Should You Disconnect The Warning Dashlight in Your Car?

“Let us take an analogy. On it’s instrument panel a car has a whole range of warning-lights, which come on only when one of the car’s vital functions is no longer operating properly. Yet in the actual event of one of them lighting up during a journey, we are far from happy about it.

We feel obliged by this signal to interrupt our trip. In spite of our understandable disquiet, however, it would be stupid to get annoyed at the light itself. It is, after all, telling us about some happening which we otherwise would have taken much longer to find out about, since it lies in what for us is an ‘invisible’ zone. Consequently, we treat the fact that the light has come on as the cue to call a mechanic, with the object of ensuring that after he has done his job the light will no longer be on and we can happily resume our journey.

Nevertheless, we should be pretty indignant if the mechanic were to achieve this end simply by taking out the light-bulb.

True, the light would no longer be on – which would indeed be what we had wanted – but the way in which this had been achieved would appear to use to be far too superficial. Rather than stop the light coming on at all, we would regard it as far more sensible to make it unnecessary for it to light up in the first place. But for this to happen, we should need to shift our attention from the light itself and turn to what is behind it, so as to find out what is actually out of order. The lights real function, in other words, is and was simply to act as an indicator and make us ask questions.

As the warning-light to our example, so is the symptom to our subject. That which constantly reveals itself as a series of bodily symptoms is the visible expression of an invisible process. It is designed as a signal whose function is to stop us in our tracks, reveal that something is no longer in order and make us ask questions about what lies behind it all. Here, once again, it is silly to get upset about the symptom, and downright absurd to try to switch it off simply by preventing it from appearing. The symptom has to be made superfluous, not prevented. But in order to do this it is just as necessary as before for us to avert our gaze from the symptom itself and examine things more deeply, if we are to understand what the symptom is really pointing to.”