Campbell has written extensively on the subject of mythology and he became interested in schizophrenia after he read some of Perry's theories. Campbell has recounted how he was asked to give a series of lectures on schizophrenia at the Esalen Institute in 1968.[72] When he told the organiser that he knew nothing about schizophrenia, he was put in contact with Perry in order to learn. Perry sent him a paper he had published in 1962, and upon reading it Campbell said he discovered ‘that the imagery of schizophrenic fantasy perfectly matches that of the mythological hero journey, which I had outlined and elucidated, back in 1949 in the Hero with a Thousand Faces’.[73]
Campbell was then engaged in a vast mythological project involving a cross-cultural comparative study of mythology.[74] He had paid no attention in researching this project to specific problems of psychopathology or personalised mystical visions, and was mainly concerned with analysing ideas he found to be common to all mythologies:
"According to my thinking, they were the universal, archetypal, psychologically based symbolic themes and motifs of all traditional mythologies; and now from this paper of Dr. Perry I was learning that the same symbolic figures arise spontaneously from the broken-off, tortured state of mind of modern individuals suffering from a complete schizophrenic breakdown."[75]
The usual pattern of the mythological hero journey uncovered by Campbell in his own research involved three stages: separation, initiation and return. An individual separates from the established social order and goes on a long inward and backward journey, deep into the psyche, and is confronted there by chaotic and terrifying forces. If the person is fortunate a centre of harmony is found, and new courage discovered, before a return journey of new birth is completed:
"A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder; fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow men."[76]
Campbell drew an analogy between schizophrenia and the mythological mystical journey which he had been researching by comparing the fortunes of two divers, one who can swim, and one who cannot: ‘The mystic, endowed by native talents for this sort of thing and following, stage by stage, the instructions of a master, enters the waters and finds he can swim; whereas the schizophrenic, unprepared, unguided, and ungifted, has fallen or has intentionally plunged, and is drowning.’[77]
It is not uncommon for theorists to position mystical experience in the context of some kind of evolutionary process. As has been discussed above, Bucke had a theory about an evolutionary potential he called cosmic consciousness. Perry also developed an evolutionary theory, of sorts. In his book Roots of Renewal in Myth and Madness,[78] Perry elaborated on the themes he had developed in his earlier works and articulated a theory about the evolution of the Semitic/Judeo/Christian religious ideas in which he found most of his patients to be drowning.
Perry argued that there is indeed an evolutionary process underway involving the faculties of consciousness of individual participants. His view is that this process was initiated by a breakthrough in the development of human consciousness which occurred with the establishment of the first city states in ancient Mesopotamia. The specialised social roles that became necessary with the establishment of civilisation required new forms of social organisation that fundamentally altered the way in which individual people related to one another and also the way they related to life in general. Life in cities required clearly defined structures of social authority. Hierarchies of power emerged from these conditions, which in turn led to individual identity being largely vested in the social ranking of the individual concerned.
The collective and individual focus on status at first removed ordinary people from the possibility of finding a solution to the problem of personal mortality. All power was at first transferred upwards to the King and, in the early centuries of these ancient city-states, the King was thought to be the only person capable of fulfilling the evolutionary potential by transcending the problem of death. The King was so powerful he was given divine status so that he could achieve this goal.
However, as time progressed the evolutionary potential slowly percolated down through the layers of social class, eventually passing through the aristocracy and down to the mass of people, in what Perry refers to as a ‘democratisation work of messianic visions’.[79] Whereas the image containing the evolutionary message had at first been confined to the personification of a divine King, remote and aloof from ordinary people, the concept of a messiah, which eventually evolved as the symbol of transcendence, was a model for everyone to emulate.
Perry’s theory is that the course of acute schizophrenic imagery sequentially follows the developments of the Semitic/Judeo/Christian religious traditions. These developments have been laid down, layer upon layer, in the collective unconscious so that the schizophrenic individual, who is working through this storehouse, encounters them in the order in which they were filed:
"It is my thesis that the visionary states we call psychosis recapitulate this entire history, as another instance of ontogeny repeating phylogeny. The renewal process attempts to evolve a new level of consciousness in the individual, and to accomplish this, induces an identification first with the mythology of sacral kingship, then with that of messianic democratisation, and finally reaches a vision of the potential spiritual consciousness for life in the world society of today."[80]
It is apparent that Perry's theoretical framework is seriously flawed. This is because it does not explain the nature of visionary states in people who do not have this Judeo/Christian background. A Chinese person with a Confucian background, for instance, is not likely to encounter this same sequence of archetypal material. Therefore, even if Perry's theory does correctly describe the pattern of psychotic experiences for people with Judeo/Christian backgrounds it still only deals with relatively superficial aspects of these experiences. It doesn't penetrate deeply enough to identify a denominator that is common to people of all religious and cultural backgrounds.
Perry's theoretical weakness is reminiscent of the problem with Laing's work and probably originates with same inadequacies in professional training. As with Laing, it is apparent that Perry recognised there were people undergoing spiritual/mystical emergencies who were mistakenly thought to have 'diseased' minds. He was prepared to listen carefully to what these people had to say about their inner experiences, he sympathised with them, and was certainly better for them than any conventional drug-treating psychiatrist would have been. His patients were lucky to have him. But, as with Laing, he was trained in medicine and not in the appropriate body knowledge associated with mysticism. Although his psychiatric training included a Jungian component, which apparently put him on the right track, it still proved to be an insufficient grounding on which to build a sound theoretical framework to properly explain what he observed.
Next: Summary of the Mystical Problem in Schizophrenia
[72] Joseph Campbell, ‘Schizophrenia—the Inward Journey’, in Myths to Live By, p. 201.
[73] Ibid., p. 202; Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces.
[74] Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God (4 volumes), Souvenir Press, London, 1973–1974.
[75] Campbell, ‘Schizophrenia—the Inward Journey’, op. cit., p. 202.
[76] Ibid., pp. 202–3.
[77] Ibid., p. 209.
[78] John Weir Perry, Roots of Renewal in Myth and Madness: the meaning of psychotic episodes.
[79] Ibid., p. 195.
[80] Ibid.