While I was listening to some of my co-workers conversing last friday, I started thinking about psychiatry, and then that made me think about Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Hawthorne seems to have thought that inner and necessarily unobservable states (they're inner) tend to manifest themselves in the outer world where they can be observed and interpreted. For examble, in The Scarlet Letter, Arthur Dimmesdale is secretly an adulterer, and this inner state manifests itself outwardly at the end of the book as a comet's tail or meteor trace (it's been a while since I read the book) in the shape of an "A" in the sky.

Psychiatrists apparently see the world in much the same way. One goes to the head-shrinkers exhibiting some distressing behaviors (outer state), and they deduce that one has some sort of chemical imbalance in one's brain (inner state) and prescribe pills to right things. They never actually check your brain chemistry; they just observe your outward behaviors.

I don't know: if Nathaniel Hawthorne were to come up to me today and tell me that he could solve my problems with a bottle of pills, I don't think that I'd take him up on it ... mainly because I'm scared shitless of zombies.