David Kessel

In this analysis, Fairbairn sees only the negative side of the problem, for the sufferer seeks redemption in the spiritualising of their ego, of their inner life. Stack Sullivan quotes Ferenczi in this respect: the sufferer is seen to

"permit anything to happen to his body, which has become to him as immaterial as the outer world. His whole narcissism retreats into the spiritual ego which is, so to speak, a citadel which still holds out, though outer and inner forts are lost".

But there is a need to get beyond the dimensions and characterisations of post-Freudian western psychoanalysis. As Christopher Caudwell put it in his study of Freud (Studies in a Dying Culture) -

"The censor, the ego, the super-ego, the id, the Oedipus complex, and the inhibition are mind deities, like the weather deities who inhabited Greek Olympus. Freud's picture of a struggle between eternal eros and eternal thanatos, between life and death instincts, between the reality principle and the pleasure principle, is only the eternal dualism of reflective barbarians, carried over by Christianity from Zoroastrianism, and now introjected by Freud into the human mind. It represents a real struggle but in terms of a western bourgeois myth."

Schizophrenia is dissociated sexuality, the inner war between the unconscious and the conscious. Splits between hate and love, action and dreams, force and tenderness, anger and consideration, fragment the sexuality, draining the body of libidinal association and the mind of carnal coherence - whence the characteristic masturbatory fantasy life or impotence of the sufferer.

I believe this dissociation occurs because of an addiction to a memory taking place at a time of personal crisis. This causes a cybernetic short-cut. This addiction may be the result of a long period or acute episode of thalamic disintegrity and insecurity consequent on the invasion by introjection of a powerful alien will, perhaps that of a parent in an impressionable child, or that of a dead pal at war. This introjection occurs together with the values and experiences of the immediate environment; so that a post-1945 experience in a soldiers child may include the introjection of the experience of the extermination camps as well as battles and the prevalent army bullshit.

Politics

At its best, the inner struggle of the schizophrenic to regain his or her individuality approaches the condition of civil war. For the alien will and the compensatory addiction have grained lives and biological forces of their own. But, using the cathexis of good inner intimate objects, the subject may make headway. This is an issue I will return to under treatment.

There is a vast amount I do not understand about the relationship of schizophrenia with time. However, together with the future block which Lidz writes about, there is a general speeding up of time which may be connected with the impatience of suppressed hunger.

The inner struggle of the schizophrenic helps to explain why he or she has the existential duty towards the community to communicating that I have spoken of, but, politically, such is the extent and depth of people's fear of the unknown world of the psyche and madness, that schizophrenics are -or could become - the modern Jews! Not only are we invalidated and demonised; often both at the same time, but we are subject to irrational and perhaps deliberate prejudice by the media. If someone with angina or, more commonly, alcoholism, murders somebody, their illness/disability is not mentioned; whereas if the murderer is schizophrenic it makes the headlines. This may or may not be deliberate. This prejudice is, perhaps, as much due to the projections of psychopathic, schizopid, 'normal' people as it is to ignorance.

I think it likely, especially given the fact that no one believes what we say, that various experiments are carried out on schizophrenics by MI5 - pharmacological, short wave radiation experiments and mind-policing and suiciding experiments.

Treatment

After the closure of the big asylums many the schizophrenics 'resettled' in the community' died within their first year - of cold, neglect, and dislocation - the inadequate, friendly simple schizophrenics; the emotional, devastated hebephrenics; the intense and wordy paranoids ... we are not told about them!

Any meaningful care has to fundamentally meet the chronic invalidation and sense of futility which mark this condition.

For this reason, the "Therapeutic Community' as pioneered by Sullivan, Maxwell Jones and others is essential. The Claybury psychiatrist Dennis Martin has written a very interesting account of such an experiment in the 1960s - Adventure in Psychiatry - An experiment which survived for several years despite opposition from other doctors and managers.

Finally, I would like to say that the writings of radicals, such as R.D. Laing and David Cooper, whilst truly great philosophically, are downright dangerous, in most cases, therapeutically. Appropriate minimal medication, and even, on occasions, ECT are an essential ingredient of modern treatment, as much as existential, non-Freudian therapy. Forward to the insulin of the mind.

David Kessel 11.1.2008