***Overcoming Fear and Hearing Voices with Oedipus

Overcoming Fear and Hearing Voices with Oedipus

When I was a kid I used to chat with adults waiting for the bus on bus benches. Taking opinion polls with this captive audience in the summer in south Florida in the Fifties was easy. People will tell a kid anything when there's absolutely nothing else to do and nobody is looking. I learned poor people are all for any revolution if they don't have to do anything themselves.

I learned people have a horrible fascination for sick babies: They have to handle the baby--out of morbid curiosity, was my kidly impression. The baby was a live-looking doll, and I was dressed in a gray Lord and Taylor Handmacher suit that I got for a quarter at the thrift shop where the Palm Beach ladies donated their finery. One of them was exactly my size, 6. Her shoes and hats were too; so was I ever dressed, with this 'suppurating leprosy' baby in its fine carriage!

This fellow was different. His bus never came, and he didn't talk. He glowered at me. He wore a suit too. I worked at getting his confession in my opinion poll project. One day I did. He told all. I almost got swatted when I corrected his pronunciation of "Oh-Edipus." I was in the third grade but had read two libraries already when I met this fellow.

Here is his story. From the time he was a very little kid, he heard voices in his head. His mother took him to many, many psychologists, counselors and psychiatrists. He got my attention with this: My schizophrenic mother heard voices too. He rattled off the names of these counselors and the dates he saw them, and for how long, how old he was, and what fools they were: They just didn't get it, didn't know what to do, and wouldn't admit that.

BUT he counted himself so lucky...and he was sincere in his voice about this...to have ONE good man among the practitioners. This man did not offer him any hope. He said: You will always hear the voices. Your brain is wired bad, you walk around in the state other people are in when they dream. Those voices are really just dreams. Those ideas are just that kind of stuff. What you have to do is just ignore them. No, don't answer them, don't tell them to shut up, and No, you aren't imagining it.

Sure enough, the man said, many years ago he just quit listening, quit paying attention to those voices, and now he hardly hears them at all, they are so faint.

After he confessed, he didn't hang out on my opinion poll turf any more. I never saw him again. Just when I was getting to like the guy, you know.

This is an easier concept for 'overcoming fear' than the more serious approaches, because this attitude has you immediately disrespecting what opposes you from within. Its story doesn't matter, it's you, it's your brain wiring job, it's a dream state anyway.