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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria University, Wellington N.Z. Vol. 22, No. 10. September 14, 1959

The Cause

The Cause

All these arguments turn our attention, inevitably, to the secret intentions of the psychologists themselves. What sort of pattern do they form?

Firstly, it seems, they enjoy shocking people; they are iconoclasts, and they have the courage of one. An iconoclast, in case you are unfamiliar with the term, is a person who goes round breaking statues. The danger is, as Cocteau pointed out, that such people risk becoming statues themselves.

Psychologists cannot accept the world and adopt all sorts of emotional and intellectual subterfuges to rationalise their way out of this. Their handling of situations at a distance by words reflects their lack of capacity for emotional involvement.

What neater way of solving the problem than instituting themselves (in the manner of Dr. Caligari) in a department concerned with mental health? (And not without a certain grandeur of self-sacrifice on the part of the martyr.) Who would, after all, suspect the High-Priests of being athiests?

To borrow a term from J-P. Sartre, psychologists are not "engages". They are afraid of their own subjectivity—desperately on the outside of a world they'd give their world to enter. One can only laugh at their attempts to drag the wonders of Art and Science into the Procrustean bed of their narrow system; at their efforts to nail down the soul of mankind, if not the soul of the soul, and the meaning of meaning of meaning

... I ask you: could any psychologist answer the desperate outcry of Judas?—"Why did I have to be Judas?" or that of Christ, the most heart-breaking words ever uttered: "My God, my God, Why have you forsaken me?"