Madness Radio: Art and Schizophrenia Louis Sass

I agree it is a phenomenon but that it is a societal phenomenon of 'splitting' and not one neatly contained within the individual. Society creates a neat dividing line between the sane and the insane, the 'normal' and the 'abnormal.' That is a comforting illusion for the group considering itself to be the sane ones but it is not reality. It is far too neat for that. If seen differently; let's say as an effect on the individual who gets labelled 'abnormal' rather than as a self contained cause rising up from within a defective human being, then what is seen, heard and understood will take on a whole new meaning which may well shock a lot of people. Spend a little time thinking about that.
It is also not hard to accept the labelling system when it is applied to others and not to oneself. The labels are not just descriptions of something; they are definitions of 'defective' people; people who get treated very differently by a society that defines them that way.
I suggest the problem really lies in the 'them and us' illusion which these defining labels tend to promote and support.
“Normal' people have a problem understanding the “abnormal” because a line is drawn, separating others from the possibility of understanding. What is normal is to self define. What is abnormal is to be defined by others and told we must accept that. Would a psychiatrist accept that? The 'difference' then becomes expressed like this:
Do 'we' isolate because we are 'different'?
Or
Does society isolate 'us' because it has been taught and has accepted to see us as 'different.'

Do 'we withdraw' from society?
or
Does society push out those it perceives as 'different, abnormal' and not like 'us'?
Something to consider if you look at it from the other point of view.
I believe this is much more a sociology problem than an individual psychology problem and NOT a bio med problem at all. I also believe it is possible to understand it if looked at from the viewpoint of attribution psychology.

As for the voices; though they are a part of the inner experience and the inner dialogue often like being awake in a dream or a nightmare, they are ALSO a part of the external experience with real people in our all too real concrete lives. All the 'normal' people would experience the same thing if under enough pressure and/or the right circumstances to trigger it. Seeing others as fundamentally different allows those who feel 'normal' to feel safe and secure in the illusory knowledge that it could never happen to them as THEY aren't sick. But then, that is what many of us 'defectives' claim too; isn't it?

While I find the French post-structuralists', especially Lacan's and Kristeva's, approach in some regard very interesting, for instance Kristeva's concept of poetic vs. psychotic language (art vs. "psychosis"), I think, it's important to remember which forms the basis for this approach, which is Freud's Oedipal theory. Which in it's turn, indeed, deprives "psychosis" of meaning beyond being an attempt to repair individual, psychological development gone haywire. Here we go again: it's all in the individual's brain, and it doesn't really matter, whether "brain" then is interpreted literally, as biopsychiatry does interpret it, or, as psychoanalysis interprets it, as the mind. A kinship, I found very well illustrated by Adrian Johnston's review of Alphonse De Waelhens' and Wilfried Ver Eecke's Phenomology & Lacan on Schizophrenia, After the Decade of the Brain, http://www.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?id=1270&type=book&cn=7

Johnston doesn't see any discrepancy between a Lacanian/psychoanalytical and a biopsychiatric view of "schizophrenia". According to him, the Lacanian "foreclosure" of the "Nom du Père" (Name of the Father; with its full acceptance being the precondition for the individual to enter the Symbolic, i.e. being able to communicate understandably), that characterizes "psychosis", thus could be explained by imbalances in brain chemistry...

Personally, and after having been into French post-modern psychoanalytic theory for about a decade, I had a strong feeling that something decisive was missing from it to make it explain, among other things, the loss of significance, or the disconnection of the signifier from the signified, that did play a huge role every time I experienced crisis. I found the "missing link" in Bateson's concept of the double bind. Of course, words lose their meaning, when they're never meant to mean what they mean... Or, in Lacanian terms, of course the Name of the Father is foreclosed when the Game isn't played by the rules.

I think, Patricia is right. A lot of the isolation is society isolating "us". Nevertheless, I also withdrew, actively, from society. from culture, from the "Name of the Father", that I had experienced as utterly treacherous (traumatizing). And while I felt extremely isolated and alienated from the world (culture), I also at the same time felt completely one with what I today would call (my inner true) nature, or life (in a spiritual understanding).

The idea that the split would be exclusively a "schizophrenic" phenomenon, presupposes that human beings are their culture. Louis Sass in fact at one point during the interview says that shaking hands would be a natural thing to do (for "normal" people). It isn't. It's a cultural thing to do. Anyhow, my take on this is that we have a culture, but are (our) nature, which renders the split a phenomenon common to all human beings (cf. the Fall of Man). Art and "psychosis" in my opinion are two different ways of dealing with the experience of the split. Art tries to deal with it consciously, "psychosis" unconsciously.

i really appreciate both of these thoughtful comments. definitely a central problem with sass´s approach is that he approaches the mind individually. so you get experience ´within´ a person, and whether its the brain or the mind or the psyche, it doesnt see what happens as fundamentally relationships -- with each other, with context and communication, with the broader society. mind for me isn´t within an individual, and to see it as such opens you to a pathologizing us separate from them frame. sass also uses diagnostic categories in too fixed a way, though his view of how experiences are on a continuum would point to going beyond the diagnostic framework. still i really appreciate his attention to detail of experience, given how little phenomenological approaches are used today, and think that his discussion of art and literature points in extremely interesting directions. when i get past the limitations of psychology and philosophies of mind and take what´s useful and leave the rest i´ve discovered there´s a lot of intelligent and insightful to be found in many strains of psychology.-- will

It is a move in the right direction Will but we must move farther and I believe it is going to be 'us' and not'them' who are ultimately going to integrate the 'them and us' problem.
P.