SCHIZOPHRENIA: A CURATIVE

CATASTROPHE?

Peter Higginson.

1404 words.
Published Journal of Critical Psychology, July 2006.
“It is justifiable to regard the term ‘sickness’ as pertaining not to the acute turmoil (of
schizophrenia) but to the pre-psychotic personality, standing as it does in need of
profound reorganisation.”

(John Weir Perry.) 1

In the medical model of schizophrenia it is assumed that the patient was once

well and has been struck by the onset of a genetic/biochemical malfunction resulting

in the distressing symptoms we are all familiar with: hearing voices, mental pain,

acting out, delusion, hallucination etc. The assumption is that before the illness the

patient functioned normally: holding down a job, maybe a marriage or in early onset

cases at least a family role. The illness represents a disaster for the patient because

she loses her occupational and family functioning and becomes disturbed and

distressed.

The onset of schizophrenia is seen as a step down into dysfunction and is conceived

as the mental equivalent of cancer- a disease to be cleared up so that the patient can

resume normal life.

There is a certain amount of medical nihilism, however, in assuming that

social functioning

is the only index of a healthy mind. The human personality has a spiritual and sensual

core

composed of complex sensation, aspiration to divine experience, intellectual

dynamics. We aspire

to know ourselves and to experience all the subtleties of sensational life from a core

1 John Weir Perry, quoted in Michael O’Callaghan, When the Dream Becomes Real: ch. 2,
www.global-vision.org/dream/dreamch2.html
3

we call our

soul. The soul is known through forms that connect the self to the energy of

everyday experience. These forms are emotional, spiritual and psychic as well as

having a more mysterious material

nature. They originate the questions ‘how does it feel?’ ‘Where am I?’ ‘What is the

truth of that?’

To that extent the soul is the core of our personal morality, politics and values and is

the location

of the higher purpose of our lives. But it is perfectly possible to function well in

society and be completely unaware that one’s soul is sick, that one’s personality is

deformed.

When a child’s core is attacked by family, neighbourhood and school bullying

such that

the soul’s forms get broken, the child can develop a false personality in which real

sensations and

values, the true sense of self, distort into a performative shell. The child learns to

mirror the

behaviour and values of those around her and loses touch with the broken feelings

which sink into

the unconscious and produce distortions in the body. The child is unaware of the

choked

throat, the distended shoulders, the compressed chest, the numb neck, the tight calves

and

as she grows into adulthood assumes that life is something of a disappointment since
she

can’t experience the rich figures of sensual and spiritual experience which make life

worth living. Soul is not a light shining in some formal darkness but has a radical

character: grainy and

at the same time mercurial. It connects experience and personality through the

pleasures

of bodily movement. Soul is not a category of light but an embodied energy. 2 A

mature

person can experience it as a delight in the flavour of things. But the abused person

has been

broken and mystified by her milieu and can only experience herself as lifeless and

numb, a victim

of parental, social and religious myths of what she is. She functions but she does not

feel. 3

It is against this unenviable predicament that the soul eventually revolts:

plunged into unconscious life and broken by systematic abuse it reasserts itself not as

pure shining light (the American New Age myth) but in the catastrophe of psychosis.

Psychosis is a disaster that the

medical people rush to treat, to set back where it came from like a broken bone, but a

psychosis contains precious split off material: the delicacies of inner life, the capacity

for drama, the heartbeat

of the passions, the bone and tissue of imagination. A psychosis is a natural explosion
2 Cf. “The word spirit itself conveys the meaning of breath, derived from the Latin spiritus. It clearly
denotes a dynamism that is invisible as air but capable of being powerful as wind. It ‘bloweth where it
listeth’ the Gospel says, suggesting that it has a will of its own.” John Weir Perry, Trials of the
Visionary Mind (State University of New York, Albany, 1999), p. 128.
3 “In my view the ‘disorder’ lies in the so-called pre-psychotic personality, that is, in the insufficient
emotional life of the individual up to the time of the first break, the emotional aspect having been
severely limited and inhibited.” John Weir Perry (1999), p. 19.
5

of material whose aim is to force us to face the lack of inner reality in the patient. It is

a catastrophe whose aim

is curative: the purpose is to regenerate the patient, but unfortunately the rebirth is

accompanied by much ‘bleeding’ and it is against this mess that we immediately react:

forcing the patient onto drugs that repeat the repression experienced in childhood.

There is, of course, a distressing confusion to

the symptoms and family life can become very stressful, hence we might wish to

‘clear things up’

as quickly as possible. However, there is a positive sub-structure to schizophrenia

which should

not be lost amongst all the pain. Schizophrenia is the drama of nature’s onslaught

upon the patient’s false front and the attack has a healing goal: “in certain psychoses

we may observe processes of positive disintegration … in the form of a shaping of a

richer personality, revealing intellectual,

moral and social values higher than those before the disease.” 4 The treatment of

schizophrenia as

a crisis of the personality will produce more positive outcomes than a simple counter-

attack upon

the symptoms.

Our treatment regimes should be informed by a knowledge of how systems

disintegrate in order to configure new forms. The old false-self system is ripped into

by schizophrenia so that the

4 K. Dabrowski, Personality Shaping through Positive Disintegration (Churchill, London, 1967),

p.92.
real self system can begin to emerge in a long painful struggle. The pre-psychotic

patient

may indeed be functioning well to all intents and purposes, but what is life where he

cannot

experience his personality? What, in short, is the purpose of all his functioning

without a sense of

self ? Psychosis attempts to engender this self in a shift into painful chaos.

Schizophrenics can get stuck in this chaos, it’s true, and some reproduce the savagery

that produced their condition, but as long as we hold tight to the belief that mental

illness represents the onset of curative forces in catastrophic form we might begin to

commission Clinics of Hope where we conceive mental

distress as an opportunity to become a feeling person. In our therapeutic work there

we can trust

the control centre of the soul which remembers exactly what it has endured and bears

its own solutions in a manner akin to other bio-physical systems:

If a dissipative structure is forced to retreat in its evolution … it does so along

the same
path which it has come…. This implies a primitive, holistic system memory
which appears already at the level of chemical reaction systems. The
system‘remembers’ the initial
conditions which made a particular development possible.We may say the
system is capable
of re-ligio, the linking backward to its own origin. 5

As the soul recovers from its abuse history it remembers what it has endured and can

re-direct the patient towards mature goals. There may arise seasoned new elements of

personality: insights, compassion, flexibility and humour together with the inevitable

mourning.

5 E. Jantsch, The Self- Organizing Universe (Pergamon, Oxford, 1980), p. 49.

7

The psyche knows what it needs- we have to learn the language of listening to it even

in

the most severe schizophrenic cases for there the riches of the soul, if recovered, will

be

the greatest. The faith we have to have in rescuing such material from the catastrophe

of psychosis

is captured in these remarkable thoughts of Carl Rogers:

So unfavourable have been the conditions in which (the mentally ill) have
developed that
their lives often seem abnormal, twisted, scarcely human. Yet, the directional
tendency in
them can be trusted. The clue to understanding their behaviour is that they are
striving to
move toward growth, toward becoming. To healthy persons the results may
seem bizarre
and futile, but they are life’s desperate attempt to become itself. This potent
constructive tendency is an underlying basis of the person-centred approach. 6

This ‘potent constructive tendency’ is the tendency of the soul to generate

reconstructive forms

even in its own disaster. The pre-psychotic personality is undoubtedly broken by the

onset of

schizophrenia but the purpose of schizophrenia is to force through a more realistic

personality. If

we must contain the aggressive element of that outbreak we must also strive to assist

in the development of the patient’s new reality. This is so that we make advances not

merely in medical

care but also for our wider society for the values we develop in the philosophy of

6 Carl Rogers, “The Foundations of a Person Centred Approach” in A Way of Being (Houghton, New
York, 1980), p.119.
health care

impact widely upon the world: “the sort of ideas we attend to, and the sort of ideas

we push into

the negligible background, govern our hopes, our fears, our control of behaviour. As

we think,

we live.” 7

7 A. N. Whitehead, Modes of Thought in Mel Thompson, Philosophy (Hodder, London, 1995), p. 205.