The philosopher Heidigger has argued that an individual's engagement with the world is tinctured, shaped, constituted by the mood in which an individual finds himself or herself. The moods that particularly interested Heidigger were anxiety and boredom. In today's post I want to describe another state of consciousness, a state which is, I believe, quite unusual, but which is very interesting. Technically it is known as 'derealization'. I hope by talking about it, I can excavate some deeper facts about the human condition. Just as Heidigger was able to gain metaphysical and ontological insights from the phenomenological study of his own consciousness when in a mood, I think it may be possible to express important 'truths' about an individual's situation in the world by describing and analyzing this peculiar state of consciousness.
'Derealization' is considered both a symptom of other neurological disorders and a disorder in itself. It is generally characterized as a feeling that the world has become somehow unreal. I have experienced it several times in my life. For instance, I remember it manifesting itself in mid 2007 when my mother and I travelled south from Auckland to Wanganui. At this time I had endured a psychotic episode that had persisted for several months. During this trip south, I developed the delusion that I was the star of a film directed by Peter Jackson. All of the people I saw on the road and in the cafes we visited were extras in this film – I was the only genuine person left in the world. If you know the film The Truman Show, dear reader, you may have some idea how I felt. I felt not only that I was under constant observation or monitoring but that everyone I saw was, in some way or another, dependent on me for their existence. It was a peculiar state of mind of course and I wonder if some recreational drugs can induce the same effect.
This was not an isolated occurrence of derealization. Around August 2009, for instance, I visited a beach in Point Chevalier with a social worker and again I experienced this peculiar state of mind. The beach didn't so much seem unreal as too real - all off my senses were elevated to a higher pitch and I was intensely aware of my own perceptions of this environment. I had never visited this beach before despite living in Auckland all my life and, consequently, I briefly entertained the delusion that the beach had not existed before I visited it, that it had been created only the day before. It was a beautiful beach - how could I never have known of it previously unless it had just been created? Once again I had the feeling that the external world was manifesting itself only for my benefit. Derealization, as you see, can easily segue into a type of solipsism. When in this state of mind, a person becomes overwhelmed by his own consciousness of the world; the idea that the world might exist independent of one, that it might carry on by itself, in some strange way recedes. It is a state of mind that can also easily arise during moments of extreme paranoia when the whole world, one feels, is involved in a conspiracy against one and, for this reason, I would characterize paranoia as a type of totalitarianism. Derealization, I would also argue, is the purest form of psychosis.
Derealization, like psychosis generally, is an organic response to severe psychological stress. I had a friend who spent eight months in a mental health ward in 2012. During this time she developed the delusion that there was a video camera in her eyeball and that her mental health team were watching the world through her eyes. She had even considered cutting out the offending eyeball to escape the feeling. This girl had obviously experienced a continuous feeling of derealization for a number of months while in hospital. I could sympathize with this friend because I had myself entertained the belief, in earlier episodes of my life, that my spectacles had a video camera in them. She had become hyper-aware of her own perceptions of the world and the video-camera delusion was something she had invented as an explanation for this heightened state of consciousness. To speak plainly, I believe that the occasions of derealization that my friend and I experienced were a response to the stress caused by psychiatric misdiagnosis. When it seems that the whole world believes bullshit about a person, it can cause the person to doubt the foundations of reality itself.
How to describe what depersonalization is like? In one's ordinary experience of the world, we take it for granted. We tacitly and automatically assume the world's independent existence, we assume that others have their own lives that have nothing to do with us, we assume that people and places and things are constituted by a dense, complex web of interrelationships, interrelationships in which we may not be involved and to which we do not usually give even a cursory thought. When derealization occurs, all of these assumptions fly out the window. The world presents itself instead now as pure phenomena. The world, we feel, has become conditional on our consciousness. My feeling in 2009 that the beach was just something 'made up' may have arisen from a need to feel some sense of control over my own situation and environment. The idea that the beach had previously existed but I had not known about it before was in a way threatening. It imperiled my sense of self. I preferred to believe instead that it had never existed before, rather than accept that I had simply been ignorant of its existence.
Strange as it may seem, derealization, although it may seem pathological, is a very philosophical mood to find oneself in. Consider the hoary old philosophical problem, "If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?" Bishop Berekely would say, "No". Berkeley did not believe in the existence of an external world; rather he thought all our perceptions were ideas in the mind of God. Earlier Descartes, having proven to his own satisfaction that he himself existed ("Cogito ergo sum"), provided an ontological argument for the existence of God and, only on the basis that God is omni-benevolent rather than omni-malevolent, was able to assert the idea that an external world exists, a thesis that would be otherwise problematic. Immanuel Kant argued that we have no perceptual access to "things-in-themselves" and Husserl's phenomenological method is founded on the operation known as "epoche" - a suspension of belief in the reality of perceived objects. Derealization, a state of mind that comes naturally to someone in the grips of psychosis, is deliberately cultivated by phenomenologists. Perhaps all these philosophers I mention have had some glancing acquaintance with madness, an acquaintance they themselves did not recognize as such? It is not impossible.
So what can one learn from this peculiar state of consciousness? I tend toward the idea that there is no single, objective reality – but I am no solipsist. I believe in the existence of other minds. Multiple worlds coexist side by side. Every individual inhabits, is the centre, of their own universe. But these different worlds overlap and it is within this overlap that discourse, conversation, occurs. It is in this space, the space that we all contest, that one should seek to make one's home.
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