Perry trained at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich. In the early 1970s he was engaged in a programme sponsored by the US National Institute of Mental Health looking at innovative methods of handling schizophrenia. Under this programme Perry established a treatment centre in San Francisco called Diabasis which gave him an opportunity to test some his theories.
In his 1974 book The Far Side of Madness, Perry gave an unequivocal account of schizophrenia as a mystical experience and criticised conventional psychiatric approaches for their ‘interdiction against listening to the ‘patients’ nonrational concerns’.[64] Perry recounted how a relative with personal experience of psychosis had told him early in his career that the most essential requirement of somebody experiencing schizophrenic symptoms was to have another person listen to a description of the internal experience. Perry appears to have listened to his patients much more closely than other psychiatrists, and as a result he has found consistent patterns of mythological material in the symptoms.
But he hints at also having had the advantage of some first-hand experience of his own. He recounts some details of a conversation with a patient in which the woman described her descent into madness as being ‘a little like dying’. Perry recalls how he:
"leapt at this statement to assure her that dying was just the point, that it is what has to happen when there is an urgent need for change. She responded, ‘Have you been through all this yourself? I’ve never met anyone as wise as you about these things.’ I answered her question. I said, Yes, in a fashion I’d been through this, too; but my way was not in the involuntary experience of being overwhelmed by it as she was, but in intentionally dipping down into this same inner life to explore it; the inner experiences in that process were much the same, though."[65]
Perry was probably referring to his own experiences in psychoanalysis when he talked about 'dipping down' to the inner life. It is evident he believed that some schizophrenic symptoms can be experienced voluntarily and that this can be beneficial.
Perry believes that the human condition requires people to simultaneously live in two different dimensions. One is the familiar territory of the ego which deals in the mundane affairs of everyday life. The other is a reservoir containing ‘the great basic metaphors of the human experience’ through which a person’s emotions can engage with worldly matters that are not yet fully conscious.
"The latter is the mind into which one plummets when seized with madness. As Plato told us, it might be the divine frenzy of the seer or the revelation of the founder of religious forms, the inspiration of the artist or possession by a great love. And it might be a ‘schizophrenic’ episode."[66]
Perry theorised that schizophrenia manifests as a combination of the unconscious activating and the ego collapsing. This assessment fits closely with mystical practice, in which the mystical aspirant deliberately activates the unconscious through techniques such as word repetition and visualisations, while denying expression to the conscious self-identity (ego) through ascetic practices such as seclusion, celibacy and fasting.
The Far Side of Madness documents Perry’s findings after analysing in depth the psychic experiences of twelve patients over a twelve-year period. The book identifies consistent patterns of myth, ritual, messianism and mysticism in the schizophrenic experiences of his patients. According to Perry the origins of these patterns are to be found in the kingship rituals of ancient Mesopotamia: ‘the ceremonial death and renewal of the year and of the sacral king and his kingdom, out of which other religious forms have differentiated and evolved in the centuries since’.[67]
The essence of Perry’s theory is that the earliest civilisations required the invention of specific rituals and myths in order to give them collective guidance and continuity. These rituals and myths became buried in the collective unconscious of the original city-dwellers. After civilised culture was successfully launched in Mesopotamia, the people of other cultures, learning from the Mesopotamian model, absorbed in some osmotic manner, along with the urban way of life, the original Mesopotamian collective unconscious.
These rituals and myths now lie buried in the collective unconscious of all modern people, where they act as a common denominator to give coherence to social organisation based around life in cities. When the individual ego of a person collapses, often because the person has not been properly integrated into civic society, these archetypal myths and rituals flood into consciousness in an attempt to reinform the person. When this process is successful the effect is to reinvent the person’s individual ego so that it can find a role that is better adjusted to the requirements of civic society.
In a more recent interview, Perry made clear his approach to the treatment of schizophrenia. He said that he agreed with Jung’s belief that schizophrenia is not really amenable to psychiatric control (although Jung clearly came to believe that it could be treated with psychotherapy), and that for therapeutic purposes the best interpretation of the condition is that it is itself a spontaneous healing process. In his opinion the term sickness should only be applied to the pre-psychotic personality, which can be seen as standing in need of reorganisation.
"The way ‘schizophrenia’ unfolds is that, in a situation of personal crisis, all the psyche’s energy is sucked back out of the personal conscious area, into what we call the archetypal area. Mythic contents thus emerge from the deepest level of the psyche, in order to re-organise the Self. In so doing, the person feels himself withdrawing from the ordinary surroundings, and becomes quite isolated in this dream state … The whole schizophrenic turmoil is really a self-organising, healing experience. It’s like a molten state. Everything seems to be made of free energy, an inner free play of imagery through which the alienated psyche spontaneously re-organises itself—in such a way that the conscious ego is brought back into communication with the unconscious again."[68]
Perry claimed that, in the absence of psychiatric intervention, the acute phase of the schizophrenic experience normally only lasted six weeks. He argued this was confirmed by the biblical tradition of forty days in the wilderness. He said that in his experience this pattern was so universal that he had formed the opinion that chronic schizophrenia, in which a person has recurring crises over a lifetime, was socially constructed by intolerance encountered during the first acute phase.
Perry was surprised to discover that people experiencing these symptoms were usually more concerned with cultural and social issues than with their own personal affairs. He says that his Freudian training in medical school had not prepared him for this, and that when Jung had informed him about it he had at first been sceptical. But after he observed the phenomenon for himself he says it became the primary reason for developing his alternative methods of handling people in acute crisis: "Our new understanding shows that the process of re-connection to the unconscious, which these millions of people go through in a way that’s usually so very hazardous, isolated and uncreative, is nonetheless made up of the same stuff as seers, visionaries, cultural reformers and prophets go through."[69]
When traditional societies are overtaken by a crisis of confidence in their established cultural patterns, according to Perry, they are likely to produce messiahs, seers and prophets who have caught a glimpse of a new myth-form and who endeavour to transmit it to the people at large. If the new myth-form is successful it will give new direction and purpose to the society. Most modern societies are constantly changing and are therefore in constant crisis, at least in mythological terms.
To Perry, people in modern societies who manifest schizophrenic symptoms are struggling to fulfil the same function as the seers in traditional societies: ‘I am not suggesting that all persons in the "psychotic" form of visionary state should be considered prophets, but rather that the program of the visionary experience and its imagery is the same in well-known ‘prophets’ as in our little-known “patients” ’.[70]
To support this view he cites the observation that the specific nature of the opposing forces of good and evil, and the messianic function perceived by schizophrenic individuals, has been changing from one decade to another in accordance with the shifting cultural crisis of modern America. In the 1950s, for instance, the primary schizophrenic concern was with the preservation of democracy in the face of a challenge from communism. In the 1960s it was the preservation of peace against the constant threat of an enlargement of war. By the 1970s the focus had shifted dramatically to a concern about environmental issues and the need to defend the global ecology against destructive forces.
The therapeutic approach practised by Perry at Diabasis was to give emotional support while encouraging the person to plumb the depths of the experience. This is basically the opposite of the conventional psychiatric approach which seeks to abort the experience, usually by the application of drug treatment, as soon as possible. Perry says that in the fully supportive environment of Diabasis it was not uncommon for a person to emerge from the schizophrenic crisis prematurely. When this happened, he says, it was necessary to actually encourage the person to re-enter psychosis so as to complete the process. In regard to the success of his method, and indeed of the healing properties of schizophrenia itself, Perry claimed of his former patients that ‘the outcome of their stay at Diabasis was that their life after the episode was substantially more satisfying and fulfilling to them than it had been before!’[71]
Perry's observation that, without medical treatment, his patients could re-emerge from a psychological crisis with improved mental health is confirmed by research of an entirely different kind. Joseph Campbell has made similar observations about spiritual/mystical emergencies by analysing folk heroes in mythological traditions.
Next: Mythological Heroes and Schizophrenia
[64] John Weir Perry, The Far Side of Madness, p. 2.
[65] Ibid., p. 19.
[66] Ibid., p. 8.
[67] Ibid., p. 10.
[68] John Weir Perry, interview with Michael O’Callaghan, reproduced in Global Vision, 1992–1995, accessed 14 September 1997, available on-line at
http://www.ige.apc.org/glencree/dreamch2.html
[69] Ibid.
[70] John Weir Perry, Trials of a Visionary Mind: Spiritual Emergency and the Renewal Process, p. 58-9
[71] Ibid.