Funny and true

Had dinner last night with a good friend, another therapist I've known for more than a dozen years, who works entirely with the "offender" population. And likes it. She's always had a soft spot for criminals.

We were talking about the new DSM-V, the diagnostic manual which shapes and defines mental illness in American culture. It's a powerful book, because it tells clinicians what to look for. And as the founder of modern medicine, Dr Osler, said, "You usually only find what you are looking for."

The previous editions

A person with a childhood religious background, but not religious herself, she surprised me by saying that it might be a good idea to add a whole new set of pathologies based on The Seven Capital Sins.

A lot of what we have turned into therapeutic issues is just plain old human vice, IMHO. If you want a way to diagram the day's news, any day's, here you have it.

Let's see if I can run off the list from memory...

Pride,
Wrath,
Sloth,
Gluttony,
Avarice,
Lust....
and......
(this one I had to look up; repression?)
...Envy.

Although most kids probably were not paying attention, I remain impressed at the detail and the balance with which I was taught about most (not all) moral issues when I was in Catholic school. Even in grade school. Priests and nuns may have ranted on about this or that but me, being a Five, paid attention to the book, the various editions of the Baltimore Catechism, which reflected Aquinas' usually common sense approach to virtue and vice.  For example, it was clear that anger was not sinful in itself; if it was justified and within bounds, it was natural and ok. Enjoying food and drink was not gluttony: it was when this natural need became immoderate or irrational. (Aquinas' own big girth must have been a glandular problem...).

Just for the hell of it: 

this is not a Muslim treaty; it's Aquinas' own handwriting. 

Apparently he never learned the Palmer method.

Lust, well, there was not so much apparent balance there. Or maybe I was tone deaf to the subtleties, but it seemed that in the end there were only two kinds of people: married people who could be sexual, and unmarried people who were in constant danger of falling into mortal sin through deed, word and thought.

Maybe the fact that I was taught Catholicism in a largely New York Irish context explains some of this: the Irish really had no problem with anger (or fighting) and eating...and drinking! (Or smoking or cursing or gambling or dancing). But sex made them pretty nervous.

Even though Catholicism is supposedly Roman, it does indeed take on national and ethnic shapes. When I went to live in Italy, I certainly discovered a quite different flavor of my ancestral faith. Honesty and sincerity, I discovered, were largely AngloSaxon concerns at which even Italian nuns rather snickered. Despite their high demands on propriety and respect in the public forum, I found them deeply unshocked and forgiving about human nature in private.

I am certainly familiar with all seven of these capital, head or root, sins. The one I regret the most is sloth. But on the other hand, my natural laziness and underachievement means that my practice of the other vices is less intense. I'm too lazy to be that bad.