Rationality vs. Mysticism

I occasionally discuss, via email, various philosophical issues with a friend of mine. This friend, Rene, is highly intelligent and extraordinarily well-read. He is also blind, writing his doctoral thesis on blind memoir. He has an older brother diagnosed schizophrenic and so has an interest, not only in disability studies, but also in madness. The reasons for my interest should be plain from earlier posts. I find Rene a very interesting and helpful interlocutor in discussing these matters. I thought I would share with you an email I had written to him about madness. (I had hoped that his reply would be as interesting as they typically are but, in this case, his response was positive but quite brief).

***
Hi Rene. I thought I would share with you, if you don't mind me bothering you, some of my recent thoughts about schizophrenia.

The dominant attitude among psychiatrists and psychologists, it seems to me, is 'rational' and 'scientific'. Schizophrenia is an objective condition, probably a disease, that exists objectively out there in the world, independently of their observations of it. The role of psychiatry is to describe the symptoms of this 'illness', to try to determine its causes and to seek a cure - although it seems to me that today psychiatrists have basically given up on the idea that it can be cured and have more or less given up on the idea that they can work out its cause.

Over time, the definition or symptomology of schizophrenia has changed considerably. When Kraepelin coined the term "demential praecox" in the late nineteenth century, he categorized it in terms of loss of cognitive function and in impairment of memory. He does not mention voice hearing at all. In fact, I don't believe he even made reference to delusions or hallucinations. All of that came later. I don't know when voice-hearing became the key defining symptom of schizophrenia but I am fairly sure that it did not originate with Kraepelin – despite the fact that he is considered the father of schizophrenia.

It's not just that the definition of schizophrenia has fluctuated considerably over time - I think that the condition itself changes as a result of different theories or descriptions of it. I'll give an interesting example. A number of years ago, when I started researching schizophrenia, I read that one of the supposed symptoms was a diminishment of verbal fluency. When I wrote my film about Liz, I decided to attack this idea by making her as verbally fluent as I could - in fact I incorporated a running joke into the film of her using obscure and difficult words like "sciolist" and "tergiversate" that caused her considerable difficulty in being understood by others. I wrote the film in 2012. Early this year, 2016, there was an article in the paper that reported that schizophrenics tend to like using obscure or made-up words - it was almost as if someone had read my film and had based their understanding of schizophrenia on my film without realizing that I was just trying to paint a picture of an individual rather than of the whole group. In my experience, in fact, the verbal fluency of schizophrenics is on a continuum and this continuum is no different than that displayed by the population at large.

The implication of this story is, of course, that the idea of schizophrenia found in the collective consciousness and even among 'experts' is in a state of constant flux. This raises a serious question about whether the condition does, in fact, exist independently of a people's observations of it. I think that doctors, rather than basing their diagnoses on symptoms, label a patient 'schizophrenic' first and then look for symptoms to justify their diagnosis later.

I am going to pitch a couple of strange ideas to you now, if you don't mind. Let us suppose that within civilization there is in a constant tension between two opposed tendencies - the mystical and the rational. In a book I just read by Patrick Harpur the author calls these two world-views sometimes 'soul' and 'spirit' and sometimes 'Dyonisian' and 'Apollonic'. We live in a very rational and scientific age and anything that smacks of mysticism, phenomena such precognition and clairvoyance for instance, is excluded, expelled from society. Mystical experiences are labelled signs of a disease and those who experience them are treated as pariahs. The interaction between a schizophrenic and a psychiatrist is a battle between someone who in a former age might have become a tribal shaman rather than an invalid, who is a vessel for gods and daimons, and someone who could be considered a high priest of the modern rational world. But hyper-rationality itself contains the secret seed of irrationality, just as sometimes a mystical perspective may be the most rational perspective.

Plotinus and Jung, among many others, have argued that there is a world-soul. What we collectively believe about the world influences the world we live in and so we must all bear collective responsibility for the evils that occur in it. Descriptions of schizophrenia create the condition they ostensibly describe. This is a problem for me. I was thinking about this last night. If I want to change the way schizophrenics are treated, should I tell the world this truth - that the world is constructed of beliefs about it? Or should I invent an alternative quasi-rational theory of schizophrenia, one I don't really believe myself, but which might be more helpful to sufferers than the medical model? I don't know. I suspect, by the way, that the psychiatrists who invented the stress-vulnerability model took the second road.

Incidentally, although I believe that schizophrenia has a spiritual origin, I know that many illnesses and disabilities are simply organic. I just don't believe this true of schizophrenia. I am unsure where to draw the line between mind and body and so I am unsure to what extent most illnesses are mental and to what extent physical.

Anyway, I'll talk to you again on Sunday. I hope you are well.