The Scorsese BBC documentaries about Bob Dylan pinpoint the difficulties entailed for adults in being intellectually free and emotionally alive. This is a pity because it is our natural state when three years old. They ask questions like, 'Did people make God?' and 'Is the Pet Shop Boys girls?' (said our daughter in response to Neil Tennant's falsetto). They effortlessly make up words, throwing out streams of poetic thoughts.
In the films, Dylan brilliantly kept his balance on the tightrope of sanity that is walked when an artist free-associates out loud in the public domain, and at the same time, paradoxically, does so with phenomenal rigour. The most telling example came standing outside a pet shop, circa 1964.
The camera cut between the words listing the products and services on sale, and Dylan's extemporisations. The sign said 'We will collect clip bath & return your dog. Cigarettes and tobacco. Animals and birds bought and sold on commission'. Speaking very rapidly, Dylan went into a rhythmic incantation: 'I want a dog that's gonna collect and clean my bath, return my cigarettes, give them back my animals, return my cigarette and give my birds a commission'. This relatively concrete stream flowed into abstract surrealism. 'I'm looking for a place that's going to animal my soul, mitt my return, bathe my foot and collect my dog'. Psychiatrically speaking, I suspect that Dylan has many symptoms of Personality Disorder - narcissism, omnipotence, febrile moods.
But precisely because such people (like small children) have weak boundaries, they are freer in their thoughts, sometimes child-like, as well as selfishly childish. Indeed, the disorder is a mixture of regression to early childhood and failure to have developed beyond it.
Both the disordered and children are close relatives, in important respects, to schizophrenics. One of that illness's diagnostic features is defined in the bible of mental illnesses as 'disorganised speech' (eg, incoherence). A psychiatrist who had never heard of Dylan would probably suspect schizophrenia if asked to diagnose the man by the pet shop. That would be to miss the huge creativity involved.
Most three-year-olds engage in playful 'disorganised speech' dozens of times a day and exhibit other schizophrenic symptoms, like claiming to be someone else. Alas, from five, our parents and schools eradicate such ways of being.
It's very hard to be adult in a developed nation and retain the spontaneity and inventiveness found in three year olds, without being mad, personality disordered or employed as an artist. I believe that creating the context in which these child-like attributes can flourish in adults should be the principal goal of politics; they are the cornerstone of mental well-being.
The words 'change' and 'dreams' have dominated the political party conferences this year, but they referred to improved Having rather than Being. Dylan was right that he who is not busy being born (emotionally maturing), is busy dying.
The mental block
A recent study of 8,000 British mothers with a small child and living with a partner (Psychological Medicine) finds that, when interviewed a year later, if the relationship had ended, they were more likely to be depressed than mothers whose relationships remained intact. However, there were some unexpected patterns in the results.
Splitting up did not help to relieve the misery of women who were already depressed whilst still in the relationship. After leaving, they actually felt worse: think twice before jacking in a relationship in the hope that the change will be an antidepressant. You might have thought that if a relationship was really shitty, at least then the mothers would have been happier once out. On the contrary, however disharmonious and vile what was left behind, the mothers felt no better on escaping.
Not surprisingly, the mothers who were most upset after separation had been in what they fondly imagined to have been happy relationships beforehand. Their greater distress may have been because they were shocked by the sudden, unanticipated fissure (eg if their man suddenly revealed an affair out of the blue).
The study also implies that being depressed can cause break-ups (as shown in many other studies) because if the mother was depressed during the relationship, separation was more likely: depressed people are more likely to have break-ups. Implication: Don't assume the grass will be greener with someone else, always get treatment if depressed.
