The Ontological War

I post to various discussion groups, and I’m going to include a few of those posts here, with possibly minor changes to them. For copyright reasons, I will not include the full post of the other poster.

In this post I reply to a poster who had written that people who have schizophrenia do not have a mental illness, but are instead struggling with basic questions about human life.

I agree with this, at least the “asking fundamental questions about existence and life itself” part. But these people are also not doing very well in their search or quest.

There are a lot of ways of looking at all of this, but here is one of the more direct, touching briefly upon a few of the more important points.

Some people look into themselves and think, “I am actually shy, but I don’t tell anyone.” When these people do this, they are showing they are aware on some level that the self they are being in day-to-day life is not who they know they “actually” are, which is the self they sense deeper within themselves.

Other people also sense this innermost self within themselves, and they then strive to reach it and become it, usually during their young adulthoods. For those who move forward along this journey, they soon realize that the self they have always been is not who they truly are, but a self they now consider to be their “social self” or “false self.” They also have a better sense of the self deeper within themselves, which they might now think of as their “true self” or “real self.” Overall, the men and women who undertake this quest fall into one of four main groups, three of which are described below.

Some of the people on this journey begin to feel that they are losing their way or that the journey is too painful or difficult, and because of this they return with determination to the self they had been before they started, to what they just recently knew was their false or social self. But now that they have returned to being that self, they tell themselves and others it is their true self and the true self of all humans. But in fact, they have gone back to being what they earlier knew was an alienated self, which in turn results in their contributing to the maintaining of an alienated day-to-day world.

Another group, which is very small, of people on this quest continue moving forward: they don’t get lost in it or retreat from it.

Still other people on this journey lose themselves along the way, and, since they are in a very real sense between selves, their loss seriously impacts almost every aspect of their lives.

The term “ontology” can be expanded to include emotions, thoughts, and ideas such as these, and, to digress for a moment, I had my first thoughts about schizophrenia several years after I’d started thinking about ontological questions. At that time, I knew little about schizophrenia: I assumed that it was a psychosis that had nothing to do with ontology. If I’d thought about it, I probably would have considered schizophrenia to be about as far from the benefits of ontology as it was possible to get.

I was very surprised, then, when someone gave me a copy of The Divided Self, and I read these sentences by Laing:

The central split is between what David called his “own”
self and what he called his “personality”. This dichotomy
is encountered again and again. What the individual
variously terms his “own”, “inner”, “true”, “real” self
is experienced as divorced from all activity that is
observable by another, what David called his
“personality”. (p. 73, paperback)

The number 1 question I had after reading this was how in the world could people who were supposedly suffering from a deteriorating psychosis be aware, “again and again,” of important insights about the human self, insights that elude almost all the people in the day-to-day world? The inevitable answer is that the awareness of their true self and their false/social self–what David called his “own self” and “personality”–by schizophrenic people does not come from their mental illness but is instead a result of their ontological quest, of their greater understanding of themselves and of human life.

Skipping ahead several steps, this all sounds great initially–a deeper understanding of schizophrenia! But unfortunately most people appear to be so poor at moving forward ontologically that it might end up that schizophrenia is, essentially, incurable, simply because we humans are unable or are too afraid to become who we truly are.

Kind regards,

Scott