Sulian said that the first nation elders have a view that a kind of spiritual war is taking place between the white and the red people. It is being fought by their respective drugs. Your alcohol is killing our people, but our tobacco gets back at yours!
I mention this apparently quirky insight because it is significant that both drugs, in their respective traditions, play sacramental roles. Native North Americans use tobacco in the peace pipe, and West Europeans use alcohol in the Christian communion service (where, interestingly, the passion of Christ is his Eros/Thanatos sacrifice on the cross by dying for the love of the world. In so doing he mythologically or otherwise affirms eternal life).
This is just one pointer suggesting that tobacco abuse might be seen as spiritual misuse. The short burst of elation that nicotine gives partakes of a spiritual quality. But used non-sacramentally it addicts. In seeking to promote this, tobacco companies, if my analysis is valid, are engaging in spiritual exploitation. Young people and people who are unhappy in life, are particularly vulnerable. We live in a predominantly secular age where genuine avenues for spiritual expression (as distinct from trite churchianity and cults) are not easy to find. Some people are therefore deeply vulnerable to flirting with the oblivion offered by narcotics of any kind. Anecdotal interviews with young people demonstrate this: … the health aspect certainly doesn t worry me – if anything I find the self-destructive element attractive, one 21 year old man told The Times. A 23 year old woman said, I do it because it will kill me (Coren 1995).
An Edinburgh Wester Hailes physician, most of whose case load is with the consequences of addictions, has pointed out to me how often such behaviour has archetypal components of the martyred hero: the death of the young god; the James Dean figure. And the common male teenage fantasy of being the tail-gunner in the Lancaster, holding off the attacking enemy, but being shot just as the plane lands safely: and then watching the heroism of his own funeral. Such archetypes speak to the Adlerian psychology of the need to feel important, loved, to have a role in a world which doesn t care a damn for you, has never cared a damn for you, and wishes you d just get off the dole queue and behind the counter selling hamburgers for MacDonalds.
Thanatonic cigarette advertisements can therefore be interpreted as saying, “Miserable? No God? Then rest your life into our arms. Be ravished by the Nirvana of our sweet oblivion. Killing you softly with our song. And like HM Government is telling you in the words printed below, ‘Smoking Kills’.”
In societies such as ours where religion has largely failed in its role of providing emotional expression for matters of ultimate concern, addictions arguably are a consequence. Alcohol, for instance, both numbs the pain and may fulfil, perversely, a displaced sacramental function. It is no coincidence that in much of the Scottish Highlands, as in other colonial wastelands, heavy drink toggles with heavy religion; or that the approach of Alcoholics Anonymous is primarily concerned with the non-sectarian resolution of spiritual blockage. The Ayrshire born Professor of Twentieth Century Poetics at the Sorbonne, Kenneth White, addresses this in an essay on Tam o’ Shanter – the frustrated Scots shaman in the same lineage as MacDiarmid s archetypal Scottish drunken man with his thistle (1990):
It is whisky alone which enables Tam to look without fear on the ‘devlish’ scene, it was whisky alone which enabled Burns to penetrate into the very recesses of his mind, right into the pagan core, after having thrown off the hindrances of Christian morality and, in this case, its particularly drastic form, Calvinism. Whisky, or usquabae, was the real Water of Life to many a Calvinist; drinking it allowed him to escape the moral death which he otherwise endured; drinking it freed his imagination, let him enjoy some natural being, some thalamic (if I may say so) consciousness.
In short, we might ask whether modern cigarette advertising is one of the most malevolent missionary endeavours of all time. Might the companies, nationally and transnationally, be seen as veritable Molochs: fiery tombs that consume the children for nothing but their own balance sheet salvation?
If the arguments in this paper are tenable, could the companies continue to operate as cryptically as they have done over the past two decades? Or would their secret be out; the symbolism behind their surrealism exegised; the public, or at least those who take an interest, both inured and disgusted?
I hope so. That is one of my objectives in writing.
Health Education for a Cultural Psychotherapy
This paper s analysis suggests the need for a fundamental review of the nature of our society s health education. It would require health to be understood in its full psychospiritual as well as its somatic dimensions. It would entail seeing a role of government as being to ensure that all people have the option of access to psychospiritual education. This is not the same as the religious instruction upon which some political ministers place so much hope for public morality.
It would mean ensuring that each person has access to the means for developing their full human potential – a process in which the articulation of creativity is central (Darwin 1995). In my view and that of other deep ecologists, it would entail having a right of access to nature. My American colleague, therapist Jane Middleton-Moz (1989) who works with the very rich as well as with broken Native American communities, tells that 70% of her clients first found solace in nature. Indeed, a number of thinkers with backgrounds in both therapy and ecology are currently making persuasive cases that the violation of nature and damage to the human psyche are a feedback loop which, if negative now, could again be made positive by learning that caring for the Earth is to care for the self (Ventura & Hillman 1993, Seed, Naess et. al. 1988, Macey 1993). Some of my colleagues at the Centre for Human Ecology have demonstrated this to be as important for the urban poor as for those sectors of society more usually associated with the countryside (cf. O Leary 1996).
The relationships between intergenerational trauma and addiction would have to be openly explored in society. In parts of Scotland, for instance, it would require examining the contemporary health effects of intergenerational poverty linked to traumatic historical events like the Highland Clearances (McIntosh et al., 1994). We are familiar with the concept of psychotherapy for individuals. I believe that the same is needed at a cultural level: a cultural psychotherapy to address collective pathologies. Just as with an individual the first step in therapy is to recover repressed memory, so at a cultural level repressed history must be revealed. In particular, psychohistory should be taught. This looks not just at the events but at their emotional consequences. It is only very recently in Scotland and Ireland that radical historians, especially James Hunter, Brendan Bradshaw and Donald Meek, have touched on the importance of this and have started to give the poetry and song of bygone generations their due historiographical weight (cf. Hunter 1995). History which denies psychospiritual consequences is but displacement activity designed to keep the young disempowered. This has been very evident in the teaching of Scottish history in schools during much of the twentieth century. The gap is being filled, however, by Scottish folk/rock by singers like Runrig, Dougie MacLean and Dick Gaughan. In Ireland such work is championed by Sinead O Conner, who has a particularly powerful track about the psychodynamics of the famine. The passion released in these ways is becoming evident as a resurgent inclusive nationalism with internationalist values.
I would feel hesitant in making what might be seen as grandiose suggestions about cultural psychotherapy were it not that a growing chorus of thinkers now perceive what Jung saw: namely, that we are all products of the psychological climate of our times. Thus, action to bring about both human healing and ecological regeneration must be both individual and collective. If we carry on ignoring the problem, keeping ourselves doped on nicotine, alcohol and Prozac, we stand to destroy further the very basis of human life. US Vice President Al Gore says of this (1992, p. 220 – 221).
One of the most effective strategies for ignoring psychic pain is to distract oneself … addiction is distraction…. The cleavage in the modern world between mind and body, man and nature, has created a new kind of addiction: I believe that our civilization is, in effect, addicted to the consumption of the earth itself. This addictive relationship distracts us from the pain of what we have lost: a direct experience of our connection to the vividness, vibrancy, and aliveness of the rest of the natural world. The froth and frenzy of industrial civilization mask our deep loneliness for that communion with the world that can lift our spirits and fill our senses with the richness and immediacy of life itself.
Stan Grof concurs. He links what he calls BPM III experience – a more structured conceptualisation that would incorporate Thanatos – with a powerful vision of the possibility of articulating our full humanity (op. cit. 219 – 221; cf. also Grof & Grof (eds.) 1989):
Probably the most intriguing among the new insights are those related to the current global crisis. We all have the dubious privilege of living in an era when the world drama is reaching its culmination…. Does it not seem possible that our efforts at peace fail because none of our present approaches have addressed that dimension which seems to be at the centre of the global crisis: the human psyche…. In our modern world we have externalized many of the essential elements of BPM III. When working to achieve transformation on an individual level, we know that we must face and come to terms with these themes. The same elements that we would encounter in the process of psychological death and rebirth in our visionary experiences appear today as stories on our evening news…. The scatological dimension is evident in the progressive industrial pollution, accumulation of waste products on a global scale, and rapidly deteriorating hygienic conditions in large cities. Many people with whom we have worked have volunteered very interesting insights into this situation…. It seems that we are all involved in a process that parallels the psychological death and rebirth that so many people have experienced individually in non-ordinary states of consciousness. If we continue to act out the destructive tendencies from our deep unconscious, we will undoubtedly destroy ourselves and all life on our planet. However, if we succeed in internalizing this process on a large enough scale, it might result in evolutionary progress that can take us as far beyond our present condition as we now are from the primates…. As utopian as this might seem on the surface, it might very well be our only real chance. Over the years I have seen profound transformations in people who have been involved with serious and systematic inner quests…. Their ability to enjoy life, particularly the simple pleasures of everyday existence, increased considerably. Deep reverence for life and ecological awareness are among the most frequent consequences of the psychospiritual transformation that accompanies … spiritual emergence…. It is my belief that a movement in the direction of a fuller awareness of our unconscious minds will vastly increase our chances for planetary survival.
If the tobacco companies have helped