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schizophrenia, at least in part, is a vestige of bicamerality, a partial relapse to the bicameral mind. The present chapter is a discussion of this possibility.
The Evidence in History
Let us begin with a glance, a mere side-glance, at the earliest history of this disease. If our hypothesis is correct, there should first of all be no evidence of individuals set apart as insane prior to the breakdown of the bicameral mind. And this is true, even though it makes an extremely weak case, since the evidence is so indirect. But in the sculptures, literature, murals, and other artifacts of the great bicameral civilizations, there is never any depiction or mention of a kind of behavior which marked an individual out as different from others in the way in which insanity does.
Idiocy, yes, but madness, no.1 There is, for example, no idea of insanity in the Iliad.2 I am emphasizing individuals set apart from others as ill, because, according to our theory, we could say that before the second millennium B.C., everyone was schizophrenic.
Secondly, we should expect on the basis of the above hypothesis that when insanity is first referred to in the conscious period, it is referred to in definitely bicameral terms. And this makes a much stronger case. In the Phaedrus, Plato calls insanity “a divine gift, and the source of the chiefest blessings granted to men.”3 And this passage preludes one of the most beautiful and 1 Even the word found in I Samuel 13 that is sometimes brought forward as the first reference to schizophrenia is the Hebrew halal, which is better translated as foolish in the sense of an idiot.
2 When E. R. Dodds suggests that a few places in the Odyssey refer to madness, I find his argument unconvincing. And when he concludes that there was a concept of mental disease common in Homer’s time, “and probably long before,” this is a completely unwarranted assertion. See E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 67.
3 Phaedrus, 244A.
406 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World soaring passages in all the Dialogues in which four types of insanity are distinguished: prophetic madness due to Apollo, ritual madness due to Dionysus, the poetic madness “of those who are possessed by the Muses, which taking hold of the delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awaken lyrical and all other numbers,” and, finally, erotic madness due to Eros and Aphrodite. Even the word for prophetic, mantike, and the word for psychotically mad, manike, were for the young Plato the same word, the letter t being for him “only a modern and tasteless insertion.”4 The point I am trying to make here is that there is no doubt whatever of the early association of forms of what we call schizophrenia with the phenomena that we have come to call bicameral.
This correspondence is also brought out in another ancient Greek word for insanity, paranoia, which, coming from para +
nous, literally meant having another mind alongside one’s own, descriptive both of the hallucinatory state of schizophrenia and of what we have described as the bicameral mind. This, of course, has nothing whatever to do with the modern and etymologically incorrect usage of this term, with its quite different meaning of persecutory delusions, which is of nineteenth-century origin.
Paranoia, as the ancient general term for insanity, lasted along with the other vestiges of bicamerality described in the previous chapter, and then linguistically died with them about the second century A.D.
But even in Plato’s own time, a time of war, famine, and plague, the four divine insanities were gradually shifting into the realm of the wise man’s poetry and the plain man’s superstition.
The sickness aspect of schizophrenia comes to the fore. In later dialogues, the elderly Plato is more skeptical, referring to what we call schizophrenia as a perpetual dreaming in which some men believe “that they are gods, and others that they can fly,”5 in 4 Ibid., 244C.
5 Theaetetus, 158 .
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which case the family of those so afflicted should keep them at home under penalty of a fine.6
The insane are now to be shunned. Even in the exotic farces of Aristophanes, stones are thrown at them to keep them away.
What we now call schizophrenia, then, begins in human history as a relationship to the divine, and only around 400 B.C.
comes to be regarded as the incapacitating illness we know today.
This development is difficult to understand apart from the theory of a change in mentality which this essay is about.
The Difficulties of the Problem
Before looking at its contemporary symptoms from the same point of view, I would make a few preliminary observations of a very general sort. As anyone knows who has worked in the literature on the subject, there is today a rather vague panorama of dispute as to what schizophrenia is, whether it is one disease or many, or the final common path of multiple etiologies, whether there exist two basic patterns variously called process and reactive, or acute and chronic, or quick-onset and slow-onset schizophrenia. The reason for this disagreement and its vagueness is because research in the area is as obstinate a tangle of control difficulties as can be found anywhere. How may we study schizophrenia and at the same time eliminate the effects of hospitalization, of drugs, of prior therapy, of cultural expectancy, of various learned reactions to bizarre experiences, or of differences in obtaining accurate data about the situational crises of patients who, through the trauma of hospitalization, find it frightening to communicate?
It is beyond my effort here to sort out a way through these difficulties to any definitive position. Rather I intend to step around them with some simplicities on which there is wide agreement. These are, that there does exist a syndrome that can be 6 Laws, 934.
408 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World called schizophrenia, that at least in the florid state it is easily recognized in the clinic, and that it is found in all civilized societies the world over.7 Moreover, for the truth of this chapter, it is not really important whether I am speaking of all patients with this diagnosis.8 Nor of the illness as it first appears, or as it develops subsequent to hospitalization. My thesis is something less, that some of the fundamental, most characteristic, and most commonly observed symptoms of florid unmedicated schizophrenia are uniquely consistent with the description I have given on previous pages of the bicameral mind.
These symptoms are primarily the presence of auditory hallucinations as described in I:4, and the deterioration of consciousness as defined in I:2, namely the loss of the analog the erosion of mind-space, and an inability to narratize. Let us look at these symptoms in turn.
Hallucinations
Again, hallucinations. And what I shall say here is merely adjunctory to my earlier discussion.
If we confine ourselves to florid unmedicated schizophrenics, we can state that hallucinations are absent only in exceptional cases. Usually they predominate, crowding in persistently and massively, making the patient appear confused, particularly when they are changing rapidly. In very acute cases, visual hallucinations accompany the voices. But in more ordinary cases, the patient hears a voice or many voices, a saint or a devil, 7 “The Experiential World Inventory” developed by H. Osmond and A. El. Miligi at the Princeton Neuro-Psychiatric Institute, has been given to schizophrenics in different countries and cultures with very similar results.