Info on Sam Vaknin

By design, both agents were shrouded in darkness. I could see their silhouettes, the army-like crew cut, the wire-rimmed glasses, the more senior agent's hearing aid. Their hands rested, lifeless and stolid, on the plain wooden conference table that separated us. They were waiting for my response, immobile, patient, pent up aggression in check, heads slightly bowed. The overhead neon lights crackled and fizzled ominously but otherwise the room was soundproof and windowless. I was led there via a bank of elevators and a series of elaborate Escher-like staircases. By now, I was utterly disoriented.

"Shared Psychotic Disorder is not a new diagnosis." - I explained again - "For a long time it was known as 'Folie a Deux'".

The younger agent shifted ever so imperceptibly on his plastic chair but said nothing. His colleague repeated his question, wearily, as though accustomed to interrogating the densest of people:

"But can it affect more than one person?"

"Yes, it can. The literature contains cases of three, four, and more individuals consumed by shared delusional beliefs and even hallucinations." - I raised my palm, forestalling his next attempt to interject:

"But - and that's a big but - the people who partake in common psychotic delusions are all intimately involved with each other: they share living quarters, they are members of the same family, or sect, or organization. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever documented an occurrence of shared psychosis among totally unrelated strangers."

This caveat evidently got the young agent's attention. He perked up, straightened his posture, and addressed me for the first time:

"Then what is mass psychosis?"

"A myth," - I said - "assiduously cultivated by an eyeball-hungry media."

The senior member of the team chuckled softly:

"C'mon, doctor. Thousands of people claim to see the Virgin Mary or a UFO at the same time - that's not psychotic?"

"It's a momentary delusion, alright, but it is far from psychosis."

"Can you help us tell the difference?" - The young one was evidently losing patience with the whole exercise.

"I would be able to help you better if you were to tell me what this is all about."

"We can't." - snapped the younger, not bothering to hide his exasperation - "Just answer our questions, will you?"

The older of the two laid a calming hand on the forearm of his impetuous partner:

"Doctor," - his voice was appropriately a resonating baritone - "you have to believe us that it is a matter of utmost importance to our national security. That's all we are authorized to divulge at this stage of the proceedings."

I sighed:

"Have it your way, then. A delusional belief is not the same as a momentary hallucination. People who claim to have seen the Virgin Mary or a UFO, have typically reverted to their normal lives afterwards. The incidents left a very small psychological footprint on the witnesses. Not so with a shared psychotic disorder. Those affected structure their entire existence around their inane convictions."

"Can you give us some examples?"

"Sure I can. There are hundreds if not thousands of cases meticulously documented ever since the 19th century. Some patients became convinced that their homes were being infiltrated by aliens or foreign powers. An unfortunate couple was so afraid of hostile electromagnetic radiation that they converted their apartment into a Faraday Cage: they sealed it hermetically at an enormous expense and took out all the windows and interconnecting doors. They claimed that the radiation was intended to dehydrate them by inducing diarrhea and to starve them through chronic indigestion."

The young agent whistled and the older one emitted one of his soft laughs.

"In another instance, an entire family took on enormous credits, sold their house, and quit their jobs because they delusionally talked themselves into believing that one of the sons was about to sign a multi-million dollar contract with a Hollywood studio. They even hired engineers and architects to lay out plans for a new mansion, replete with a swimming pool."

The young one could no longer hide his mirth.

"Of course, there's the run-of-the mill paranoid, persecutory delusions about how the FBI, or CIA, or NSA, take your pick, are tapping the family phone, or shadowing its members as they go innocently about their business."

"Why would anyone believe such crap?" - Asked the senior one.

"Because the source of the delusional belief, the person who invents it and then imposes it on others, is perceived to be authoritative and superior in intelligence, or in social standing, or to have access to privileged information."

They exchanged glances and then:

"So, it's like a cult? A guru and his followers?"

"Exactly. The primary case - the originally delusional person - does his or her best to keep the others in relative seclusion and social isolation. That way, he monopolizes the flow of information and opinions. He filters all the incoming data and blocks anything which might interfere, upset, or contradict the delusional content. The primary case become sort of a gatekeeper."

They whispered to each other, nodding and shaking their penumbral heads vigorously, but never gesticulating with their hands. Then, following the briefest of silences, the older agent said:

"What if a delusional belief were shared by all the inhabitants of the planet, by everyone, everywhere, almost without exception?"

"Such a delusional belief would be indistinguishable from reality." - I answered - "In such a world, who would be able to demonstrate the delusion's true character and to refute it or replace it by something real and viable? Luckily, it is impossible to engineer such a situation."

"Why so?"

"To create a long-lasting, all-pervasive, credible, and influential delusional belief on a global scale, one would need to recruit a source of unimpeachable authority and to force all the media in the world to collaborate in disseminating his or her psychotic content across continents and seas. Even in this day and age, such an undertaking would prove to be formidable and, in my opinion, face insurmountable psychological, not to mention logistical, obstacles."

The younger agent tilted his chair backward on its hind legs:

"So, even if people witness the unfolding of some incredible event on television, attested to by thousands of eyewitnesses and covered by a zillion TV stations, they are still unlikely to believe it? And they are bound to persist in their disbelief when the President of the United States of America addresses the nation to confirm that the event had actually taken place?"

"That's not the same thing." - I explained, as patiently as I could. This cryptic and one-sided exchange was beginning to unnerve me - "An event that unfolds in real time on television and is witnessed by thousands of people on the ground is real, it is not a delusion."

"You are contradicting yourself," - the senior agent rebuked me gently - "As you have acknowledged earlier, crowds composed of thousands of individuals claimed to have seen UFOs or the Virgin Mary but their testimonies render neither apparition real. This is the mass psychosis that my colleague here had mentioned earlier. You objected to the term, but whatever you want to call it, the phenomenon exists: large groups of people see and hear and smell and touch things that simply aren't there. It happens all the time."

"Mass hallucinations do happen." - I conceded - "But, I have never seen UFOs or the Virgin Mary on television."

"That's because you aren't watching the right channels," - grinned the younger one - "Television is a medium that is very easy to manipulate: special effects, stunts, old footage, montage, that sort of thing. Haven't you heard of the urban myth that the whole so-called landing on the moon took place in a television studio out in the desert in Arizona or New-Mexico? It's easy enough to imagine."

I shrugged and straightened in my chair:

"OK, you got me there. If someone with enough resources and authority was hell-bent on staging such a lightshow, he or she could get away with it: witnesses are gullible and prone to auto-suggestion and, as you said, television images are easy to doctor, especially in this digital era."

They remained seated, rigid and staring with hollow, shadowy eyes at me.

I rose from my seat and said:

"Gentlemen, if there is nothing else you need, I should really be on my way. I hope I have been of some ..."

"You have an office in New-York?" - The senior member of the team interrupted me.

I faltered:

"Yes ... I ... That is, my university ... I serve as a consultant to the venture capital arm of my alma mater. They let me use a cubicle in the premises of their New-York subsidiary in the Twin Towers. I am actually flying there tomorrow morning. We have an annual meeting of the Board of Trustees every September 11. Why?"

They both ignored my question and kept staring ahead. Finally, the older agent exhaled and I was startled by the realization that he has been holding his breath for so long:

"Thank you for coming, doctor. I am sorry that this meeting could not have been as instructive for you as it has proved to be for us. May I just remind you again that you have signed a non-disclosure agreement with this agency. Our conversation is an official secret and divulging its contents may be construed as treason in a time of war."

"War? What war?" - I giggled nervously.

They stood up and opened the door for me, remaining in the shaded part of the room:

"Goodbye, doctor, and Godspeed. Have a safe flight tomorrow."


Hebrew and English short fiction
Free Anthologies and e-Books By Sam Vaknin

In my language, we have a word for "feeling embarrassed on someone else's behalf"... oh sam...

LifeSong wrote:I see your "u" is dead. This happened to me a couple days ago where my "v" died. Then, the next day, just as I was planning to go out to buy a new keyboard, it began to work again. Was it just that I'd dropped a drop of port on it the night before? Truly, did it just need to dry out?
And what is applecare?

Glad your 'v' is back! My u is still gone, so I got a cheap usb-keyboard now. I could live without the 'u' (replacing with 'v', now that would make "vvvvzela" look funny...) but the 7, ' ; ] etc. are gone too, although a few others creeped back overnight. Pity it's a laptop so the whole damn thing has to be taken in for a repair, 2-3 weeks which will kill me bizniss-wise Hope this mess will dry up soon (hate this new keyboard).
Actually it turned out it's not 'applecare' I have but the store-insurance - I paid for it very reluctantly, now glad for it. Applecare wouldn't cover for spillage.
Port is good! Gosh, now I'm sure I appear as a right alcoholic, which isn't quite the case (yet?! ) - it's just that I get sociable enough to chatter on the internet after having some wine (inhibitions etc. etc.)
Thanks for your sympathies! Sending you a little song in return:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Qrgqt03hgg
(can't find the subtitled version anymore, but still nice...)
______
Hold on - you guys are not taking the mickey out of me, are you??? Mind you, I've never seen the Virgin Mary in persona yet, but looking forward to it, being a good Catholic. (UFOs I don't care about.)

LifeSong wrote:Hebrew and English short fiction
Free Anthologies and e-Books By Sam Vaknin

Pretty good short fiction.

sum1 wrote:I expected that since you like the style of Vaknin, your probable aim was to write in a similar manner yourself, and in that case, sloppiness would be undesirable

Well, yes I do, however embarrassing it is in the current development of this thread - but still if I'd be really hard-pressed to emulate someone else's style, then my aim would be perhaps, well... let's just stay with Wodehouse for good measure:
"
'Good evening Jeeves.'
'Good morning, sir.'
This surprised me.
'Is it morning?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Are you sure? It seems very dark outside.'
'There is a fog, sir. If you will recollect, we are now in autumn - season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.'
'Oh? Yes. Yes, I see. Well, be that as it may, get me one of those bracers of yours, will you?'
'I have one in readiness, sir, in the ice box.'
"

(^ now, that last line is my personal idea of Valhalla - do they have butlers in Valhalla? And 'bracers'? Or is it just a vast empty ice-box? Is Valhalla worth to convert from godlessness to Odinism? (I almost succumbed here to a really very lame word-game on hedonism > anhedonia, but I really despise pronounciation-based puns so I won't. They are the fleas of the British press. But that's what you get with an aphonetic, vague, slimy language like the English. But enough of linguistics.) (Also we have an aspirin-based headache-pill here called Anadin (Skywalker - NOT!), but the salix wreaks havoc on your stomach-lining so I switched to Nurophen Plus long ago - haven't looked back since. Not that I have that many migraines anymore (hardly any at all), but its meagre codein-content comes as near to cheap, legal opiatesque mellow fruitfulness as it gets. That's my only indulgence with "drugs" (Lexapro aside), Nurophen Plus - how sad is that?! )

sum1 wrote:

wooster wrote:Takk.

This is Norwegian, right?

Right. No Opera (still with Safari), but I peruse the excellent Norwegian weather-forecast site:
http://www.yr.no/ on a daily (hourly!) basis, which is a huge contributing factor to my my chronic depression. I am a sun-junkie, stranded in the ONLY sunless corner of the entire world!! How's THAT for self-sabotage??! I heard that even Sweden has some sunny summer days, is that true?
By now I'm really on the brink of swapping home with some starving African family. It's year-round grey cold November here... Mind you, the scenery is awesome.

sum1 wrote:You sound like a fan of fish.

Well I do like the odd fish, but not to the extent of fanship. If I call myself a fan of anything, then it's cinnamon, basil, forest-strawberries (I have 3 secret sources nearby), chestnuts, venison, woodcock, fresh blood (pig or chicken) roasted on onions & goosefat, truffles (not that I can afford them), porcini & a lot of other forest-mushrooms, chocolates, ginger, most cheeses, biscotti/cantuccini, and Croatian Slanac. (well, thats far from the full list... All sorts of green herbs and lettuces too.) Kippers I eat once in about every five years, sardines slightly more often. Salmon is good, I prefere smoked. Incidentally, jst yesterday I had a big chunk of haddock.

But I can understand that you came to this conclusion. Too many fish for too few posts, thats how generalizations are born.

Sole is sublime, I have a superb recipe with Pernod. I love smoked flatfish too, the kind they air-dry on Iceland (Norway??) Any flatfish in fact. And monkfish. Shoot I MUST make more money... Scallops.

sum1 wrote: understand the most hated of society and take them in defence at the risk of being hated myself

- but isn't that what they call honour and heroism?

sum1 wrote: Ought you not highlight the Jacques too, or is that not a variation on the same theme?

Nope, Jacques is for 'Jacob', as for the old lad with the ladder in the Old(?) Testament - he climbed the old ladder right up to Heavens to dispose of God upon some old grudge or another. A well-publicized attempt at Götterdämmerung if you please.

sum1 wrote:Anyway, you seem to have a very pronounced fondness for French

Fondness I have, sadly I do not speak much French anymore. Only a very little, when I'm really desperate for a meal.

sum1 wrote:By the way, is Villon French too?

Yep, one of my childhood favourites. You're dead on right about the 'meaning' (just google François V~) - mind you, the English translations are crap.
(LOLZ François Datcha!! ) But I think you're making a fool of me once again...?

Hey - whatever happened to your other post? Or was it yesterday's wine playing tricks with my eyesight?

oh well - speaking of wine and Jacques, here's another lifesong of exuberant joy and sorrow: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJxmjw4P ... re=related - comes handy in times of anguish (this time with English subtitles even) ami remplir mon verre

sum1 wrote:Hans Magnus Enzensberger

This is the person I feel most curious about investigating

Do check him out, he's good. (Mind you, apart from some essays I've only ever fully read this one book* of him: http://books.google.com/books?id=TqfG7S ... &q&f=false (scroll down for sample pages), co-written by Irene Dische who's accidentally the author of another exceedingly good book:
http://www.amazon.com/Job-Irene-Dische/dp/0747554684 )

(* - not entirely correct, as my translated edition was more co-scripted than 'translated' by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Esterhazy - which is fair enough, after all the saga is all about his family... )

sum1 wrote:Yes, I actually don't know a lot of the people you mention.

Do not worry, it happens to me ALL the times on this forum (on others too). I simply haven't the faintest idea what/whom the others are talking about.

sum1 wrote:Again, I am at loss, and I'd be delighted if you were to kindly elucidate the matter. Perhaps I lack the necessary background knowledge that would render it self-explanatory.

Honestly, I am at loss here too. Haven't the faintest recollection of what drove me from doppel to katzenjammer at the time... All I can recall it was an exceptionally good sunny day on the 21st of June (probably the last one in the entire summer).
Wait - perhaps I was feeding the cats, that's how. A good example of 'free association' turning into gibberish via catfood and absentminded bluff (and yes, I should pay better attention to my typing).

sum1 wrote:I generously assume that you idealise rather than envy me

Your assumption is correct. I admire your eloquence, wits, talent, skill and abundant intelligence = in short, I perhaps idealise you - which is a benign form of envy, as it regards traits I'm lacking myself, but lacking these traits doesn't affect my life-quality in a negative way (or not too much). So I don't want to rob or deny you of those traits, but rather just admire them vicariously.

Now, it would be alltogether different if you were in possession of something I'm in perpetuous, malignant & rabid red-hot true envy of: say, for example, a spacious crumbling old villa (preferably in Italy, but can be anywhere else visually & weather-wise appealing), with ivy-covered walls, a flagstoned lobby, peeling plasterwork, high ceilings, tall windows, dusty library etc. etc. etc. - along with all the appropriate visuals and smells and a disused, leaf-scattered fountain in the (overgrown) garden. And, most importantly, a terrace where to have the morning-coffee and the first smoke of the day with the morning-papers. Something EXACTLY like this:


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... r_1868.jpg
(You cannot beat Spitzweg on magical realism)

Now, in THAT case, chances are that I'd be creeping up beneath the ivy in the small hours of a dark moonless night, dagger in mouth, through the attic-window (like pious Aeneas), and SLIT your throat in your sleep, dispose of the body (in the fountain, perhaps), then take over the place. Nobody ever would find out. I'd live happily ever after in the House with my morning-coffee on the terrace lit by morning sun.

But it's all fantasy as you live in a totally wrong place and I have my fair share of grey cold ugly weather already.

sum1 wrote:if anything, that you would most of all want to be an even better version of myself

- frankly, that option haven't occured to me as of yet, as what I most of all want is 1. hot sunny weather, and 2. a chilled bowl of Îles Flottantes with caramel-sauce and a generous sprinkle of cinnamon/caramel chrystals. (Mind you, it can change any minute - who knows?? Not the weather-needs though, that's a constant & perennial woe).

sum1 wrote:Of the two most prominent historical favourites of mine, Hermann Göring

I'm sure you've read this book before - but in case if not yet, it is too good to miss, one of my favorites: Le Roi des Aulnes (Erl-König, or The Ogre), by Michel Tournier :

http://www.amazon.com/Ogre-Michel-Tourn ... 080185590X

But let me copy a review here, as I think it sits well within the narrative of this forum - or thread or what - (then again, i think the same of whichever book etc. I happen to like...) (italics by the original reviewer, boldings by me):

"At a high point in a pivotal relationship formed during his refectory days in an alien French boy's school, Abel Tiffauges is told the gruesome apocryphal story of the Baron des Adrets' newfound awareness of cadent euphoria by the obese enigma Nestor. The crescendo is reached when the latter murmurs in coda that "There's probably nothing more moving in a man's life than the accidental discovery of his own perversion." Just how much truth this observation bore is revealed to Abel many years later, when he has mutated from a bunched-up, undersized boy into a hulking giant of a man; bearing a wounded child in his massive arms, he is lapped by beatific paroxysms of phoric joy, much akin to that experienced by a pair of historic personages: St. Christopher when he similarly performed as steed for a riverine Christ, and Alfonso d'Albuquerque, a conquistador in peril of death at the hands of the boundless sea, who perched a lad atop his shoulders in the desperate hope that the youth's innocence would serve to cleanse him of sin and turn the eye of God toward him in a favorable light. Would that there were enough innocence to mount and shrive the twentieth-century, an epoch when perversion, obsession, and desire freed themselves from all restraints and ran amok amid a continent watered with blood.

The Ogre is a beautifully strange novel, alternately narrated by and about the remarkable Abel Tiffauges - a Frenchman so unlike his countrymen, a gentle giant who firmly believes himself an eternal and potent natural force, primordial in origin, descended across the mists of time from the original Abel, the nomad brother of the sedentary Cain who - in a pattern to be repeated ad nauseam throughout history's pages - was murdered by his sibling for his hateful and peregrine individuality. Tiffauges interacts with the material world only in a routine and perfunctory manner, quietly going about his solitary business while a rich and eccentric inner life, in which systems and symbols, portents and preordained fates illuminate every event in their explicatory light. Even as the apocalypse of the Second World War thunders down upon Europe and Tiffauges is swept from a Parisian suburban garage to Teutonic castles amidst the marshy forests and plains of East Prussia, he is central to this avenging maelstrom, a locus for the melancholy loam of Prussian nature, yet completely apart from it, a separate entity to the daily suffering and slaughter that plays out around him. Finding in the war the means to pursue his child-focussed obsessions, Abel calmly sets about a phoric existence, luxuriating in its anarchic bliss until the diabolical inversion that always threatens the innocent poisons the roots of all his fantasies.

Michel Tournier has penned a marvel here, a haunting, quirky story that lingers in the mind like a disturbing dream. The fascinating symbolism and ego-mythology of Abel's unique and contentedly lonely mind, after having spread to saturate every event and path of the story, are swiftly drawn back in a taut synthesis for the perfectly realized final pages. The dialectic between innocence as a guileless love of being, of man, of life, and its malignant inversion purity, a satanic hatred of all that innocence cherishes, holds place of primacy, along with those of freshness versus corruption, chaste desire against lust, and the boundaries of amorality. Abel imagines himself an innocent - but why then his need to be anointed by that of a child? Abel's immense capacity for sacrifice and compassion exist right alongside his utter indifference to the suffering of the majority of humanity who don't conform to his ideals; the children he so gently carries have been cruelly ripped from the arms of their parents, and a mother's tears move him no more than the death throes of the Third Reich. Unrealized guilt yet contains the potentiality for redemption that is immanent in culpability. Not until the horrific joke played out by the malignant streams of fate is revealed to him, in all the fullness of its macabre glory, does Abel finally understand the price of phoria and truly behold the Erl-King's sovereignty, the inescapable fate in store for the Ogre, whether in the pellucid realm of fairy-tale or the grim theatre of reality." (C.S.)
____
(Aye, what brought me from your reply to this book - Herr Göring makes a short but cheerful appearance in it, with a big bowl of gemstones)

sum1 wrote:By the way, I'm lazy too, and if you feel this is a compelling reason to go out of your way to do me a great disfavour in the sanguine hope that you're helping me, by stroking and encouraging my laziness, then why not make all threads started by me sticky? While you're at it, you can sticky all threads I've replied to as well, including this one. If you do this for me, which I sincerely hope you will not, I shall thank you by saying goodbye, because I'm too lazy to scroll past the first page of threads merely to find the interesting and novel content that I'm truly and honestly really here for, and which I therefore hastily presume everyone else to be here for. I'm not interested in static and stale threads. If I were interested in static information I would go to Sam Vaknin's site and read all of his stuff as well as join his mailing list because his writing certainly is a great deal better than that of most people here, including most of my own writing, and especially this rant. In fact, it is because I'm lazy and because I'm interested in novel content that I haven't looked once at most of the sticky threads in all the time I've spent here, yet have tremendous confidence in their worthlessness . I'm prejudiced against sticky threads, and I automatically devalue them in my mind and promptly and resolutely dismiss them as worthless with extreme prejudice, based almost purely on their quality of being sticky, and to a lesser extent based on their almost invariably lacklustre and uninteresting titles. I despise sticky threads more than the Nazis despised Jews, and more than the Jews despise Nazis. If I had the resources to build and run a complex of death camps for sticky threads, I would do so with zealous devotion and determination if it were not for my deficits of attention, motivation and patience.

This is the most beautiful rant I've ever read. I laughed a lot.