1 The Problems Posed by Les Havens in Psychiatry and My Reply to Them

A teacher may be judged by the quality of his problems. Professor Havens gave me big ones. I do not think the reader would want to follow this series unless it concerned him or her personally. I think it will concern him or her personally, because the series turns out to have a unity like a mathematical proof, and that unity is the disaster of modern humanity. We are all in it, and some of us have found a way out of it. The structure I will attempt to prove like Poincare (1908) (Gustafson, 2008, Chapter 13, Part II) did in non-linear geometry is a fractal structure: the exchange an individual gets in his or her life is self-similar on all scales of time and space, in a moment or a word, or in a lifetime. The method of my proof is to give a series of problems posed by Professor Havens, followed by my reply, in the order they came to me over the last forty-four years. All of the problems in the series will turn out to have the same structure. The reader, no doubt, would like to know what this structure is, before embarking on the series. Fair enough. The modern problem, and by modern I mean the last five thousand years, always turn out to be a fate set by the group he belongs to, by which the individual loses him or herself. From Homer, to Dante, to Shakespeare, to Tolstoy, to us, always the same result. The magnetic field of the group captures the individual nearly every time. Humanity is too terrified to be out of step with it