¶ Responsibility
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Index Entry
Responsibility:
“”… Up to the nineteenth century, or the beginning of the twentieth century, what we could smell, see, hear, and touch was what he meant by reality. I think to many in our society today that is still what you mean by reality. Freud and Mesmer shook society’s concept of this kind of reality, because man up to this time had been saying, because that is reality, every human being knows just what he is doing. If he is of sound mind, when he is awake, then he knows just what he is doing. Therefore, he must be entirely responsible for his every act. So as we developed laws, we made man utterly responsible for his every act. But Freud and Mesmer, through their hypnotism, were able to disclose behaviors of human beings for which the human being was not responsible at all. So this shook the idea of the courts, and we have had to have psychiatrists and others come in to bring you a reconsideration of the responsibilities of human beings. Now, what has really not been paid attention to in our society, again because we are all so specialized, is that there is almost no tendency to look at the whole and to really understand the whole."
