What Sass picks up in modern culture and
identifies with schizophrenia may in fact be the overreliance on the left
hemisphere in the West, which I believe has accelerated in the last hundred
years. In fact Sass himself discusses this possibility (along with several
others) in an appendix called ‘Neurobiological Considerations’.
Although the phenomenology of schizophrenia comprises an array of symptoms and experiences, these relate to a group of core disturbances in the relationship between the self and the world. Perhaps the single most important one is what Sass calls hyperconsciousness. (McGilchrist 2009, kindle location 10330-10334)
Associated with this is what Sass calls a loss of ‘ipseity’, a loss in other words of the pre-reflective, grounding sense of the self. The self has to be constructed ‘after the fact’ from the products of observation, and its very existence comes into doubt. (ibid, kindle location 10347-10350)
There is a veering between two apparently
opposite positions which are in reality aspects of the same position:
omnipotence and impotence. Either there is no self; or all that the observing
eye sees is in fact part of the self, with the corollary that there is no world
apart from the self. Whether there is no self, or everything is embraced in the
self, the result is the same, since both conditions lack the normal sense we
have of ourselves as defined by an awareness that there exists something apart
from ourselves. (McGilchrist 2009, kindle location 10354-10358) (now, man, you
are talking about narcissism)
Sass compares Antonin Artaud (who himself
suffered from schizophrenia): ‘I can’t even find anything that would correspond
to feelings’, and suggests that the ‘theatre of cruelty’, which Artaud
originated, was a response to this devitalised condition. ‘I wanted a theatre’,
he told Anaïs Nin, ‘that would be like a shock treatment, galvanise, shock
people into feeling.’ (McGilchrist 2009, kindle location 10389-10392) (what is
the RH doing, when LH fragments? shall we say, the craziness of the
modernist art presents exactly the desperation of RH to restore sanity, in the
fragmentation caused by overwhelming LH?)
Dear Louis and Iain,
Madness does not
equal to schizophrenia.
Madness is out
there, not in the asylum only, or, shall we say, the former is more
interesting, as an example, in terms of what we’ve been made of, or, how we’ve
been screwed up, by the modernity.
Have a nice life.
Best wishes
KC
