Status Updates From The Divided Self: An Existe...

The schizophrenic is desperate, is simply without hope. I have never known a schizophrenic who could say he was loved, as a man, by God the Father or by another man. He either is God, or the Devil, or in hell, estranged from God. When someone says he is an unreal man or that he is dead, in all seriousness, expressing in radical terms the stark truth of his existence as he experiences it, that is - insanity.

We shall suggest that it was on the basis of this exquisite vulnerability that the unreal man became so adept at self-concealment He learnt to cry when he was amused, and to smile when he was sad. He frowned his approval, and applauded his displeasure. 'All that you can see is not me,' he says to himself.

The person whom we call 'schizoid' feels both more exposed, more vulnerable to others than we do, and more isolated. Thus a schizophrenic may say that he is made of glass, of such transparency and fragility that a look directed at him splinters him to bits and penetrates straight through him. We may suppose that precisely as such he experi-ences himself.

We have our secrets and our needs to confess. We may remember how, in childhood, adults at first were able to look right through us, and into us, and what an accomplishment it was when we, in fear and trembling, could tell our first lie, and make, for ourselves, the discovery that we are irredeemably alone in certain respects, and know that within the territory of ourselves there can be only our footprints.

His whole life has been torn between his desire to reveal him-self and his desire to conceal himself. We all share this problem with him and we have all arrived at a more or less satisfactory solution.

For instance, a man tells us he is 'an unreal man', and if he is not lying, or joking, or equivocating in some subtle way, there is no doubt that he will be regarded as deluded. But, existentially, what does this delusion mean?

Even in the negative instance where we are drawn up or baffled by an absence of reciprocity, where we feel there is no one there who is responding to us.

The difficulties facing us here are somewhat analogous to the difficulties facing the expositor of hieroglyphics, an analogy Freud was fond of drawing.

"The cracked mind of the schizophrenic may let in light which does not enter the intact minds of many sane people whose minds are closed."