Schizophrenics: Introduction

We introduce here not the typical schizophrenic known to the psychiatric community, but rather the everyday schizophrenic who by force of culture has severed their link to the external world by understanding, incorrectly, that their subjective experience of reality is somehow distinct from reality itself. Schizophrenics like Lyn Hejeinian, who in rejecting closure, create a new closure, closing her interior off from the exterior world. In dissecting the nature of this fallacy, the fallacious deductions that result from it as a lens, and the impoverished world it helps engender, we will be taking a look at Deleuze and Guatarri's Capitalism and Schizophrenia, RD Laing's The Divided Self, William Blake's prophetic texts, as well as contested authors such as Lyn Hejeinian who like all fabulous liars, opposes what she sustains. It will be here that we redefine the normal state of mankind as schizophrenic, careful not to include those who suffer from psychotic pathology. No, this schizophrenia is of an altogether more banal nature and is tantamount to dividing oneself from one's own perspective, for the world as we perceive it but a crystallization of our perceptions, and for most of us, is reduced to the mean.

It is therefore the aim of this text to point out first of all that the consensus delusion of what constitutes reality is forged in a scientific looking glass of psychiatric reductionism. More often than not, the theoretical underpinnings of psychiatry are based on studies of the brain, and this too is a reductive dismissal that the entire body is responsible for the internal states of the individual, and while inquiries into the brain may often lead to useful discoveries, patients are not walking brains, anymore than they are chemical imbalances. In treating their chemicals the underlying causes that resulted in their pathology are not considered or considered the realm of the therapist, who is more often than not a social worker who has taken a couple classes on abnormal psychology and is about qualified to cure the patient as I am to perform neuro-surgery. But the appearance that something is being done is often more important than the actuality of doing something, so patients are often left feeling hopeless that their malady has no cure.

In fact, it is this nihilism, this hopelessness, that is at the root of some depression, and that depression is treatable with pills, but the underlying hopelessness remains, for if I am my chemicals, then I am no one after all, a biological effect of a careless god.

The speculum is thus the issue. What you see is truly what you get, and the schizoid model of the self, which deems that we are separate from our environment, both hurts and helps us, depending upon the quality of that environment. The standardization of perspective however, has caused us to privilege one while making a disease of the other, and this why we've taken up this inquiry, for it is a delusion that we are separate things perceiving an objective reality, and in truth when we make this distinction, we are dividing ourselves from our own perspective, and thus projecting the psychic contents of our own experiences onto an illusion of objectivity.

I am not a body encapsulated at the fringes of my skin, rather, I am all that which is in range of my eyes, the clicking of the keyboard as I hear. I do not think from a hemisphere behind my eyes, I perceive with the entirety of my body, that is as a gestalt.

In order to overcome our denatured reality, we must relearn our mind's relationship to the body, which is to say, unlearn that there is a distinction between mind and body, for this is truly and illusion conjured perhaps by an evil magician ages ago to imprison men and women in a casing of flesh.