T h e sun came to have an extraordinary effect on me. It seemed to be charged with all power; not merely to symbolize God but actually to be God. Phrases like: “Light of the W o r l d , ” “ T h e Sun of Righteousness that Setteth Nevermore,”
etc., ran through my head without ceasing, and the mere sight of the sun was sufficient greatly to intensify this manic excitement under which I was laboring. I was impelled to address the sun as a personal god, and to evolve from it a ritual sun worship.22
In no sense am I thinking here that there is innate sun-worship or innate gods in the nervous system that are released under the mental reorganization of psychosis. The reasons that hallucinations take the -particular form they do lie partly in the physical nature of the world, but mostly in education and a familiarity with gods and religious history.
But I do mean to suggest
(1) that there are in the brain aptic structures for the very existence of such hallucinations,
20 Schreber, pp. 226, 332.
21 Ibid., p. 269.
22 J. Custance, Wisdom, Madness and Folly (New York: Pellegrini and Cudahy, 1952), p. 18.
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(2) that these structures develop in civilized societies such that they determine the general religious quality and authority of such hallucinated voices, and perhaps organize them into hierarchies,
(3) that the paradigms behind these aptic structures were evolved into the brain by natural and human selection during the early civilizing of mankind, and
(4) are released from their normal inhibition by abnormal biochemistry in many cases of schizophrenia and particularized into experience.
There is a great deal more to say about these very real phenomena of hallucination in schizophrenia. And the need for more research here cannot be overstressed. We would like to know the life history of hallucinations and how this relates to the life history of the patient’s illness, of this hardly anything is known. We would like to know more of how the particular hallucinatory experiences relate to the individuals upbringing.
Why do some patients have benevolent voices, while others have voices so relentlessly persecuting that they flee or defend themselves or attack someone or something in an attempt to end them? And why do still others have voices so ecstatically religious and inspiring that the patient enjoys them like a festivity?
And what are the language characteristics of the voices? Do they use the same syntax and lexicon as the patient’s own speech? Or are they more patterned as we might expect from III.3? All these are problems that can be resolved empirically.
When they are, they may indeed give us more insight into the bicameral beginnings of civilization.
The Erosion of the Analog ‘I’
Of what transcending importance is this analog we have of ourselves in our metaphored mind-space, the very thing with which we narratize out solutions to problems of personal action,
418 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World and see where we are going, and who we are! And when in schizophrenia it begins to diminish, and the space in which it exists begins to collapse, how terrifying the experience must be!
Florid schizophrenic patients all have this symptom in some degree:
W h e n I am ill I lose the sense of where I am. I feel ‘I’ can sit in the chair, and yet my body is hurtling out and somer-saulting about 3 feet in front of me.
It is really very hard to keep conversations with others because I can’t be sure if others are really talking or not and if I am really talking back.23
Gradually I can no longer distinguish how much of myself is in me, and how much is already in others. I am a conglomera-tion, a monstrosity, modeled anew each day.24
My ability to think and decide and will to do, is torn apart by itself. Finally, it is thrown out where it mingles with every other part of the day and judges what it has left behind. Instead of wishing to do things, they are done by something that seems mechanical and frightening . . . the feeling that should dwell within a person is outside longing to come back and yet having taken with it the power to return.26
Many are the ways in which this loss of ego is described by patients who are able to describe it at all. Another patient has to sit still for hours at a time “in order to find her thoughts again.”
Another feels as if “he died away.” Schreber, as we have seen, talked of “soul-murder.” One very intelligent patient needs 23 Both quotations from patients of Dr. C. C. Pfeiffer of the Brain-Bio Center of Princeton, New Jersey, where schizophrenia is regarded as several biochemical illnesses primarily treatable by brain nutrients.
24 Storch as quoted by H. Werner, Comparative Psychology of Mental Development (New York: International Universities Press, 1957), p. 467.
25 From E. Meyer and L. Covi, “The experience of depersonalization: A written report by a patient,” Psychiatry, i960, 23: 215-217.
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hours of strenuous effort “to find her own ego for a few brief moments.” Or the self feels it is being absorbed by all that is around it by cosmic powers, forces of evil or of good, or by God himself. Indeed, the very term schizophrenia was coined by Bleuler to point to this central experience as the identifying mark of schizophrenia. It is the feeling of ‘losing one’s mind5, of the self ‘breaking off’ until it ceases to exist or seems to be unconnected with action or life in the usual way, resulting in many of the more obvious descriptive symptoms, such as “lack of affect” or abulia.
Another way in which this erosion of the analog ‘I’ shows itself is in the relative inability of schizophrenics to draw a person. It is, of course, a somewhat tenuous assumption to say that when we draw a person on paper, that drawing is dependent upon an intact metaphor of the self that we have called the analog ‘I’ But so consistent has this result been that it has become what is called the Draw-A-Person Test ( D A P ) , now routinely administered as an indicator of schizophrenia.26 Not all schizophrenic patients find such drawings difficult. But when they do, it is extremely diagnostic. They leave out obvious anatomical parts, like hands or eyes; they use blurred and unconnected lines; sexuality is often undifferentiated; the figure itself is often distorted and befuddled.
But the generalization that this inability to draw a person is a reflecting of the erosion of the analog ‘I’ should be taken with some circumspection. It has been found that older people sometimes show the same fragmented and primitive drawings as do these schizophrenics, and it should also be noticed that there is a considerable inconsistency with this result and the hypothesis being examined in this chapter. We have stated in an earlier 26 The first several years of research with the DAP have been reported in L. W.
Jones and C. B. Thomas, “Studies on figure drawings,” Psychiatric Quarterly Suffle-menty 1961, 35: 212-216.
420 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World chapter that the analog ‘I’ came into being toward the end of the second millennium B.C. If the ability to draw a person is dependent upon the drawer having an analog ‘I’, then we would expect no coherent pictures of humans before that time. And this most definitely is not the case. It is obvious that there are ways of explaining this discrepancy, but I prefer to simply record the anomaly at this time.
We should not leave this discussion of the erosion of the analog ‘I’ without mentioning the tremendous anxiety in our own culture that accompanies it, and the attempt, sometimes successful, sometimes unsuccessful, to arrest this terrifying fading-off of that most important part of our interior selves, the almost sacramental center of conscious decision. In fact, much of the behavior that has nothing to do with any reversion to a bicameral mind can be construed as an effort to combat this loss of the analog