Honoring Icarus energy
The neurodivergent impulse, bipolar disorder, and the DSM as a penal code
An explosion of neurodivergence
Collective rebellion is underway against what Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé refers to as the “dis-associated self.” We are visited by an emergent mental health crisis among young people, whose desires and embodied realities present symptoms and energies which cannot neatly weave themselves into the material incentive structures and cultures we have inherited.
Young people reach for the tools made available, self-diagnosing on TikTok, and merging their identities with diagnostic categories forged to pathologize personalities that exhibit an unwillingness to serve the regime of production.
“Oughtism” and the DSM as a penal code
I recently had the privilege of taking a course with Dr. Báyò, where he grounded his transmission in a critique of psychology as the “policeman of capitalism,” an idea whose lineage flows through thinkers like Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault.
As I sat with this framing, the DSM and its contents started to seem more like a penal code than a medical text.
Akómoláfé coined the term “Oughtism,” to mean: “the ways we are trained, habituated, conditioned, and rewarded to think along dominant lines of production. How we 'ought' to behave. A tendency towards the already known. A regulatory refrain that whispers how bodies ought to look like, ought to behave like.”
Are these neurodivergent eruptions and symptom clusters gestured at by the DSM trying to tell us something about our place in the world? I think so.
Icarus energy, the neurodivergent impulse, and bipolar disorder
I’ve never spoken publicly about my experience on the bipolar spectrum until now, having waded through a mire of shame and stigma on the way to sharing my story, despite the relative mildness of my experience.
My experience of hypomania felt like being visited by what Italian psychologist Roberto Assagioli aptly describes as a “flood of light, energy, and joy.” Assagioli also notes that when these energies enter a person the personality is often “unable to rightly assimilate the inflow.” When the emotions and imagination are uncontrolled, some people confuse the qualities of the “divine Self” for their normal personality and ego. This was certainly true for me the first time around.
I’ve always found the myth of Icarus a beautiful way to understand how this flavor of neurodivergence manifests, including its pitfalls. Flooded by the joy of escaping the prison in which he grew up, he soars too close to the sun, causing the wax to melt from his wings. When his wings fall apart, he falls into the ocean and perishes.
I count myself lucky to have avoided the extremes of this spectrum of experience, unlike my aunt Katie, who I never met. She took her own life in 1991. I felt such a strong connection to her when I was first visited by hypomania, and later found copies of Assagioli’s books that belonged to her on my family’s bookshelves, unintended gifts to help her nephew understand our shared experience.
“Chasing the dragon” and the addictive drive
In a conversation with a close friend about his own experience of hypomania, we found agreement that it feels like “getting high on your own thoughts.” There’s a way in which it feeds on itself, pumping the bellows of an inner fire. It feels like being freed from an inner prison of judgements, where creativity flows with ease, and the channel connecting us to the universe is wide open.
Without discipline and integrated wisdom, our addictive drive wants so badly to chase that high and use these energies to fulfill the ego’s desires, often followed by periods of deep emptiness and lack as we abuse our mesolimbic reward pathways. Many people successfully channel these energies into the pursuit of money, disembodied sex, and all manner of other secondary satisfactions, as Francis Weller refers to them. Assagioli describes this as when “energy is absorbed by hidden blocks and patterns that prevent higher integration, energizing and bringing them to life.”
Honoring and integrating Icarus energy
The sign outside the UCC church I attended in high school read “God is still speaking,” prominently featuring a multi-colored comma. I believe that the Universe will never cease trying to say something through each of us.
Assagioli believed that it was possible to use the opening of these energy channels toward a more permanent integration and higher-level organization of the personality, where regressive tendencies and patterns are neutralized and transformed. Even with partial integration, people who experience these energies can be left with an ideal model and sense of direction that can be followed in an ongoing process of transformation.
The third time I experienced this inflow of light, it flowed from a willingness to grieve a life that was becoming increasingly dysfunctional. As 2023’s summer so(u)lstice arrived on a mountaintop dance floor in Mendocino County, a sense of clarity and direction began to emerge in my being. I knew that I needed to slow my life down, reduce my consumption, reconnect with my family, and create an off-ramp from my career to pursue work that spoke to my heart. A plan began to emerge. I could feel my wings but I knew from experience to keep my flight path level.
Learning to tend my inner fire
Last April, when I was in the final days of a meditation retreat, I met with the retreat leader, who had been silently observing me for several days. She told me “you have a very intense energy. I can tell that it has been a burden to you at times in your life.” She was right.
“Keep fire energy in your belly while you draw water energy up into your mind.”
I remember telling one therapist in my early 20s that it felt like my energy was “a firehose, flailing around and spraying wildly,” whose direction I did not have the strength to hold. As my former partner and I were beginning to realize our breakup, I told our couple’s therapist that I felt like I was using the people in my life as lightning rods to ground my energy.
Learning to gently feed, cool, and channel my inner fire is a lifelong process of self-confrontation.
The privilege to integrate
Integrating Icarus energy into my unfolding life is continually smoothed by my whiteness, my maleness, my tallness, my stable family life, my loving community of friends, and my access to wealth.
What does the prisoner do with Icarus energy? How does the farm worker become fugitive? I do not have the answers.
“In discontent, we meet the intriguing premise that home could be different than it is at the moment, and that reality is not as resolute or as stable as it appears. We are confronted with a crack in the wall of the familiar, a longing with no traceable lineage, a homesickness with neither medicine nor map, a memory of a place we do not know how to name, a feeling that “god” is captivatingly close by.”
– Báyò Akómoláfé
Further reading and listening:
Teens Turn to TikTok in Search of a Mental Health Diagnosis – Christina Caron (NYT)
The God of White Modernity is Tired - Báyò Akómoláfé
Oughtism – Báyò Akómoláfé
Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis – Edited by Stanislav Grof, M.D. and Christina Grof
Psychosynthesis: A Manual of Principles and Techniques – Roberto Assagioli
Coming Down to Earth – Báyò Akómoláfé