As If The World Were Ending: The Meaning of the Schizophrenic Experience – Eugenio Borgna
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
(Note: I didn’t search for most of the original quotes in English, so I just translated them myself. They are going to differ from the original sources.)
The premises
[…] there is meaning in a book only if it falls within the realm of the unreachable and the impossible: like those indicated by Franz Kafka in a letter to Oskar Pollak: “If the book we are reading does not wake us up with a blow to the skull, what is the point of reading it? To make us happy, as you write? My God, we would be happy even without books, and the books that make us happy – we could, in any case, write them ourselves. But we need books that affect us like a misfortune that causes us deep pain, like the death of someone who was dearer to us than ourselves, like being cast out into the woods, far from all men, like suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. This, I believe.”
I. Schizophrenia in its cognitive and historical aspects
We are not marked, not even at the extreme boundaries of psychotic experience, by an inescapable fate: beyond our personal characteristics (the structure of our personality), we become what others, through their words and their silence, nurture within us (make of us). The meaning of a gesture and the importance of an allusion are dizzyingly amplified when confronted with the lights and shadows of the psychotic human condition; and one might (perhaps) even go so far as to assert that essential areas of psychotic “chronicity” (the expansion over time of a psychotic experience) are thrown wide open by the reification of the other-than-us: in the whirlwind of shattered hopes that our attitude induces (carries along with it). Within the context of the echoes that every psychotic experience reflects around itself: that’s where the meaning and the contradiction of every therapeutic strategy takes place.
[…] Certainly, the transformation of psychiatry from a naturalistic science into a human science cannot overlook the sense of solitude that, in the frozen silence of “normal” society, devours the most sensitive existences, ultimately turning into a condition of social isolation.
[…] As Alexander Mitscherlich stated, in a family where a psychotic experience arises, “no one can help but ask themselves whether they, too, bear some responsibility for this fatal event”; and further: “And where everyone refuses this responsibility, the victim ends up marginalized and forgotten in the seclusion of an asylum. The misery of their existence is thus excluded from the lives of their relatives or, rather, from the consciousness of society as a whole. And once again, the mechanism of projection intervenes: we do not examine the reasons for our rejection; we prefer to make these troublesome patients disappear behind the walls of a hospital.”
(These mechanisms of repression have not disappeared from public consciousness even today, not even within the framework of an anti-asylum psychiatry like the Italian one.)
[…]
The notion of utility (or “productivity”) as the absolute criterion for discriminating between a life worthy of being lived and the denial of any spiritual life in a schizophrenic existence that extends over time, has taken shape as the paradigm that allowed psychiatry (a certain kind of psychiatry) and the German political power (National Socialist) to deem legitimate – and subsequently carry out – the forced discharge of patients diagnosed with (chronic) schizophrenia from psychiatric hospitals and their extermination.
[…] Each of us desperately tries to erase and conceal the fractured image of madness: of schizophrenia, which constitutes its emblematic expression; and perhaps, as H. Burkhardt says: “In madness, there sometimes manifests that aspect of reality which man must not see in order to remain sane.”
II. The psychopathological and clinical image of schizophrenia
1. The music and the angels in the autre monde
(Elena’s story; I’m going to translate from French)
“Now i am in the other life, in which i sometimes even see the angels and i hear the music. But I feel that it’s not fair, that it’s also a bit like a world of madness; everything changes around you, too, you seem detached, distant from me… You still are Doctor M., but I see you as if from afar. I wouldn’t want to withdraw from real life, but something is driving me which is stronger than me. I split myself in two, I can hear myself… I couldn’t live life like that, and so I hide underground, in this other.”
[…]
“It’s true that in ’this world’ I’m closer to the soul, to Dante’s heaven, but we’re too small, too small (touches her forehead); I feel distant from life, I no longer have feelings; I feel detached from everything… I so much prefer the other world; you are there too, and there, with you, I can reach the heights of the soul. Here I am diminished. Why do I get tired of being dragged away, beaten down, pushed down? Explain to me how this ’thing’ happens, which drags me down and hides me from life…”
âś»
[…] “I don’t know if I will ever recover: I have been living in another dimension for too long. People, things, space: everything is different for me. […] I have too many conflicting thoughts inside me. For years, I kept up a façade, but if only you knew what was behind it… A whole world outside and another world inside.”
[…]
When anguish grows and becomes overwhelming, lived experiences (including hallucinatory ones) turn athematic and insubstantial: discourse dissolves in its contents, giving rise to a state of disorientation: of indeterminacy and an inability to decipher the meaning of reality. There are no longer any “voices” transmitting songs or engaging in dialogue […]: there is only stunned silence and desperate solitude.
[…]
“I can’t tell if I’m at the beginning or the end, but I can’t seem to be here and now. I’m completely confused: I can’t find a fixed point in anything. Whatever I hear or see sets off an endless chain of possible interpretations inside me; and nothing seems clear or simple anymore.”
[…]
“I’m crazy, I’ve gone mad, or maybe I just need to get married. […]”
[…] The psychotic metamorphosis is not limited to dragging with it a clinical symptomatology but alters the way of being-in-the-world, and of being-part of the world, for every patient. Within the horizon of a phenomenological intuition, so brilliantly outlined and described by Ludwig Binswanger, it is possible to re-cognize a schizophrenic reality in its immediacy and in its eidetic transparency. The other-from-us appears in its human reason for being and in its cracked but not broken intentionality; even though the area of enigma and the exhausted existential anguish remain fixed in their silence and in their ambiguous, torn suffering.
[…]
As Claudia’s psychotic experience suggests, one cannot help but be drawn into the fragility and shadowy nature of her existence, detached from the world and immersed in hallucinatory phantasmagorias. However, in confronting such an existence, I seem to glimpse highly sensitive antennas that begin to vibrate in inner silence, capturing the hint of a rejection or the fragile blossoming of a smile. The Rilkean mirrors, which pass by me dizzyingly and capture some of the infinite expressions of Claudia’s face, reflect the defenseless and helpless image of a young woman who shuts herself within the boundaries of an autistic condition, petrified by the onslaught of hallucinations, yet nonetheless broken by a meaningful glance and a meaningful encounter.
The phenomenological intuition leads us to this deep reason for schizophrenia: to this distance and this failed encounter, to this interhuman relationship that is consumed (burned) in the ardent impossibility of otherness. Putting aside every symptomatic element and encountering the other-than-us along the risky edge of a simple interhuman relationship, I am able to grasp the unmistakable figure of schizophrenia as a hopeless waiting for some form of salvation: Claudia’s schizophrenia stands before me with the flashing and blinding clarity of an absence-presence (an unreality-reality), a mirage that becomes an abrupt inner awareness.
Schizophrenia as a (seemingly) desolate land but carved by the experience of life and death. This life that regenerates in different phases, endowed (gifted) with meaning: within the furrow of a human possibility, in the sense of V.E. von Gebsattel. This death (this arcane experience of possible death) that inserts itself into the horizon of certain schizophrenias with the rapacious fascination of the ineffable that lies in the other side of life.
[…]
In the contents of Claudia’s hallucinations (these songs) and in the contents of her delusions (fragile and evanescent), one perceives a strange sweetness; although this is sometimes replaced by an aggressiveness that is both intense and undifferentiated: temporary, in any case. […] her face, softened by a smile and by ethereal, fleeting glances. After all, she loves music: she plays the piano and has a musical sensitivity that also shines through in the content (the themes) of her hallucinatory experiences.
[…]
Each psychotic existence, then, has its own originality: one that violently rebels against any attempt to crush it and strip it of meaning, following the line of a naturalistic conception of psychiatry. In the heartbreaking pain, which makes us relive (which makes me relive) Claudia’s psychotic existence, there hides this desperate appeal to understand it and to feel it as a constitutive reality of our shared world-of-life.
âś»
[…] Since there is no longer an other-than-the-self, with whom a contextual discourse based on intersubjectivity can be articulated, nothing remains for “who-is” in schizophrenia but this way of being (hallucinating) in the world: surrendering to the incalculable and unstoppable “power” of the “sound” (of the foreign “voice” petrified in its flight from any historicity) or of the broken word, which nonetheless still carries a meaning beyond any contradiction.
Listening, seeing, touching, and being-touched are different ways of communicating with the world and in the world; and they are ways that, in schizophrenia, radically transform in the vortex of an existence that becomes hallucinatory.
2. The metamorphosis of meanings and the end of the world
[…] This is one of the radical insights, the most shocking insight, of phenomenology: both philosophical phenomenology and phenomenology applied (to clinical practice). Beyond any philosophical discourse, every communication, every authentic dialogue (dia-logos), testifies to the circularity of these experiences that make the self and the world a single, radical unity of meanings. When the Stimmung (the mood) within each of us changes, the very physiognomy of the world changes too: the ways in which the world calls us and speaks to us also change. […]
As Ludwig Binswanger wrote, in joy the heart expands: the heart mysteriously opens; whereas in sadness the heart closes and contracts relentlessly. Referring to some splendid words by Goethe, he finally emphasizes how, in the anguish of the heart, both the world and the sky eclipse. (In the delirious Stimmung, this is particularly evident.)
[…]
In the context of a delirious experience, before it takes shape in its thematic consistency and descriptive figures, there is the overwhelming and precarious experience of Wahnstimmung (which can only be approximately translated to delirious mood). In this atmosphere, which is not yet delirium but prepares for it, every communication with the world becomes uncertain and problematic: in it, there arise sensorial and inter-personal structures immersed in a horizon of in-determinate and un-defined meaning; and within it, there is the premonition of a meaning (delirious) that cannot be grasped or thematized. The difference between the real and the imaginary, between word and sign, between gesture and meaning is erased: in the area of an extreme ambivalence that allows no choices in the spreading of anguish.
Phenomenologically, in this delirium that is forming but does not solidify as long as the delirious mood persists, the meanings of objects transform and plunge into a radical inconsistency. When it suddenly darkens like an eclipse over the horizon of experience, everything seems to sink into absolute insignificance: there is nothing but the experience of nothingness, which refers to Heidegger’s revolutionary discourse: to its significance that is not only existential (ontological) but also anthropological (psychological) […]
[…] “I must surely know what kind of brain I have… either I’m going to go insane or they’ve taken away my ability to integrate the whole; I saw the whole in pieces and I see everything in pieces”; then, describing the experiences felt during the night: “I felt strange, different, unrecognizable to myself… all things appeared twisted, sinister, frightening, like a dark atmosphere in which all lamentations fade… I spoke aloud to hear my own voice, but it was unrecognizable, sometimes loud and booming, sometimes as if it reached my ears like when it snows, as if through a wall of cotton… the dawn never came, I tried to move but I can’t say if I managed to reach the door… I’ve never felt such anguish… seeing everything distorted… but that’s not the right expression, I can’t find it, it was as if suddenly the dimensions of space had changed, and it crossed my mind that it was as if the world were ending…”
In the delirious mood, one perceives (simultaneously) this disintegration of the self and this fibrillation of the world in a reciprocal psychopathological escalation and within the context of a spreading estrangement. Things and people plunge into vortices of semantic fading from which no structured units of meaning emerge: ones with form; but rather, frayed and fragile meanings that flee into radical indistinction and boundless anguish.
The fading of the world
(Ed. Also see the movie Melancholia, 2011)
The experience of the delirious mood (Wahnstimmung) then spills over into that of the end of the world. The fleeting and ethereal meanings, inconsistent and a-thematic, (now) allude to an universe that allows fragmented and indicative signs of an impending and imminent catastrophe to resurface. In the experience of the end of the world (in the experience of a Wagnerian twilight of the gods), one lives, and dies, in an atmosphere of alienated insecurity that refers to the precariousness and in-definition of every relation of meaning, and that evokes in patients a perplexed and ambiguous attitude in its futile and torn questioning of a shattered and desolate world.
There are psychopathological and phenomenological differences between the two experiences: as Bruno Callieri states in another of his works, in the delirious mood “the relationships between thought contents are blurred and do not allow for the recognition of a graspable meaning”; while in the experience of the end of the world “the new meaning of the contents emerges immediately, as an expression of a sense, more or less unified, suddenly made aware.”
The strangeness of things, and their fading into unreadable and obscure symbolic figures, are captured in the words of Giovanna: a patient dragged into the vortex of a world that fades and then disappears into the track of an absolute anguish and despair in their incandescent intensity. The words become fragmented: scorched and burnt stubs to which still cling meanings oscillating in their vague symbolism. Giovanna’s words show how the initial psychotic experiences are immersed in this inexpressible anguish and how they can slip from the experience of a delirious mood to that of an elusive and unstoppable end of the world.
“I am terrified. I have terrible suffering. I am ethereal, I am inconsistent, I am dead, I feel cut into many parts. I am shattered by suffering. I am desperately alone. The things I see right now have a very particular symbolic meaning that I cannot decipher; but in them, there is the precise sign of an imminent end of the world.”
Only by immersing ourselves in the subjectivity of patients, and only by analogically comparing their experiences with our ways of feeling and reliving the emotional realities within us, is it possible to sense something of the psychological modifications that occur in the psychotic conditions of emerging delirium (of Wahnstimmung) and the end of the world: schizophrenic areas of ineffable metamorphosis of reality and the dissolution of boundaries between self and world: between subjectivity and intersubjectivity.
The schizophrenic experience of the end of the world is expressed in two different thematic modes: in the first, one relives the fading of the world: its terrifying annihilation in which things, and the meanings of things, fall apart, burning and leaving only rubble and absences of meaning: there is no longer a world of things and people, and no longer a subjectivity that inhabits the world; in the second, along with the fading (the disappearance of the old world), there accompanies the rebirth of a different world (from the one before): a new world in its features and in its donations of meaning. The emotional context in which the world is lived in its end (in its catastrophe) and in its regeneration, when this occurs, is not marked only by anguish and terror: there can also be (even) an emotional condition woven with apparent happiness and grace: a joy, of course fragile and fleeting; and there can be emotional conditions in which panic and happiness, despair and elation intertwine and become entangled, in a spiral of emotions, contradictory and lacerating in their intensity. (Of course, it is a joy continuously touched by an acute sadness: as Nietzsche says: “Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a mode of seizing upon happiness as though they would choke and strangle it, out of jealousy—ah, they know only too well that it will flee from them!”)
From the delirious mood, the delirium arises
When the delirious mood and the experience of the world’s end crumble and dissolve, the previous clinical condition (at times) reconstitutes itself; although the most frequent outcome leads to the emergence of frozen delusional formations, upon which anguish and restlessness run aground, gradually fading. Communication with others and with the world (the knowledge of others and of the world) changes in its modal aspects: the boundless anarchic abyss of indecipherable meanings is no longer there: the silent unknowability of things is no longer there; and the prevailing unreality is reinterpreted through meanings that reflect in the contents of the delusion, making the lake of darkness less obscure. The formal quality of semantic dissolution is radically compromised in the delirious mood and in the experience of the end of the world; whereas in delusion, the rupture of meaning recomposes itself within the framework of an internal organization and a structural component of the discourse: in the epiphany of the irrational.
In the dazzling depiction of acute schizophrenia, captured and described in the dizzying succession of its various thematic and formal modes of being, Klaus Conrad situates Wahnstimmung and the experience of the end of the world within the context of what he calls the trematic phase (fear and trembling, in a Kierkegaardian sense), with which the illness begins.
The phenomenology of delusion engages with this psychopathological experience insofar as it unfolds as a discourse that eludes common symptomatological definitions: those upon which clinical psychiatry relies. Within this universe of discourse, it is, in any case, necessary to choose between abstract (rationalistic) theorems and phenomenological (hermeneutic) intuitions, which, by setting aside all pre-established knowledge, grasp and describe the essence (the structural core) of the delusional experience. Beyond any symptomatological connotation, the delirium establishes itself with immediate clarity as a phenomenon rather than a symptom: as a human experience rather than a biological event.
[…]
[Delirious experiences] are not a psychopathological and clinical problem but an anthropological one.
In Minkowski’s psychopathological and phenomenological discourse, delusional interpretations are regarded as an expression of a dizzying (universal) expansion of the field of meanings, which brings with it the (psychotic) anarchy of meanings and the consequent dissolution of any internal hierarchy among them; this occurs within the context of an evanescence (a disappearance) of the inescapable categories of life: “chance”, “contingency”, and “fortuitous occurrence”. […]
Some additional considerations by Minkowski complete the ultimate meaning of this overflowing (interminable and boundless) expansion of the field of meanings in the phenomenological foundation of delusion.
“On the street, we encounter many passersby: they are simply passersby, and they do nothing but pass: it is the natural order of things. But it would be enough (I believe) for us to ask ourselves, about each of them, why, at this precise moment, one of them happens to be in our path to fall into a delusion of persecution. The passerby then loses his status as a mere passerby and becomes a man who deliberately positions himself there, in front of us.”
3. Desperation and the shadows of the night
[…] There is no psychotic experience that does not have to do with time; and, therefore, the catatonic (schizophrenic) experience too. […] in it, “the halt of the usual existential rhythm” and “the monstrous and viscous constriction of every path through time” expand to the point of reaching “that equally typical state of ’catatonic arrest’ where the very iteration of a rhythm or movement within the fixity of its becoming is identified with the annulment of the rhythm itself and its transformation into a ’chronological nothingness’: a duration lacking vigilant participation, or in which – if it exists – this participation is essentially dissociated.”
[…] the body is no longer experienced in its intentionality and freedom, but in its constraint and its deprivation of transcendence. One no longer “is” a lived-body (a meaningful body), but “has” a body-object (a body-thing); in the sense that the body as a living reality is gradually submerged, and devoured, by the body that becomes a thing.
This gives rise to an ever-deepening separation between the self and the body; the body becomes autonomous from the self and loses itself in the world: a thing of the world. There is no longer autonomy, nor freedom, in the gestural and motor aspect of a body that reifies itself. […]
In the catatonic experience, as a consequence of this corrosion of the lived body, the gesture is (thus) no longer a bearer of communication and transcendence; and speech no longer carries meaning.
4. The psychotic fragmentation of one’s experience
(Alessandra)
”I am indifferent to everything. My mind is divided into a thousand pieces that I try to put back together. Even though my mother is out there, this doesn’t change anything for me: I’ve already killed her inside me. I am a murderer: for me, nothing can change anymore. I think I see things on the walls: a little girl playing, for example, and I’m not sure that it isn’t true.”
[…]
“I don’t even know if I’ve eaten or not. I feel an insane urge to kill myself and to kill others: these things are, now, outside of me and I can’t do anything about it. I am no longer me, I am ten thousand scattered fragments, none of which recognize themselves as Alessandra, they are fragments of others. My anxiety and my anguish are paralyzed by something else: if I truly felt them, it would already be a relief. I don’t know if it’s me speaking, or if I am an echo of myself. I am a parody of what reality is.”
[…]
“I feel like I’m already finished. I don’t know what’s happening anymore, I no longer care about anything. My parents are alive, but I always see them as if I were seeing them from the dead. I feel like a survivor of myself. The thought of the life ahead of me scares me. I feel dead: I don’t know myself and I don’t want to get better because I’m afraid of reality. Every time I see healing approaching, I react this way. I don’t want to get better: it would be a disaster if you make me get better. I don’t know anything anymore, I don’t know why I want to kill myself, it’s an idea I’ve always had. I can’t get better: I must atone.”
[…] Alessandra says she is tempted by the desire to die as soon as possible: even though, she then expresses her fear in tears when faced with this (possible) eventuality. The anguish arises, dizzying and unstoppable, yet it eventually fades: leaving the desert of despair around her.
[…]
“I’ve surpassed my limits: the limits of my psyche. I had built myself a network of superstitions and I was fine; but I broke the rules. I destroyed myself inside and lost all my feelings. I no longer have an identity, I feel so confused, but I don’t know how much of this is true and how much depends on me. […]”
[…] But Alessandra, after being discharged, never contacted us again.
âś»
[…] The path on which Alessandra’s existence has set out, I don’t know where it leads: I don’t know if the shadow of death and dying still accompanies her, or if it dissolves into the light of a solidarity and an alterity rediscovered; but one can only continue, together, on this journey in search of one of those oases (expected and unexpected, chimerical and concrete) where suddenly the psychotic experience loses, or at least loses track of, its torments and its anguishes. Alessandra’s destination is not the same as Claudia’s: nor that of Margherita or Giovanna. The “voice” calls each of them to the places that are destined for them.
A patient like Alessandra relives herself in an estranged state (“I don’t know if it’s me speaking, or if I am an echo of myself”): torn apart from her history and the becoming of her person: without homeland and without a home. Her existence is annulled: the patient and her world no longer exist. What silence is more desolate than that of an existence immersed in death: in the death of the past and the death of the future? Certainly, within the rational horizon of knowledge, Alessandra knows she is the person she has historically been, but she no longer relives herself as the same: she feels not only profoundly changed and transformed but relives herself as deprived of all freedom and intentionality. There is no more atrocious dialectic than that expressed in the antinomy between being-already-dead and desiring death, which constitutes an essential element of Alessandra’s schizophrenic form of life: her words reveal this; and this psychotic way of living and dying is accompanied by an endless anguish: an anguish that becomes unbearable in its dizzying rapacity. But even the experience of being-already-immersed in death is nothing more than an expression of estrangement: when it assumes the intensity and radicality that have been observed in the patient. In such a psychotic form, this estrangement (this inflamed unknowability of one’s own self and body which are no longer even experienced as living anymore) spreads to extinguish any communication with personal and physical realities: it strips every meaning from one’s existence and from that of the others-than-onself.
âś»
[…] Certainly, in the obviousness and unproblematic nature of our daily life, we don’t even reflect on the fact that within us lies the immediate and undeniable experience of existing (we are, and we feel, alive beyond any doubt), of being separate and distinct from one another (we do not confuse ourselves, nor identify ourselves, with the people and things outside of us), of being free and autonomous in the manifestation of psychic acts (the thoughts, feelings, imaginations, and acts of will that arise within us belong to us: they are not of others), of being the same in the flow of time (each of us changes over the course of life, but the consciousness of a historical continuity that makes us be, and feel, the same person we were in different stages of life, does not change) and, finally, of not being split and divided, of not being “doubled,” in the unity of our (of one’s) self.
[…]
When we plunge into the vortex of the psychotic metamorphosis of existence, the consciousness of the self (our unproblematic and obvious mode of living in the world) radically transforms in its constitutive dimensions (in its structures)[…]
âś»
In Lord Chandos’s letter (ed. The Lord Chandos Letter, Hugo von Hofmannsthal) we read, among other things: “My case, in short, is this: I have completely lost the ability to think or speak coherently on any subject”; and: “Everything fell apart into parts, and the parts into other parts, and nothing could be embraced by a concept. The individual words floated around me; they coagulated into eyes that stared at me and into which I was forced to stare in turn; they are whirlpools that, looking at them, give me vertigo, that swirl incessantly and, crossing them, one reaches the void.” The fruitless search for elusive concepts that dissolve: ”I understood those concepts well: I saw the marvelous play of their relationships rising before me like splendid fountains, playing with golden spheres. I could whirl around them and observe their mutual play: but it was something that happened only between them, and the deepest, personal part of my thought remained excluded from their dance. Amid them, I was struck by a feeling of terrifying loneliness; I felt as though I were imprisoned in a garden with nothing but statues without eyes; and I fled once again into the open air.” A mysterious epiphany descends on things: transfiguring them. “A watering can, a harrow abandoned in the field, a dog in the sun, a poor cemetery, a cripple, a peasant’s cottage – all of these can suddenly become the vessel of my revelation. Each of these things, and the thousands of other similar things which the sight usually scans quickly with natural indifference, can, for me, at a certain moment which is not at all in my power to provoke, suddenly take on a noble and moving character, one that all words seem too poor to express it with.”
[…] Radicalizing even further his discourse on The Lord Chandos Letter and the psychological constitution of its protagonist, Hermann Broch states: ”[…]What manifests in this situation is not the condition of inner retreat, the state of man cast into nothingness; it is the condition of extreme powerlessness and thus of extreme disgust, nausea towards things because they are unreachable, nausea towards one’s own words that, due to a strident disharmony, no longer grasp the thing; nausea towards one’s own being, which has lost knowledge and consequently also the possibility of realizing itself.” In Hofmannsthal, we are not dealing with a deliberate imitation of schizophrenic writing but rather with the emergence (perhaps) of common structures of meaning and experience.
âś»
After all, trying to engage a psychotic patient in her psychological and human reality without knowing or intuiting that her time is not our time means maintaining an unbridgeable distance between the patient’s world and our own: it means losing the possibility of adapting our speech and gestures to the timing of her words and movements: within the framework of yet another (mutual) misunderstanding. Time, then, which in depression is stripped of its future dimension, plunging into the whirlpool of an overwhelming and unstoppable past; and which in schizophrenia is torn apart and shattered by the simultaneous (though asymmetrical) loss of both future and past, in their particulate erasure, in the survival of a present (the Augustinian present of the present) isolated and tormented. The abyss and the vertigo of a time that, like the schizophrenic time, has lost these two essential dimensions of temporality, bear witness to the radical existential metamorphosis that experiences like Alessandra’s one succumb to, devoured by schizophrenicity.
In Alessandra’s psychotic experience, there is no longer hope, no longer vital momentum; and this happens because there is no longer a future in her temporal existence. When death (the thought of death) has replaced life (when life itself becomes death), one lives in the desertification of hope and trust, which must nonetheless be recovered and saved. Not by carrying out suicide, but by living death as its inevitable consequence, Alessandra continues to die and continues to experience suicide as an elusive and enchanting possibility (ed. see Cioran and suicide as an ever-possible option, which paradoxically invites to postpone the act). Death as a rejection of the future, as a future already consumed and crumbled, is ultimately nothing but the metaphor (the image) of the transformation of time: of its dissolution.
The ways in which temporal modifications manifest in schizophrenia vary in each psychotic existence: in Alessandra, they take on an emblematic significance, marked by the thematic presence of death.
[…]
Every patient, when plunging into a schizophrenic type of life, longs for closeness, understanding, trust, and love; yet, at the same time, they cannot bear a closeness that might wound their inner self. Closeness then turns into oppression, and when it becomes even more intrusive, a state of excruciating anguish arises, along with a sharp awareness of being overwhelmed. Every possibility of dialogue withers, and a desperate escape into solitude and distance is reborn; an escape that only exacerbates the subjective feeling of abandonment and sadness.
III. The mysterious and creative image of schizophrenia
2. The psychotic experience is accompanied by a poetic experience
[…] As G.E. Morselli beautifully wrote: “the metamorphosis of the schizophrenic self is far from being a phenomenon of passive regressive automatism, or a mere psychogenic reactive consequence; the patient, despite enduring the weight of dissolution and psychogenic factors, constructs within it a form of life, just as the Eskimo builds an igloo – the snow hut – to protect themselves.”
The life story of Margherita
“If everything I experience is an illness, then after so many years, I know it is incurable; if it is not an illness, it means that everyone wishes me harm and is against me, and it is just as impossible to think of going on like this. In either case, it is better to end it.”
The poetic experience
( Excerpt from an untitled poem by Margherita )
And the days passed… A tangle of shrubs to be burned.
I kept watch on rainy, starless nights, and the daylight found me humble and defeated, my face dry from a tearless sorrow.
( Another untitled poem, complete )
You hit rock bottom when you become indifferent even to your own pain.
When you cling to death just to receive a little posthumous affection.
When there is nothing left to hear, nothing left to say, nothing left to see.
When a mouth speaks but you cannot hear its sounds.
When indifference tears you away from life into the swamps of nothingness.
When disgust is so overwhelming that it offers no explanations.
When pain falls silent, subdued, and annihilated by its own silence, it turns into something like pity.
When your arms are outstretched and you don’t know what to do with them.
When tears have thickened as if frozen in your eyes.
When that scream of despair has become voiceless, and you scream, scream, but no one hears you.
Yet you keep wasting your loyalty and wait through time with humility.
The creative discourse
Every creative (psychotic) experience nevertheless moves within the blatant antinomy between inner experience, which longs to find a means of expression, and the awareness of the radical difficulty to do so: the withering and drying up of gestures and words, which sink and float in the desolate autistic solitude. In facing this vortex of antinomies, in fleeing from them or transcending them, one of the most painful conditions of psychotic life is born.
The suggestion of voluntary death
The discourse on voluntary death, on suicide (on the meaning of suicide), holds infinitely complex and enigmatic aspects even within the realm of psychiatry. What areas of freedom (of decision) still remain open in the face of a voluntary death that overwhelms lives wounded by the icy winds of the déraison? To descend into the depths of interiority, into fractured subjectivities where suicide takes shape, is not only difficult but also reckless and harrowing. The mystery (the insurmountable solitude) that seals the near and distant instant of the final decision blocks any attempt at deciphering (at interpreting) that deludes itself into grasping something radical and meaningful. There are suicides that are planned, and there are suicides that unfold along the precipitous and unpredictable slope of instantaneity and suddenness. There are suicide attempts that redeem death (the death sought in the agonizing illusion that life, denied, may be fulfilled in death) and do not repeat because their failure is marked by a salvific catharsis, and there are suicide attempts that repeat themselves (fatal and unavoidable) until the end: closed off to any human hope and perhaps tied to a different hope that escapes us in its transcendence. We are left with nothing but to surrender to this atrocious whirlwind of ephemeral and unreadable interpretations.
[…]
[In depression, suicide arises following certain processes. In schizophrenia, however,] it seems to emerge (in particular) when the illness empties itself of its symptoms and moves, even, toward its resolution. What happens in these cases, or what can be thought about these cases? There are no certainties, of course: some patients plunge into the fatal suggestion of voluntary death after long years of illness, marked by remissions and relapses that have shaped their life story; suicide is thus experienced as an escape from an unbearable and lost situation. This is a suicide that arises in the wake of a resolute and inexorable decision; fueled by the awareness of the suffering endured during the acute crises. Any condition of isolation and inner solitude undoubtedly becomes a (possible) prelude to despair and the desperate decision: which, at times, overwhelms any (rigorous and dialectical) therapeutic strategy. The pharmacological suppression of symptoms, their disappearance, (sometimes) leaves behind a state of emotional emptiness and existential insignificance: one that only suicide fills.
Ellen West
[…] writes Binswanger: “The feast of death was nothing but the feast of the rebirth of her [the patient Ellen West’s] existence. However, when human existence can only be fulfilled through renunciation of life, existence becomes tragic existence.”
[…]
(Ellen West, who, by the way, wrote poetry – and in this, too, she reminds us of Margherita, […] at the age of twenty-one wrote in her diary: “Death is the greatest happiness in life, if not the only one. Without the hope of an end, existence would be unbearable. Only the certainty that the end must come, sooner or later, consoles me a little.”) (ed. A concept expressed in almost identical terms by Cioran.)
Suicide and time
When, as in Margherita’s case, the future becomes evanescent and fragile, and the past is nothing but the repetition of an endless suffering, suicide becomes a radical possibility. Every suicide is intertwined with time: it takes place in a time that has lost hope and in the desperate attempt to strip the future of its secret and unpredictability. In suicide, time and space merge and collapse into a bottomless abyss: just as in the vertigo of pain, about which Simone Weil writes marvelously: “A physical pain that reaches its extreme limit, devoid of any consolation because accompanied by complete moral despair, is the totality of time and space that, in just a few moments, enters the infinite expanse of a body and tears apart the soul.”
3. Dream and life
[Gérard de Nerval’s] psychotic crisis in 1841
[…]
“Confess! Confess! they shouted at me, just as they once did with sorcerers and heretics, and in the end, I decided to let myself be classified within an illness defined by doctors and indiscriminately labeled in medical dictionaries as either theomania or demonomania. By relying on the inherent meanings of these two definitions, science grants itself the right to make disappear or silence all the prophets and seers foretold in the Apocalypse; and I took solace in being one of them.”
The psychotic crises of 1853 and 1854
In the letter dated October 21, 1853, he writes to his father: ”[…] I will confess that the doctors, and this does not honor the art of Hippocrates, do not understand that living together with the sick ones is what makes one sick: especially in the case of mental or nervous illnesses”; […]
The split of the self
[…] Certainly, Gérard de Nerval’s creative struggle transcends any reductive clinical connotation, but the structures of his discourse, in any case, assist in the deeper understanding and interpretation of the enigmatic and lost meaning of the (psychotic) déraison, which is another form of reason. The lyrical and narrative parabola of Aurelia, nourished by this anguish and this tearing despair that is present in every psychotic experience, testifies once again to the depths of suffering and human and psychological fragility into which one falls when overwhelmed by the elusive winds of fate.
4. The schizophrenic language in the works of Antonin Artaud
The early works
( Texts written between 1925 and 1927; Artaud A., Le Pèse-Nerfs, in Au pays des Tarahumaras )
[…] “I have often found myself in a state of impossible absurdity, trying to make thought arise within me”; and again: “Do you know what suspended sensitivity is, this kind of terrifying vitality split in two, this point of necessary cohesion which the being no longer rises to, this threatening place, this disconcerting place?”
[…] “If only one could savor one’s own nothingness, if one could rest in one’s own nothingness, and this nothingness were not a kind of being but not quite death either. It is very hard not to exist anymore, to no longer be something.” […] “I am the one who has felt most acutely the disorientation of his own language in relation to thought. I am the one who has identified the moment of his most intimate, unsuspected disintegration. I lose myself in my thought really as one dreams, as one suddenly returns to one’s own thought. I am the one who knows the hiding places of loss.”
[…] “Had I ever known joy, had there ever been a sensation in the world that was not of anguish and irremissible despair; had I ever found myself in a state different from that crackling pain that pursued me every night? Was there perhaps something for me that was not at the door of agony, and could I at least come across a body, a single human body, that could escape my perpetual crucifixion?”
[…] In this anguish, there (perhaps) echoes the reflection of inner dissent and inner laceration, which the metaphor of anarchy (of dissociation and the loss of unity and identity of the self) carries with it. In the death of Elagabalus, the anguish of death, and the desire for death, are mirrored, which are present in Artaud: “I am stigmatized by an insistent death in which true death holds no terror for me.”
The night of the soul
[…] “For me, there is perpetual pain and the shadow, the night of the soul, and I have no voice to scream.”
The things that Maurice Blanchot says in another of his books on Antonin Artaud bring forth his tortured and shining image.
“What he says is of such intensity that we should not be able to bear it. Here speaks a pain that rejects all depth, all illusion and hope, but that in its rejection offers thought ’the ether of a new space.’ When we read those pages, we learn what we do not come to know: that the act of thinking can only be unsettling; what can be thought is, in thought, that which deviates from it and inexorably exhausts itself in it; that suffering and thinking are secretly linked, because if suffering, when it becomes extreme, destroys the ability to suffer, continually destroying before it, in time, the time in which it could be resumed and consumed as suffering, the same perhaps happens with thought”; and finally: “Strange connections. Does extreme thought and extreme suffering perhaps open the same horizon? Perhaps, in the end, to suffer is to think?”
Only in Simone Weil, in her extraordinary works on suffering and the unspeakable and dizzying abysses of suffering, can one perceive images (and experiences) of this radical depth.
“There is a suffering that is the backlash of the evil that has been done. A expiatory suffering. There is a suffering that is the shadow of the pure good that is desired. A redemptive suffering. There is also that which is linked to the blind play of necessity; even the redemptive and expiatory suffering are produced by this play, as chance is part of the irreducible nature of suffering.”
IV. Therapeutic models in schizophrenia
—Wanderer, who art thou? I see thee follow thy path without scorn, without love, with unfathomable eyes, wet and sad as a plummet which has returned to the light insatiated out of every depth—what did it seek down there?—with a bosom that never sighs, with lips that conceal their loathing, with a hand which only slowly grasps: who art thou? what hast thou done? Rest thee here: this place has hospitality for every one—refresh thyself! And whoever thou art, what is it that now pleases thee? What will serve to refresh thee? Only name it, whatever I have I offer thee! “To refresh me? To refresh me? Oh, thou prying one, what sayest thou! But give me, I pray thee—-” What? what? Speak out! “Another mask! A second mask!”
F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
The psychotic reality reflected in my inner world
[…]
This is the psychotic (schizophrenic) existence of Emilia, a young patient cracked by an indefinite and shadowy clinical phenomenology: to which delirious and hallucinatory experiences are foreign; but from which I am equally dragged into the antinomical whirlpool of a distance and a proximity that alternate with dizzying speed. […] Emilia’s anguish overflows with the force of a torrent in full flow, and I cannot escape it, but my anguish (also) arises from my inability to relate to this existence, sometimes still and sometimes shaken by a deep unease that distorts the lines of the face: from the surface of the face, one descends into the breaches of the depths of the soul, in the sense of Hofmannsthal’s moving discourse.
[…] Obviously, the world in which Emilia lives is not my world and is not the world in which each of us habitually lives and survives; […]
[…] I perceive every time, in Emilia, a face, young and no longer young, which suddenly opens in its dilemma-like transparency and closes in the elusive turn of an instant. A diaphanous and petrified image, luminous and shadowed, sung and pursued by an obstinate and impenetrable silence. I do not know, in the end, whether the experience that each of us has, subjectively, before the psychotic metamorphosis of existence can be defined as a condition of fascination: with its clear and incandescent trail that overwhelms me in its glacial intensity and metaphorical suggestion; akin to the song of mad (Kafkaesque) sirens on the edge of the abyss, suffocated by enchanted silence. In short, I wouldn’t know how to describe what happens in a (broken) dialogic relationship with a psychotic Lebenswelt: but something dark and significant, which I try to grasp in its meaning and resonance, unfolds in my subjectivity (in my inner world).
[…] Her anguish is (certainly) not my anguish, nor is it the depressive (melancholic) anguish that is more shouted and less fragmented, but I do not feel rejected or frozen by this anguish, which is not radically alien to our way of living. […] This infinitely sought-after, and infinitely lost encounter, can be glimpsed in our heart and in the heart of the other-than-us: on the ephemeral (visible and invisible) line of an image that burns and fades: marking our solitude and our desolation.
Psychotherapeutic possibilities in schizophrenia
([…] Then, stepping into the incandescent realm of psychotherapy, Heidegger says that from a psychotherapy aimed at doing something simply technical, “a healthier person will never emerge”; and this is because, in it, “man is definitively excluded: at best, it could result in a polished object.”)
The therapeutic community replaces the family
In psychiatry, and not only in psychiatry, generalizations are not possible: there are “therapeutic” families, which constitute an essential and ineliminable condition for any psychotherapeutic and sociotherapeutic strategy, and there are “pathogenic” (anti-therapeutic) families, which empty of meaning any possible curative Einstellung and cannot fail to be integrated, or replaced (for varying periods of time), by therapeutic communities: defined as communities in which the radical and decisive therapeutic element is based on the establishment of interpersonal and social models: without excluding other additional and integrative models.
Conclusions
[…] the beautiful things written by Marina Cvetaeva, in which the impossibility of living eventually led to voluntary death.
“I fear that misfortune (fate) is within me: I do not love, I do not know how to love anything truly, to the core, that is without end – except my soul, that is to say anguish, which overflows and spreads across the earth and beyond its borders. In everything – in every person and feeling – I am tight, as in every room: a den or a castle. I cannot live, that is, I cannot endure, I do not know how to live through the days, and every day I live outside of myself. It is an incurable disease, and it is called – soul. (ed. self-awareness)”
This struggle to live, and this feeling of not truly living (this soul-wrenching illness), runs through many letters by Marina Cvetaeva: testifying to an anguish and a desolation, a solitude and a despair, that filter through dazzling and unspeakable metaphors, and which, in referring to the infinite deserts and the shadows that fall over the land of the soul, seem to be experiences common to both psychotic and non-psychotic human conditions: beyond any antinomy and beyond any difference.