“SCHIZOPHRENIA”

“Schizophrenia", not a name that names, but explains. The word “schizophrenia” is an answer to how this happens to the human in front of me. The answer is: “With split of mind” (schizo-phrenia) (Bleuler: ambivalence). The “this” remains nameless. It is not named. In this way we don’t really know what or which phenomenon we are talking about.

A naming name is “madness”, “mania” for the ancient. “Schizophrenia” is a scientific name, it names a process. [“Empathy” - an explaining name too! (From a speaker: the empathy in psychoanalysis is not a searching curiosity but “decoding of transference / counter transference, of why a person behaves to me in this way, or causes to me one or the other feeling.) Οther process-designating terms: “melancholia”, “transference”, the known as “defense mechanisms” etc]. The quested phenomenon that is explained by the term “schizophrenia” remains to the obscurity.

The “and” of the title of our conference “Phenomenology and Schizophrenia” is willing an overcome of these boundaries, that is only possible as diplopia: When we speak about “schizophrenia”, without the parallel translation “madness”, we wouldn’t know what we are talking about. Heidegger: Double books, scientist’s view:

Then for example the evaluation of a sculpture of a greek god in the Acropolis's Museum in the vacation of sixth month term, meaning away from the research, in reality is nothing more than the coincidence of a viewer’s brain process with the substitute of a brain process, the present product. But if someone reassures us that during vacation he definitely doesn’t mean it in this way, then he lives with double or triple books…

A relevant anecdote I heard yesterday:

As said by that nuclear scientist, when they were looking scornfully the horse shoe that he had on his lad’s door: “Oh, I don’t believe, of course, such things – but they say, whether you believe it or not, it brings luck!”.

Phenomenology, as wants to stand at the phenomena, needs names that don’t explain but name.

PHENOMENOLOGY

A more general comment: About phenomenology we heard many and different statements for the understanding and the interpretation of schizophrenia. What we have to remember is that, firstly, the understanding –when it is therapist’s personal case– meaning that he in a kind of an internal lab “understands” the other, has no meaning at all, except of the self-complacency of the understanding. Understanding has meaning only when it is shared in the communication, when it is a place of meeting between patient and therapist. And as long in the meeting with the schizophrenic as in psychotherapy in general, often happens, such an understanding and communication to be missing. And, in my opinion, it is of a great importance the misunderstanding to be acceptable and free to exist, and even to be encouraged and the patient to inhabit this misunderstanding, when it happens.

Conscience / Self… as starting points of phenomenological analyses.

[Wittgenstein] Substancializations of words from the use of language. Use of language: “I have got conscience of this thing”; substancialization: ‘the’ conscience. Accordingly the reflexive pronoun in the phrase “Take care of your self”, and the substancialized ‘self’. Similarly ‘the Ego’, ‘the unconscious’ etc. These terms do not derive from the use of language, so they have no meaning for the communication, they are non-sense, pseudo-problems.

KNOWLEDGE

Τhe difference between name and description on the one hand, and explanation on the other, is important in psychopathology and psychotherapy. In the end the point is in what extend things that concern us are approached only through knowledge (subject of which can also be “the emotion”), or if another approach is needed here – and at this point I see the meaning of phenomenology.

Kraus:

During the sequence of the development of delusional ideas and illusions, our patients were trying to translate these primal, prereflective and odd experiences into delusional experiences of technical content, in order to make plausible these primal experiences to their selves and others, to dress up with words something that can’t be transferred in our common language.

The “(delusional) aura”, its overcome and resolution, with the “new interpretation of the world and the person in the world” – “he cockcrowed”: literally: Words came out, the answer, a salto mortale took place, the ambiguous tranquility.

The apocalypse: salto mortale: the quest of an answer, favor to the answer, meaning without taking under consideration reality. Its only concern to tranquil from the worry of “aura”, from the question. The total fixation to knowledge, the “metallization and the abolition of the naturally self-evident.”

And something else about this kind of apocalypse. Probably it happens to everyday experience. Love? I thought it yesterday as I was reading some of Magiakofski’s verses:

And here/ that from a / cheap tavern,/ when this / agitation will cease / from the palate / to the stars / a word is launched / like gold-born comet. / It stretches / the tail / in one third of the sky, / it shines / and sparkles its feathers, / so the two lovers / stare the stars / through their / violet kiosk.

EMPATHY

Freud

Solipsism. Freud, 1915, Das Unbewusste:

Conscience transmits to each one of us only the knowledge of our psychic situations. The fact that another person has conscience is a conclusion that comes up analogically to the base of the perceived expressions and actions of this other person so to make clear to us this reaction of the other.

In this way, were referred, even today, by speakers’ expressions like “similarity of experiences”, “regenerative consonance”, “with my ego to transfer to the other’s ego”, “analogous similarities”.

Only through the solipsistic view the other is a stranger and it is needed the effectuation of empathy.

Heidegger: About the perception of other humans (Zollikon Seminars)

The common psychological theory that one perceives the other human through “empathy”, through “projection” of him self to the other, does not say anything because the presence of empathy and projection prerequisites the co-being with the other and the co-being of the other with me. Both already require that the other has been viewed as other human; otherwise, I would project to the vacant.

Wittgenstein:

The absurd of private language.

The last years came out from me mainly two ways of communication that are away from the area of solipsism and the need for empathy.

The first way:

When someone speaks to me, I see his talk in front of me. It is like he enters me in a scenery, or in a room and we co-walk around it. I am not in this way turned at him asking to enter his inner world, to feel empathy, but we are both focused to what is each time talked about and we both are out there, to the things. Then, if I notice something there and I say it, he can see it too. It is like I am talking through his mouth. If for example I show you in this room a spider on the opposite wall, and you turn your head, you will see it, you will agree with me.

The second way: From a speech of mine in Vienna two years and a half ago, where at a point I refer to my colleague and friend Dieter Förster:

Mr Förster. I see him. The phrase “I see him” means at the same time, he sees me, no matter if his look is turned towards me or not. He looks at me and his figure, like magic wand, touches me and immediately empties me and rhythms me to Förster. I am like a tree that on its stance the main winds of the area manifest them selves, or like as driver of my car I become part of the engine. Of course, I have known Mr. Förster since 35 years and I am a driver for about 50 years but familiarity does not mean anything. The same occurs about everything and everyone, as about the unknown lady that seats towards me. / When I meet Mr. Förster after a long time, I ask him how it goes, I narrate how it goes, and we might spend a couple of pleasant hours together. The other cannot be said, cannot be verbalized. It comes up through a sea of silence.

The two ways I implied, go together.

“APOCALYPSE” AS SURPRISE

I don’t share the perception the schizophrenic apocalypse as surprise, as “common experiential orientation of schizophrenia / of modern art”. The surprise of work of art belongs to the common world. To the schizophrenic the apocalypse, its firework, is like a dream, his dream and only. Brazilians: when one sees a dream, is a dream. When many see the same dream then something new happens. Maybe in this way changes the world, when it changes, in this way acts the work of art, when it acts, and marks an era. I would see the surprise there where one’s dream I recognize it as mine too.

The “foundation of schizophrenic irony”, the “flattening and the equal evaluation of everything” – Pre-Socratic, Zen, but here, as I said, dream of one. That is why the lack of communication.

PRIMARY DELIRIUM AND “OBJECTIFICATION OF EXISTENCE”

Kraus: “During the known as primary delirium, we observe…kind of an “objectification” of existence.” [“…their whole being has received features of being of Vorhandenheit like that of material things.”]

Heidegger writes somewhere that we, humans are “the objectified” (die Be-dingten) – and of course he doesn’t mean that we are in position of primary delirium. What is the difference?

We heard about the woman whose jealous divorced husband implanted electrodes and remote-controls her. She experiences it like a total invasion of an absolutely dominating relationship. Her self is like a private space that is intruded shamelessly, which has become an unprotected space. I would say, thus, that as much the self is conceived as such a closed space, such more she has to over-defend it and such more violently she is under intrusion. And as bigger and generalized the violence, the world becomes poorer, until it becomes a skeleton to the “objectification” that was referred.

Heidegger’s “objectified” is absolutely different. Here there is not a castle of the self and the need to protect it. The objectification now is a name/term for such an openness where the self is constituted exactly as response to things and not in the apposition of the subject to objects and the defense towards them. In this direction and more radically are the teachings of Pre-Socratics and Zen.