There is a part of my chronological continuous self that is missing. It has various reference points in memory, but none in feeling. I am unable to access the feelings and capacities of that self. It is the self that spans from about 12-16. During this time, I had more or less conformed to a fairly passive identity, since I had no idea how to make it in the world on my own.. I was wild at heart, but also desired -- perhaps unsuccessfully in terms of my results -- to be a peacemaker. I sought ways to engage others with my humor through creativity, but I also had a cultural notion that relationships should be harmonious.

When I tried to teach middle-school, I needed to access my self from this period of time, in order to teach people, I was unable to do so. My mirror cells respond to adult childishness and adult seriousness, but cannot react to this condition of being 'in-between' in people. In all, I cannot rediscover this condition of the in between inside myself. Instead, when I try, I feel numbness, and my throat begins to tighten. I also can't relate to babies or small children.

I was, as has been said before, the victim of some extreme identity politics, which did not allow me to speak and express my mind, because my way of thinking (either obviously or just in the imagination of others) identified me as 'white african' -- a quintessential social and political taboo on the automatic naturalness of simply being.

In Reeducation, the correct response to it all would have been to ask myself what I had done to deserve these people's meanness

This is a big one — because it plays upon the naive idea that most people have (including intellectuals when they forget who and what they are, and so revert to ‘common sensical’ thinking) that the universe is inherently just. Oh! This is such a big one! It is such a big source of error (and of course this inherently “just universe” concept is linked to the idea of democracy as it conforms to ideas about social darwinism, that the best results for humanity are achieved by forgetting your ethics and behaving randomly according to “instinct”). This is supposed to induce justice to appear automatically out of the chaos of everyday life, in order to give you your verdict of whether you are a worthy humanbeing or not. And, if you are not a worthy humanbeing according to these pronouncements from out of the belly of chaos, then you had better darn well do some soul-searching, to find out why the justice that was percolated in the belly of the laissez-faire de-ethicisation of human relations happened to disapprove of you so.

“Why, why, oh Lord, does chaos reject me in this way? I always submitted myself absolutely to his commands. I tried to embrace chaos in every possible way, in order to reveal to all in a definitive modality that I was not uppity or arrogant, but somehow my need for depth of soul got the better of me! No wonder chaos cast the final judgment against me that it did!”

A certain amount of psychological and conceptual difficulty is linked to understanding the psychological underpinnings of shamanism, especially in distinguishing these from everyday pathology. Anton Ehrenzweig shines the way forward when he states that creativity and pathology are two sides of the same coin.

He presents an example of how they differ, however, when he contends that a schizophrenic cannot effectively create art, simply because he cannot dissolve his fears and anxieties in the depths of the psyche to remold them.  His traumas are unable to be transmuted via a dialectical relationship with the deeper or inner parts of his psyche.) Ehrenzweig also holds that creativity and pathology have superficial resemblance as both creators and mad people have a relationship with the depths of the psyche.  But only the artist integrates the elements of the unconscious with the elements of the more rational mind.

 The creator delves deeply into the constructs of his own psyche and uses the material there to reconstruct a world that is different from how it actually appears.In Nietzschean terms, the character structure of the one whose mind generates pathology has at its core a sense of decrepitude or lack, where the one who operates creativity does so from a feeling of excess or plenitude.  Thus a creator and a merely sick man, acting from very different senses of the world, must logically not be the same.  Nietzsche's view about their necessary separation seems to have changed, at least with regard to himself, later in his life, for in his memoirs he acknowledges that he was simultaneously "a decadent" and at the same time somebody who had healthy enough instincts to know how to cure himself.

This insight into himself, which was stated two years before his death, also accurately encapsulates the age-old idea of a shamanic persona, being one who has gained insights into himself through his wounding and has thus gained the power to become a healer of himself and others.

The parallel between art and shamanism is already obvious:  both artist and shaman descend into a realm of uncertainty (where all that's solid seems to melt) and this extreme level of uncertainty is experienced as a state of ecstasy within discomfort.   Object relations psychoanalysis gives a name to this uncertainty -- the paranoid-schizoid position -said to relate to an early stage of childhood development.