsing HN?
I laughed at that, I probably shouldn't have.
From what I can tell, autism is so still woefully undiagnosed within Ireland, so that's maybe why he's so keen to expand that figure. (Scotland too, by the way... Unless you're a child here, they make you jump through umpteen hoops before they even consider assessing you.)
Good grief, his diagnoses include Akhenaten, David Bowie, Salazar, Derrida, Rachel Carson, Boole, and that's just page one. Page two features Frankie Howerd, Kissinger, Gaudi, Georgia O' Keefe, Steinbeck, Jeremiah (from the Bible), Cézanne, Henry Ford, Shakespeare, Eisenstein, Anthony Burgess and Hawking. He casts his net wide and the question remains which historical personages did not have autism or neurodivergence according to Prof. Fitzgerald.
I'm sure it's a great consolation to many autistic people that Lord Haw Haw, Goering, Hitler and Eichmann are all declared by him to be on the spectrum.
p.s. He's probably right about Al Capone having Antisocial Personality Disorder.
Is there anyone not suspected to be autistic these days? Including me. Personally my finger points more in the direction of Emily Dickinson and James Joyce.
I think you may be missing the point.
This post was an absolute joy to read.
Reducing people to [ ] vetted and [x] refused boxes seems to have become a favorite pasttime worlwide.