- Part two -
The one who denies free will is insane, and the one who denies it is a fool.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Schizophrenia is still one of the most mysterious for medicine and tragic diseases for an individual. Such a diagnosis sounds like a verdict, since "everyone knows" that schizophrenia is incurable, although, as the famous American psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey writes, 25 percent of patients as a result of drug treatment have a significant improvement in their condition, and another 25 percent are improving, but they need constant care.
The same author, however, admits that at the moment there is no satisfactory theory of schizophrenia, and the principle of the effect of antipsychotic drugs is completely unknown, nevertheless he is completely convinced that schizophrenia is a brain disease, moreover, he is quite accurate indicates the main area of the brain that is affected in this disease. Namely - the limbic system, as you know, is primarily responsible for the emotional state of a person.
Such an important symptom of schizophrenia as "emotional dullness", inherent in all its varieties, without exception, is noted by all psychiatrists, nevertheless, this does not push doctors to the assumption of a possible emotional cause of schizophrenic diseases.
Moreover, in the main, the study focuses primarily on characteristic cognitive impairments (delusions, hallucinations, depersonalization, etc.). The hypothesis that emotional disturbances may be the cause of such dramatic and frightening symptoms is not seriously considered, precisely because people with schizophrenia appear to be emotionally insensitive.
I apologize for using the not entirely scientific term "schizophrenic" for brevity.
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The theory put forward is based on the idea that the overwhelming majority of schizophrenia diseases are based on the most difficult emotional problems of the personality, consisting primarily in the fact that the patient restrains (or suppresses) such strong feelings that his personality is not able to withstand if they are actualized in his body and mind.
They are so strong that you just need to forget about them, any touch to them causes unbearable pain. That is why psychological therapy for schizophrenia is still doing more harm than good, because it touches these affects "buried" in the depths of the personality of the cosmic power, which causes a new round of schizophrenic refusal to recognize reality.
It was not by chance that I said about the actualization of feelings in the body, and not just in consciousness. Not only psychologists, but also doctors will not deny that emotions are those mental processes that most strongly affect the physical condition of a person.
Emotions cause not only a change in the electrical activity of the brain, expansion or narrowing of blood vessels, the release of adrenaline or other hormones into the blood, but also tension or relaxation of the muscles of the body, increased breathing rate or its delay, increased or weakened heart rate, etc., up to fainting, heart attack or complete graying.
Chronic emotional states can cause serious physiological changes in the body, that is, cause certain psychosomatic diseases, or, if these emotions are positive, contribute to the strengthening of human health.
The most profound researcher of human emotionality was the famous psychologist and psychiatrist W. Reich. He considered feelings and emotions a direct expression of the psychic energy of a person.
Describing the schizoid character, he first of all pointed out that all the feelings and energy of such a person are frozen in the center of the body, they are restrained by chronic muscle tension. It should be noted that Russian textbooks on psychiatry also point to a particular muscle hypertension (overexertion) observed in schizophrenics of all types.
However, Russian psychiatry does not connect this fact with the suppression of feelings and also cannot explain the phenomenon of emotional stupidity in schizophrenics. At the same time, this fact is understandable, if we consider that emotions are completely suppressed, and so much so that the "patient" himself is not able to contact his own feelings, otherwise they are too dangerous for him.
This conclusion is confirmed in practice. Carefully talking with such patients in remission, one can find out that their feelings, which they are not aware of (usually they themselves feel insensible), actually have an absolutely incredible power for a "normal" person, they are literally characterized by cosmogonic parameters.
For example, one young woman admitted that the feeling she was holding back could be described as a scream of such force that, if released, it could "cut mountains like a laser." When I asked how she could restrain such a strong cry, she said: "This is my will." "What is your will like?" I asked. “If you can imagine lava in the center of the Earth, then this is my will,” was the answer.
Another young woman also noted that the main feeling she suppressed was similar to a cry, when I suggested that she try to free him, she asked with some "black" humor: "Will there be an earthquake?" Both of them recalled that their mothers in childhood constantly and severely beat them, demanding absolute submission.
Surprisingly, most schizophrenics seem to have conspired, they all point to the extremely cruel treatment of themselves by the mother (less often the father) and the parental demand for absolute submission.
Other psychologists and psychiatrists with whom I discussed this topic have pointed out the fact of abuse of schizophrenics in childhood. For example, the famous psychologist and psychotherapist Vera Loseva (oral communication) spoke out in the sense that schizophrenia occurs in cases when the parents have committed something cruel to the child, and the therapist's main task is to help the patient psychologically separate himself from the parents, which leads to healing.
But pointing out the strength of emotions and cruelty is clearly not enough, it is necessary to understand the nature of these emotions. Obviously, these are not positive emotions, this is first of all self-hatred, which he can also quite calmly inform the psychologist about.
The schizophrenic hates his own personality and destroys himself from the inside, the thought that one can love oneself seems to him amazing and unacceptable. At the same time, it can be hatred of the world around him, so he essentially stops all contact with reality, in particular with the help of delirium.
Where does this self-hatred come from?
Maternal cruelty, against which the child internally protests, nevertheless becomes the child's self-attitude, and this manifests itself precisely in the period of adolescence, that is, when the child no longer begins to obey his parents, but to control himself and his life.
This is due to the fact that he does not know other ways to control himself and another version of self-attitude. He also demands from himself absolute submission and applies absolute internal violence to himself.
I asked a young woman who had similar symptoms if she realized that she was treating herself the way her mother did to her. "You're wrong," she replied with a crooked smile, "I treat myself much more sophisticated."
These ideas are fully consistent with the theory of Mary and Robert Goulding, famous followers of Eric Berne. They believe that beating and humiliating a child is a form of the "don't live" command.
A child who has received such an order from his parents, as a rule, creates a suicidal life scenario. In some cases, this scenario leads to real suicide or depression as latent suicide.
But in schizophrenia, the human self itself is subjected to a brutal attack from the very same individual. The destruction of one's own I can be called a suicide of the soul, perhaps it happens because it was this I that was the object of persecution by the parent.
If you try to talk with a schizophrenic patient about love for himself or his Self, you will come across misunderstanding and denial. Like: "You say strange things …" or "I don't like and cannot talk about myself."
In the West, there is a theory about a cold and hypersocializing mother as the cause of the subsequent illness of the child, however, further "scientific" research did not confirm this hypothesis.
Why? It's very simple: most parents hide the facts of their inadequate attitude towards the child, especially since this was in the past, most likely they themselves are deceiving themselves, forgetting what happened.
Schizophrenics themselves testify that in response to their accusations of cruelty, parents respond that nothing like this happened. In the eyes of doctors, the parents are right, of course, they are not crazy.
An acquaintance of mine was kept in the hospital and "injected" with strong drugs until she realized that she would not be released if she did not give up her memories of her parents' sadistic behavior. As a result, she admitted that she was wrong, that her parents were innocent, and she was discharged.
Another weakness of this theory is that it does not explain how coldness and hyper-socialization lead to schizophrenia. From our point of view, I repeat, the true reason is the same - the incredible power of the schizophrenic's hatred of himself, the complete suppression of his feelings, and the desire for absolute submission to abstract principles (that is, the rejection of free will and spontaneity). That stems from the requirements of absolute obedience on the part of the parent, which is the rejection of one's self.
It is the human self that is responsible for the adequate perception of reality. Z. Freud spoke about this. As you know, such a part of the personality as Id obeys the principle of pleasure and serves the instincts, the Super-Ego obeys the principle of morality and helps to limit and restrain instincts, and the Ego (that is, I) obeys the principle of reality and helps a person to act adequately and safely.
When the human ego is destroyed, it loses its ability to test reality and distinguish delusions and hallucinations from reality.
When I published this article in the magazine, it went unnoticed. When posted online, she was criticized by an elderly woman (retired radiologist) who believed her daughter hated her because she had schizophrenia.
The daughter did not even want to let her into the house and let her communicate with her grandson. This lady criticized me very aggressively and even recommended that I start cultivating vacant land instead of writing articles accusing mothers.
As it turned out, no one had diagnosed her daughter, her husband had no doubts about her adequacy, she was not registered with the PND and had never been in a psychiatric clinic. But her mother was sure that her daughter was sick.
She gave a lot of examples of how children hated their parents, good and famous parents, and then it turned out that children were schizophrenics. Thus, she herself confirmed my hypothesis, testified that relationships with parents clearly correlate with illness, and these relationships are saturated with hatred.
Since I realized that this lady herself is interested in creating her daughter's disease, or at least in such a diagnosis, and in her words and actions she resembles a tank, I refused to continue discussing with her.
Interestingly, the psychiatrists themselves told me that they noticed a strange pattern. While the mother is visiting her sick "adult child" in the hospital, taking care of him, he is ill. As soon as the mother dies, the child quickly recovers and adapts to the surrounding reality.
The psychological causes of the disease can be generated not only by the cruel attitude of parents in childhood, but also by other factors, which explains a number of other cases. But the reason is always deeply emotional.
For example, I know of a case when schizophrenia occurred in a woman who, as a child, was rather spoiled by her parents. Until the age of five, she was a real queen in the family, but then a brother was born. Hatred for her brother (then for men in general) overwhelmed her, but she could not express it, fearing completely losing the love of her parents, and this hatred fell on her from within.
K. Jung cites a case when a woman fell ill with schizophrenia after, in fact, killed her child. When Jung told her the truth about what had happened, after which she threw out her suppressed feelings in a completely overwhelmed tantrum, it was enough for her to fully recover.
The fact was that in her youth she lived in a certain English city and was in love with a handsome and rich young man. But her parents told her that she was aiming too high and, at their insistence, she accepted the offer of another quite worthy groom.
She left (apparently in the colony), gave birth to a boy and a girl, lived happily. But one day a friend came to visit her, who used to live in her hometown. Over a cup of tea, he told her that by her marriage she broke the heart of one of his friends. It turned out that this was the very rich and handsome with whom she was in love.
You can imagine her condition. In the evening, she bathed her daughter and son in a bathtub. She knew that the water in this area could be contaminated with dangerous bacteria. For some reason, she did not prevent one child from drinking water from his palm, and the other from sucking on a sponge. Both children fell ill and one died. After that, she was admitted to the clinic with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
Jung told her after some hesitation: "You killed your child." The explosion of emotions was overwhelming, but two weeks later she was discharged as completely healthy. Jung watched her for another 9 years, and there was no more relapse of the disease.
It is quite obvious that this woman hated herself for giving up her beloved, and then for contributing to the death of her own child and finally breaking her own life. She could not bear these feelings, it was easier to go crazy. When unbearable emotions burst out, her mind returned to her.
I know the case of a young man with a paranoid form of schizophrenia. When he was little, his father (a Dagestan) sometimes tore off a dagger hanging on him from the carpet, put it to the boy's throat and shouted: "I will cut him, or you will obey me."
When this patient was asked to draw a person who is afraid of someone, then in this drawing, by the figure and details, one could unmistakably recognize him. When he painted the one whom this man is afraid of, his wife unmistakably recognized in this portrait the patient's father.
However, he himself did not understand this, moreover, at the level of consciousness, he idolized his father and said that he dreamed of imitating him. Moreover, he said that if his own son steals, then he would rather kill him himself. It is also interesting that when the topic of restraining suffering and patience was discussed with him, he said that, in his opinion, "a man should endure until he is completely mad."
These examples confirm the emotional nature of this disease, but of course are not conclusive evidence. But theory is usually always ahead of the curve.
Double clamping concept
In psychology, another psychological theory of schizophrenia is known, belonging to the philosopher, ethnographer and ethologist Gregory Bateson, this is the concept of "double clamp". In short, its essence boils down to the fact that the child receives from the parent two logically incompatible prescriptions: for example, “if you do this, I will punish you” and “if you don’t do this, I will punish you”, the only thing that remains for him is - it's going crazy.
Despite the importance of the idea of "double clamping", the evidence of this theory is small, it remains a purely speculative model, unable to explain the catastrophic disorders of thinking and perception of the world that occur in schizophrenia, unless it is accepted that the "double clamping" causes the deepest emotional conflict.
In any case, the psychiatrist Fuller Torrey simply scoffs at this concept, as well as other psychological theories. All these theories, unfortunately, cannot explain the origin of schizophrenic symptoms, if we do not take into account the strength of the latent emotions experienced by the patient, if we do not take into account the force of self-destruction directed at oneself, the degree of suppression of any spontaneity and immediate emotionality.
Our theory faces the same tasks. Psychiatrists therefore do not believe in psychological theories of schizophrenia because they cannot imagine that such mental disorders can occur not in a destroyed brain, they cannot imagine that a normal brain can generate hallucinations, and a person can believe in them.
In fact, this may well be happening. Distortions of the picture of the world and violations of logic occurred and are occurring among millions of people right before our eyes, as the practice of Nazism and Stalinism, the practice of financial pyramids, etc. shows.
The average person is able to believe anything and even "see" it with his own eyes, if he really wants to. Excitement, passion, wild fear, hatred and love make people believe in their fantasies as reality, or at least mix them with reality.
Fear makes you see threats everywhere, and love makes you suddenly see your beloved in the crowd. No one is surprised that all children go through a period of night fears, when simple objects in the room seem to them as some kind of ominous figures.
Alas, adults are also able to take their fantasies for reality, and the process of substitution occurs completely uncontrollably, but in order for this to happen, supernormal negative emotions, supernormal stress are needed.
It is no accident that it was noticed that before the onset of the disease, for a certain period of time, future patients practically cannot sleep. Try not to sleep two nights in a row - how will you think after the second night?
"Schizophrenics" before the debut of the disease do not sleep for a week, sometimes 10 days. If you experimentally wake a person at the time of the onset of REM sleep, when he sees dreams, then after five days he begins to see hallucinations in reality.
This phenomenon is perfectly explained by Freud's theory of dreams. He showed that in dreams people see their own unfulfilled desires. Freud believed that in this way the unconscious of a person informs the consciousness that a person does not want to know about himself.
On the one hand, Freud's theory is correct, but he did not pay attention to the fact that the realization of unfulfilled desires in a dream leads to the fulfillment of desires, at least in a symbolic form. And such a fulfillment of desire leads to tranquility, the desire, as it were, is satisfied purely on the mental level. That is, the main function of dreams is compensatory.
If this compensatory function of dreams is disabled, then compensation occurs in the form of hallucinations. As happened in the above experiment. Only a healthy person participating in the experiment realizes that these hallucinations are the product of his own psyche.
A sick person, tormented by suffering, takes the images of hallucinations, which are his dreams in reality, for reality. Since compensation in his case still does not occur, he sees these dreams in reality over and over again.
The same phenomenon underlies the origin of recurring dreams. Compensation does not occur either in dreams or in reality, and a person sometimes dreams of the same dream every night.
Here's an example: "Severed head"
I took an exam at one of the paid universities. The student, already an adult woman, answered the first question, and, clearly in a hurry and anxiety, asked me to interpret her dream, which had tormented her for the past two months. I realized that this question was very important to her and agreed.
It was a recurring nightmare. She dreamed that she was in a room from which she wanted to escape, but some people were interfering with her. She cannot leave, but is forced to watch as a man is executed. She sees a bloody neck when his head is cut off. All this is terrible and is repeated every night.
I said that I can't say for sure, there is no time for a more detailed analysis, but at least it is clear that in her life she is in a very unpleasant situation for her, from which she wants to escape, but she cannot. It is also clear that she is in some very serious conflict with some man.
She confirmed what I was thinking, but expressed it carefully:
- Yes, I now want to divorce my husband, but I cannot do this, because I have a small child, 1 year and 2 months. The main thing is that I do not understand the reason why I want a divorce so much. But after the birth of the child, I just began to hate him, more and more. Although before that we were doing well, we loved each other very much. The sex we had was just wonderful. He has shortcomings, he is a somewhat difficult person, but I have no serious complaints against him.
- Maybe he cheated on you, or beat you, or did something else.
- No no. He treats me very well, but I can't help myself. Why is this happening?
- It's so hard to judge. But often after the birth of a child, the mother can surface the conflicts that were in her parental family, because she involuntarily sees herself in the child. Do you have a girl?
- Yes, my father left the family when I was a year and a half.
- Maybe you have a program that when a child is 1.5 years old, you need to divorce your husband. But I'm not sure.
- Indeed, I divorced my first husband when my child was one year and four months old.
- If so, now we can confidently say that you are following such a program.
- Why do I hate him more and more?
- You just need to provide an emotional basis for a ready-made solution.
- My God (grabs his head). What a terrible woman I am. What to do? Can this be fixed?
- Come to me for a session, now we do not have time for this.
Commentary. She did not come to the session, and I do not know the long-term results of this brief analysis. I hope she had enough reason not to spoil her and others' lives, based on the scenarios learned in childhood. I also regret that I did not ask her what her mother told her about her father, and did not interpret the execution of the man as the realization of her hatred for her father for leaving her. It would then be clear that her hatred of her husband is a typical transference phenomenon, which would help her cope with these feelings. But I didn't have much time.
It is clear that no matter how much this woman watched this dream, there would be no solution to the problem either in a dream or in reality, so it was repeated.
My client with manic-depressive psychosis (I did not treat him, but only consulted) was shocked when I told him this concept. It turns out that before the debut of the disease, he did not sleep for 11 days without a break. No one told him anything like that, although he was in a psychiatric clinic four times. And this is understandable, because this theory is completely new, and psychiatrists do not know it. And psychiatrists will not believe in it, although it gives a key to the analysis of hallucinations and delusions of sick people.
I note that no matter what symptoms we discussed with him, moving from symptom to its cause, we always came to discuss his relationship with his mother. As this rich and intelligent, forty-year-old man said, my mother had such a character that it was impossible to talk to her for more than half an hour.
Why? - I was surprised. “Because in half an hour she manages to take out your brain completely.” - was the answer. He consulted me for a year and a half, then left, in English, without saying goodbye, and four months later he was in the clinic for the fourth time.
Six months later, he returned to me in a completely "crushed" state. We worked for another year, he was psychologically resurrected, again left in English, but at the moment he is healthy. I have a suspicion that he is healthy because his mother, who was the causative agent of the disease, died during this time.
Let us recall, by the way, the famous film "A Beautiful Mind", created on the basis of real facts. In it, a brilliant mathematician with a paranoid form of schizophrenia suddenly (after 20 years) realizes that one character from his hallucinations is really a product of his own psyche (a girl who never matured). When he realized this, he was able to overcome his illness from within himself.
But, returning to the theory of dreams, “schizophrenics” do not sleep for a reason, because they have nothing to do, they are extremely excited and tense, they are overwhelmed by feelings that they struggle with, but cannot overcome them.
For example, one woman “went crazy” in adulthood after a divorce from her husband, which she experienced to such an extent that she completely turned gray. In addition, the “soil” had already been prepared in the same standard way - as a child, her mother constantly beat her and demanded absolute submission, and her beloved father was a depressed drunkard. Mother said: “You are all in this Sidorov.” So, before she began an acute psychotic attack, she did not sleep in a row for about a week.
Summarizing the above, the causes of schizophrenia can be reduced to three main factors:
1. Self-control with the help of absolute violence, rejection of spontaneity and immediacy;
2. Hatred of oneself, of one's personality;
3. Suppression of all feelings and sensory contact with reality.
Nikolay Linde
- Part two -