Schizophrenia: The Divided Self by RD Laing - Essay Example

Guide's Psychology: Schizophrenia: The Divided Self by R.D Laing Chapter The existential-phenomenological foundations for a science of persons The introductory passages deal with the not so registered meanings of the experiences and issues that schizoid and schizophrenic person deals everyday that can be found in clinical psychology and psychopathology, rather more understandably explained and cleared by existential-phenomenological method that demonstrate their true human relevance and significance. After the introduction, the author starts the analysis with the need to see beyond the "terms" and "definitions" offered by clinical psychology and psychopathology that categorize a person into "me" and "others" which (as the author further argues) is skeptical in terms of relevancy since without a person, there is no "other" i.e. there is no world without the person and no person without world. Further, Mr. Laing discusses that there is always one (biased) paradigm stronger than other which makes us experience certain things in a particular way. Other person can have different paradigm of experiencing certain things in a different perspective, as seen in picture below. There is an ongoing clash, comparison and contrast b/w "organism" and "person" views. Existential phenomenology is what gives meaning of ones own self and the world in which that individual lives, and dwells. The potentially tragic paradox, that our relatedness to others is an essential aspect of our being, as is our separateness, but any particular person is not a necessary part of our being. This relatedness is used in psychotherapy to give complete therapy to patients. Chapter 2- The existential-phenomenological foundations for the understanding of psychosis Psychotic, terming a person psychotic does not entirely prove his/her schizophrenic tendency in all terms. Besides, it is how a person chooses to portray him/herself in society and among other fellow people that we mend our definitions (rather thresholds) of madness/craziness. A normally living person might me more dangerous to himself and others according to his/her mental states which he/she do not choose to show them, and a schizophrenic declared person would be more dependably certain in his true state. The more stress in further chapter is impressed upon the psychiatrist-patient relation and interaction with each other. How the patient reacts to the questions put to him/her by the psychiatrist basically depend upon the level and quality of interaction those two have. On the analysis of a patient there still can be two ways of interpretation of what the mental state, the patient has currently. Hence, it is more than essential not to base the judgment solely on the basis of patients reaction to the questions of the psychiatrist, there is more complexity to it than how much simple it appears. There is a formal analysis (interpretation) tagged on the clinical psychiatry for patients speech and behavior, which terms as limitation in judging correctly the socio-historical state of the patients. The main assertion here that the author is trying to make is that only scientific knowledge and experimentation is not sufficient for the holistic analysis of a patients state of mind. Rather, a humane and concentrated focused (keeping your own voice down so that you can hear what others have to say) attitude is very much essential as well as necessary in order to understand the patient from every aspect. The psychiatrist should examine the patient without any spectacles of clinical terms and human behavior categories, and then according to the pure analysis (free from any previous paradigms in mind). The art of understanding those aspects of an individual's being which we can observe, as expressive of his mode of being-in-the-world, requires us to relate his actions to his way of experiencing the situation he is in with us. A very nice way of summarizing the arguments is a very simple sentence taken from the book (page 33): "If we look at his actions as 'signs' of a 'disease', we are already imposing our categories of thought on to the patient, in a manner analogous to the way we may regard him as treating us; and we shall be doing the same if we imagine that we can 'explain' his present as a mechanical resultant of an immutable 'past'." It is basically the symptoms that a person shows in company of a psychiatrist that we should further start making other examinations for his/her analysis. Not the other way around like categorizing a person according to some clinical psychotic definitions. To end chapter 2 analysis here is what insight author provides about schizophrenic patients (page 38): 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 the Mother of God 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. Chapter 3-Ontological insecurity In this chapter the author talks about the (existential) reality and its related security and insecurity. And it is arguable that is the awareness is also there in a person/patient for the reality that is being talked about. Then the author compares the works of famous writers like Shakespeare, Kafka etc. the differentiation is on the basis of the way the characters in their plays or stories portray their reality and life. Do they really understand how they live when alive Is the life the writer portraying on the scripts and theatrical characters match the existential assertions made previously. Then he talks about painters in the same context, how they portray their art works Life, the death and the way people understands themselves and others. The timeline of growth of a human baby from birth engulfs the next discussion. In our view, the baby is real and alive after birth, but is it true from babys perspective too How does the baby understand its existence and reality Then the author talks about three anxieties that patients come across, engulfment, implosion, and petrification/depersonalization. If a win or lose over an argument affects your existence then your state may be psychotic, it is engulfment. However, when a patient feels in him/herself an emptiness and fears that the reality of the world would break this vacuum, this is implosive anxiety. To explain depersonalization: In depersonalization, one no longer allows oneself to be responsive to his feelings and may be prepared to regard him and treat him as though he had no feelings. The people in focus here both tend to feel themselves as more or less depersonalized and tend to depersonalize others; they are constantly afraid of being depersonalized by others. There is anxiety of becoming someones thing while making someone else a thing to themselves. Further, the author gives account of some patients and their anxiety of taking other people as things and merely things (denoting them with "it"). It is as it seems to be a clichd norm of becoming stone ourselves than being turned as a stone by others. 'Be thou hard,' Nietzsche. A very intriguing and thought provoking instance is listed in the chapter on page 54: The capacity to experience oneself as autonomous means that one has really come to realize that one is a separate person from everyone else. No matter how deeply I am committed in joy or suffering to someone else, he is not me, and I am not him. However lonely or sad one may be, one can exist alone. The fact that the other person in his own actuality is not me, is set against the equally real fact that my attachment to him is a part of me. If he dies or goes away, he has gone, but my attachment to him persists. But in the last resort I cannot die another person's death for him, nor can he die my death. For that matter, as Sartre comments on this thought of Heidegger's, he cannot love for me or make my decisions, and I likewise cannot do this for him. In short, he cannot be me, and I cannot be him. The fear of left alone and the age old anxiety of living someone elses personality are the two engulfing fears presented as cases in the chapter. At last, the only thing comes out to successfully diagnose the patient is to "let them be" and give them freedom of choice and expression to voice their anxieties which they seldom do in less conductive environment. Chapter 4-The embodied and unembodied self Theme: What form of relation with himself is developed by the ontologically insecure person Basically this chapter dealt with the bonding intensity of an ontologically insecure patient, into bodied and embodied self. Embodied and unembodied persons are defined with respect to their existential awareness level. Embodied persons are of the belief that all is with the body and all ends with the body. Unembodied persons go through life as somewhat unaware and detached from their life and basically do not see themselves with their body. There is no particular tagging of one as bas or the other as good, rather it depends solely upon the holistic approach taken by the psychiatrist. "The radically different contexts in which they occur determine the basic ways in which they are lived" (Page 69). The embodied person is engrossed in living up his "substantial" life and sees his existence as through his bode, flesh and blood. And he is also aware more of the fact that he is biologically alive and real: substantial again. The unembodied person sees him/herself as detached from his body to the extent that feeling divorced from it too. The body is felt more as one object among other objects in the world than as the core of the individuals own being. The unembodied person relies more so on his/her emotional being (feelings and movements (expressions, gestures, words, actions, etc.) to make aware him/herself of his/her living and being in the world. Borderline case: David: The central split is between what David called his 'own' self and what he called his 'personality'. Chapter 5-The inner self in the schizoid condition You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, this is something you are free to do and is in accord with your nature, but perhaps precisely this holding back is the only suffering that you might be able to avoid- FRANK KAFKA. There are certain situational experiences which cause us to temporarily be insulated from our being and awareness of our body. This causes us to fell in a very shocked and "never could believe way" and more like having a dream. This temporarily disengagement from the bodily ways is not a particular situation based happening, as counterargument by the author, rather its source can be traced back to the infancy age, where in not physical but mental psychotic movements are more pronounced due to immobility. Hence, the self tries to go other way aroung and be unembodied as a vacuum permanently to find out the balance of thoughts. This detachment of the self means that the self is never revealed directly in the individual's expressions and actions, nor does it experience anything spontaneously or immediately. The self's relationship to the other is always at one remove (page 80). Pseudo-duality is then experienced in an individual: Instead of: "(self/body) < > other", the situation is: "self < > (body-other)". Therefore the self is not able to make relation with the body and hence remains insulated from reality. Now the author talks about the differences in reality and fantasy. When one person does not act in reality rather remains in fantasy, we can say that he/she has lost contact with the real self, the original biological state of being and doing. What a schizophrenic patient would feel at this point of time is very beautifully depicted by author on page 93: If there is anything the schizoid individual is likely to believe in, it is his own destructiveness. He is unable to believe that he can fill his own emptiness without reducing what is there to nothing. He regards his own love and that of others as being as destructive as hatred. To be loved threatens his self; but his love is equally dangerous to anyone else. His isolation is not entirely for his own self's sake. It is also out of concern for others. A schizophrenic patient would not allow anyone to touch her, not because they would do her some harm, but because she might electrocute them. And this is simply a psychotic expression of what the schizoid individual feels daily. Chapter 6-The false-self system False is basically termed as "not true" otherwise, it is equally applicable in clinical psychotic experiences. It basically means that there are levels up to which particular persons are true to their true inner self. It therefore, in effect, does not mean that being true is not being psychotic, rather it is the most important factor which an experienced psychiatrist should explore in order to know more and legible about the person under their examination. Every person has his/her secrets and hence every man/woman have their own masks to cover them up behind the shield of lies and not being truly honest about the questions asked of them. One of the aspects of the compliance of the false self that is most clear is the fear implied by this compliance. The fear in it is evident, for why else would anyone act, not according to his intentions, but according to another person's Hatred is also necessarily present, for what else is the adequate object of hatred except that which endangers one's self Chapter 7-Self-consciousness Consciousness is termed as awareness; hence the topic depicts the awareness of an individual about his/her own personal self. An awareness of oneself by oneself, and an awareness of oneself as an object of someone else's observation- these are the two kinds of awareness. Author depicts a self-conscious person as: He is more the object of other people's interest than, in fact, he is. Such a person walking along the street approaches a cinema queue. He will have to 'steel himself to walk past it: preferably, he will cross to the other side of the street. It is an ordeal to go into a restaurant and sit down at a table by himself. At a dance he will wait until two or three couples are already dancing before he can face taking the floor himself, and so on. Dilemma of a self-conscious person: The 'self-conscious' person is caught in a dilemma. He may need to be seen and recognized, in order to maintain his sense of realness and identity. Yet, at the same time, the other represents a threat to his identity and reality. He is, therefore, driven compulsively to seek company, but never allows himself to 'be himself in the presence of anyone else. He avoids social anxiety by never really being with others. Self-consciousness is a state of mind just like a whirlpool in which the person is trapped willingly and also fears being there. [1] R. D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, Penguin Books, Published by the Penguin Group reprint 1990 Read More