Comparing Inaccuracies : A. N. Wilson on CSL / Shrinks on Patients

Brenton Dickieson

shared a link

Hi folks, this is an old book, but I read it because people out in the public keep referencing it and it haunts beneath Lewis studies. There are A LOT of poor facts in this book, and an example of why Lewis gets bent in public. But he also gives another reason why Lewis is being misquoted: Because he is a legend that we shape. Intriguing to think about more this facebook site and William's work. Here are my thoughts about the book as a whole, but I will follow up next week with some more thoughts about Wilson's Lewis journey.

A Pilgrim in Narnia : A.N. Wilson’s C.S. Lewis: A Mythology
https://apilgriminnarnia.com/2019/02/11/a-n-wilsons-c-s-lewis-a-mythology/

GD

Good job. It annoys me that this biography is taken seriously as biography by anyone, with all the errors and sloppiness in it. Biographies like that always annoy me. No, we can't know everything about a person, but at least do your best to be honest!

Hans-Georg Lundahl

"Biographies like that always annoy me."

You hate psychiatry too?

"No, we can't know everything about a person, but at least do your best to be honest!"

You really hate psychiatry, don't you?

GD

No, why?

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Bc their journals of a given patient are more often than not very fake biographies.

Like the level where A. N. Wilson will seem accurate about CSL by comparison, and that is how they earn lots of money (collectively) from tax payers on treating people often in no need of their services.

GD

I'm . . . not even gonna touch that one.

Brenton Dickieson

I have issues with the methods of some that do psychological shrinking of historical figures, but personally, I would love to have access to a psychiatrist or an informed spiritual director to help me order things. And as a pastor and teacher*, I cannot tell you how many times shrinks and psychologists have made critical interventions--some of them life-saving--in the lives of my parishioners and students.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Due to your sending them there?

How do you know they were in fact lifesaving?

Brenton Dickieson

Hans-Georg Lundahl Well, they didn't die. I mean, literally dozens of people who didn't commit suicide or die of anorexia or bulimia or addictions. Anyone with any experience working with mental health professionals can see the limitations and problems. But anyone who has tried to help people without the right tools can see what the help can do.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

"Well, they didn't die."

For an internvention to be lifesaving there are two criteria needed, that one, and "they would have died otherwise".

"literally dozens of people who didn't commit suicide"

How many had tried previous to shrink getting involved (btw, generally I think they are rather good with cases of depression, that's why depressed patients often become their poster children)?

"or die of anorexia"

How many were legitimately very starved?

"or bulimia"

How many were legitimately destroying their stomachs?

"or addictions"

How many of the addictions were lifethreatening? For instance, Amy Winehouse was arguably getting an earlier death, if she wasn't treated, but as it was, her treatment lowered her tolerance to alcohol and she died in ethylic coma when trying to drink as before, plus the treatment was imposed in such a manner that it arguably made her want to drink more.

"Anyone with any experience working with mental health professionals can see the limitations and problems."

Understatement of the year.

"But anyone who has tried to help people without the right tools can see what the help can do."

To or for some who chose that help.

For or to some who that "help" is imposed on.

How many would, for instance, have fared worse than dying at 65 from renal failure (sth CSL's lifestyle arguably had sth to do with and I don't mean he should be considered a suicide for that)?

With patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, these guys often make up biographies, as they don't see the patients' words as reliable, and one frequent thing is "observing" audible or other hallucinations simply from someone talking to non-present others.

Ben Gunn's syndrome, if you ask me.

That Long John Silver and a few others were not present while he dreamed of revenge doesn't mean they were not emotionally relevant to Ben Gunn (I trust anyone in our culture knows Treasure Island). So, that Ben Gunn spoke to them while absent (including threats) doesn't argue he hallucinated.

GD

All other considerations aside, this conversation is wildly off-topic.

Brenton Dickieson

GD I agree. I'll bow out.**

HGL (after adding link here)

False as hell biogaphy, item 1:

Therapeutic Superstition
by David Bentley Hart | November 2012
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2012/11/therapeutic-superstition

"There was a therapist at the funeral who had known Reuben for some time and who, in the course of lamenting Reuben’s death, remarked that he was at least glad that the psychiatrist in charge of the case had been able, in those last few years, to help Reuben get in touch with “reality.” There had been, he said, a marked improvement in Reuben’s state of mind under care, and there was some comfort to be taken from the knowledge that he had enjoyed a short period of stability and general sanity before the end."

False as hell biography, item 2:

Some guys think I am like Reuben, in the sense of living mainly in what is invisible to others.

When I talk to absent people, it's usually neither angels nor demons, nor fairies, it's people I engaged intellectually or morally with, and am shadow boxing, bc social defeats smart.

GD

Hans-Georg Lundahl Once again, this thread has gone OFF-TOPIC. This discussion is about Wilson and Lewis, not psychiatry.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

he point was, Wilson was doing a very psychiatry like (in places) false biography.

Some of the errata Kathryn Lindskog noted are like the ones mental patients can note in their journals, if accessed, or in stray remarks : Freudian analyses of some known fact, contradicting facts known to person himself or to those knowing him.

// Unlike the irritatingly tolerant Protestants, Wilson takes smoking and drinking so seriously that he claims against all evidence that Lewis disliked nonsmokers: "Lewis was impatient with puritanism and disliked non-smokers or teetotallers." (Lewis's good friends Roger Lancelyn Green and George Sayer were both nonsmokers, and Lewis tried hard to quit but couldn't.) //

Against all evidence?

Not as shrinks look at it. Eustace Clarence Scrubb's parents are non-smokers tee-totallers and wear special underwear (and obviously have more businessmanlike than chivalrous moral ideals, as reflected in their son's upbringing).

They were deluding ECS about life, so presumably Lewis didn't approve of them ... =========> Lewis was impatient with puritanism and disliked non-smokers and teetotallers.

More correctly, he didn't approve of puritanism as a cause or non-smoking and tee-totalling as causes. He would probably not have approved of signs saying "smoking forbidden" all over nearly every public place either, even if he didn't quite approve of his habit.

But not approving of a cause and hating all espousing it is precisely the kind of thing a shrink WILL NOT distinguish, if triggered, and they are often that.

// Third, Wilson attacks C. S. Lewis's own portrayal of himself as a reasonably heathy-minded Christian. Wilson reduces Lewis's evangelizing Christianity to a crippled way of coping with life. He claims that Lewis's account of his boyhood frustration with prayer can't be true. Then in one of the most amazing passages in his book (on page 162), Wilson claims to have been considering for twenty years a June 1938 letter from Lewis to Owen Barfield that shows how warped Lewis's thinking was when he began defending Christianity. At that time, Wilson says, Lewis turned against innocent pleasures such as feeling the wind in your hair, walking with bare feet on the grass, and swimming in the rain: Lewis decided these activities were Nazi or would lead to homosexuality. Thus "one must also view with ambivalence his excursion into the realm of religious apologetics." Wilson slays his third strawman with a flourish, and makes C. S. Lewis look silly. //

// But as anyone can see by reading the passage in Letters, Lewis was reporting an idiocy that he overheard from two undergraduates, and he was horrified by it. //

Deciding what a patient thinks, and then presenting any evidence to the contrary as efforts to rationalise, overlooking text passages ... (or conversation snippets) ... they thrive off that business.

// A.N. Wilson substitutes his own ideological Freudian view of C. S. Lewis. Thus the real C. S. Lewis, he claims, was not a perpetual virgin, not a nonsmoker and nondrinker, and not the genuine Christian believer he wanted to be. He was instead a terrified Oedipal neurotic and a closet misanthrope. The Narnian wardrobe is a symbol of Flora Lewis's private parts. Surely it is disingenuous for a biographer to psychoanalyze an author this way without telling readers what that author wrote about such psychoanalyzing. //

I think the same about psychoanalyzing.

// The hero of this book is A.N Wilson, who quickly and easily sees through everything, and who winks at his readers because they are now in on the joke also. //

The hero of a shrink's journal is the shrink. If you have had to do with them, you can't miss the parallel.

// He even recounts what the obnoxiously drunk Lewis allegedly said to one of his drunken students at a urinal fifty years ago, without explaining how he could know such details it if it were true. //

Shrinks also are shady on theory of knowledge.

GD

You are slandering an entire group of people, some of whom may be in this group and watching you do it. If you don't stop, I'm getting the moderator involved. It's up to you.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Fine, my point is they are excellent slanderers themselves, I am the first slander victim here.

I am living on the street bc slandered as an alcoholic, shrinks (or addictologists) and Muslims seem to be both involved.

I am presumed to be suicidal, bc I threatened suicide when I was half as old as I am now, in an attempt to commit emotional extortion against the gal I loved and had a rival about. Sure, I worked myself up as to be actually planning (hypothetically, should she refuse me) suicide, so as not to lie to her.

But I didn't do it, am not suicidal etc.

I defended myself against the slave hunt they commit by shooting at a policeman who was (against his better judgement, or what he had expressed as such) delivering me to them. This was 21 years ago. I already did time, for mistreatment alternatively attempt of unpremeditated manslaughter.

People are still poisoning my life about how I must have been unstable and they are waiting for me to become stable - with the criteria of shrinks.

I was yesterday given food I didn't need, while already enjoying a light supper, and the guy who gave it said "bon rétablissement", which I think is synonym for "bonne amélioration" or "get well soon" - supposing I had been ill.

As a consequence, when I was stopped from going back to sleep at before 2am, in the bank automat space, I stayed awake till past (I think) 4am.

My blogs are being read more in Ukraine (where men analysing CSL as Wilson did, or actually using Wilson, abound), than in Paris, where I am making publicity for my blogs as the busking.

And someone is telling people "ssshh" and "don't tell him, but don't read his blogs, you might get an unfavourable impression, he sometimes writes when he's in a bad mood" (a damned lie and complete literal truth at the same time, I am in a bad mood right now), or "we are studying his blogs as symptoms" or "in his own head he is a writer" (with 7000 articles on my blogs which are publilcly accessible, why shouldn't I be?)

So you tell ME that I am slandering MY SLANDERERS?

Just because the lines I just gave were realistic second guessing and not always overheard or directly told?

If I were for instance speaking on a FB back in the time of Wilberforce, would I be slandering slave traders?

* "And as a pastor and teacher, I cannot tell you how many times ..." => Brenton Dickieson is a pastor and teacher => not anonymised. ** This is where I made the post. The next comment of mine on that subthread (there are others) is the link to this post.