Part 1

The existential-phenomenological foundations for a science of persons

The term schizoid refers to an individual the totality of whose experience is split in two main ways: in the first place, there is a rent in his relation with his world and, in the second, there is a disruption of his relation with himself. Such a person is not able to experience himself ‘together with’ others or ‘at home in’ the world, but, on the contrary, he experiences himself in despairing aloneness and isolation; moreover, he does not experience himself as a complete person but rather as ‘split’ in various ways, perhaps as a mind more or less tenuously linked to a body, as two or more selves, and so on.

This book attempts an existential-phenomenological account of some schizoid and schizophrenic persons. Before beginning this account, however, it is necessary to compare this approach to that of formal clinical psychiatry and psychopathology.

Existential phenomenology attempts to characterize the nature of a person’s experience of his world and himself. It is not so much an attempt to describe particular objects of his experience as to set all particular experiences within the context of his whole being-in-his-world. The mad things said and done by the schizophrenic will remain essentially a closed book if one does not understand their existential context. In describing one way of going mad, I shall try to show that there is a comprehensible transition from the sane schizoid way of being-in-the-world to a psychotic way of being-in-the-world. Although retaining the terms schizoid and schizophrenic for the sane and psychotic positions respectively, I shall not, of course, be using these terms in their usual clinical psychiatric frame of reference, but phenomenologically and existentially.

The clinical focus is narrowed down to cover only some of the ways there are of being schizoid or of going schizophrenic from a schizoid starting-point. However, the account of the issues lived out by the individuals studied in the following pages is intended to demonstrate that these issues cannot be grasped through the methods of clinical psychiatry and psychopathology as they stand today but, on the contrary, require the existential-phenomenological method to demonstrate their true human relevance and significance.

In this volume I have gone as directly as possible to the patients themselves and kept to a minimum the discussion of the historical, theoretical, and practical issues raised particularly vis-à-vis psychiatry and psycho-analysis. The particular form of human tragedy we are faced with here has never been presented with sufficient clarity and distinctness. I felt, therefore, that the sheer descriptive task had to come before all other considerations. This chapter is thus designed to give only the briefest statement of the basic orientation of this book necessary to avoid the most disastrous misunderstandings. It faces in two directions: on the one hand, it is directed to psychiatrists who are very familiar with the type of ‘case’ but may be unused to seeing the ‘case’ qua person as described here; on the other hand, it is addressed to those who are familiar with or sympathetic to such persons but who have not encountered them as ‘clinical material’. It is inevitable that it will be somewhat unsatisfactory to both.

As a psychiatrist, I run into a major difficulty at the outset: how can I go straight to the patients if the psychiatric words at my disposal keep the patient at a distance from me? How can one demonstrate the general human relevance and significance of the patient’s condition if the words one has to use are specifically designed to isolate and circumscribe the meaning of the patient’s life to a particular clinical entity? Dissatisfaction with psychiatric and psychoanalytic words is fairly widespread, not least among those who most employ them. It is widely felt that these words of psychiatry and psycho-analysis somehow fail to express what one ‘really means’. But it is a form of self-deception to suppose that one can say one thing and think another.

It will be convenient, therefore, to start by looking at some of the words in use. The thought is the language, as Wittgenstein has put it. A technical vocabulary is merely a language within a language. A consideration of this technical vocabulary will be at the same time an attempt to discover the reality which the words disclose or conceal.

The most serious objection to the technical vocabulary currently used to describe psychiatric patients is that it consists of words which split man up verbally in a way which is analogous to the existential splits we have to describe here. But we cannot give an adequate account of the existential splits unless we can begin from the concept of a unitary whole, and no such concept exists, nor can any such concept be expressed within the current language system of psychiatry or psycho-analysis.

The words of the current technical vocabulary either refer to man in isolation from the other and the world, that is, as an entity not essentially ‘in relation to’ the other and in a world, or they refer to falsely substantialized aspects of this isolated entity. Such words are: mind and body, psyche and soma, psychological and physical, personality, the self, the organism. All these terms are abstracta. Instead of the original bond of I and You, we take a single man in isolation and conceptualize his various aspects into ‘the ego’, ‘the superego’, and ‘the id’. The other becomes either an internal or external object or a fusion of both. How can we speak in any way adequately of the relationship between me and you in terms of the interaction of one mental apparatus with another? How, even, can one say what it means to hide something from oneself or to deceive oneself in terms of barriers between one part of a mental apparatus and another? This difficulty faces not only classical Freudian metapsychology but equally any theory that begins with man or a part of man abstracted from his relation with the other in his world. We all know from our personal experience that we can be ourselves only in and through our world and there is a sense in which ‘our’ world will die with us although ‘the’ world will go on without us. Only existential thought has attempted to match the original experience of oneself in relationship to others in one’s world by a term that adequately reflects this totality. Thus, existentially, the concretum is seen as a man’s existence, his being-in-the-world. Unless we begin with the concept of man in relation to other men and from the beginning ‘in’ a world, and unless we realize that man does not exist without ‘his’ world nor can his world exist without him, we are condemned to start our study of schizoid and schizophrenic people with a verbal and conceptual splitting that matches the split up of the totality of the schizoid being-in-the-world. Moreover, the secondary verbal and conceptual task of reintegrating the various bits and pieces will parallel the despairing efforts of the schizophrenic to put his disintegrated self and world together again. In short, we have an already shattered Humpty Dumpty who cannot be put together again by any number of hyphenated or compound words: psycho-physical, psycho-somatic, psycho-biological, psycho-pathological, psycho-social, etc., etc.

If this is so, it may be that a look at how such schizoid theory originates would be highly relevant to the understanding of schizoid experience. In the following section, I shall use a phenomenological method to try to answer this question.

Man’s being (I shall use ‘being’ subsequently to denote simply all that a man is) can be seen from different points of view and one or other aspect can be made the focus of study. In particular, man can be seen as person or thing. Now, even the same thing, seen from different points of view, gives rise to two entirely different descriptions, and the descriptions give rise to two entirely different theories, and the theories result in two entirely different sets of action. The initial way we see a thing determines all our subsequent dealings with it. Let us consider an equivocal or ambiguous figure: In this figure, there is one thing on the paper which can be seen as a vase or as two faces turned towards each other. There are not two things on the paper: there is one thing there, but, depending on how it strikes us, we can see two different objects. The relation of the parts to the whole in the one object is quite different from the relation of the parts to the whole in the other. If we describe one of the faces seen we would describe, from top to bottom, a forehead, a nose, an upper lip, a mouth, a chin, and a neck. Although we have described the same line, which, if seen differently, can be the one side of a vase, we have not described the side of a vase but the outline of a face.

Now, if you are sitting opposite me, I can see you as another person like myself; without you changing or doing anything differently, I can now see you as a complex physical-chemical system, perhaps with its own idiosyncrasies but chemical none the less for that; seen in this way, you are no longer a person but an organism. Expressed in the language of existential phenomenology, the other, as seen as a person or as seen as an organism, is the object of different intentional acts. There is no dualism in the sense of the coexistence of two different essences or substances there in the object, psyche and soma; there are two different experiential Gestalts: person and organism.

One’s relationship to an organism is different from one’s relation to a person. One’s description of the other as organism is as different from one’s description of the other as person as the description of side of vase is from profile of face; similarly, one’s theory of the other as organism is remote from any theory of the other as person. One acts towards an organism differently from the way one acts towards a person. The science of persons is the study of human beings that begins from a relationship with the other as person and proceeds to an account of the other still as person.

For example, if one is listening to another person talking, one may either (a) be studying verbal behaviour in terms of neural processes and the whole apparatus of vocalizing, or (b) be trying to understand what he is saying. In the latter case, an explanation of verbal behaviour in terms of the general nexus of organic changes that must necessarily be going on as a conditio sine qua non of his verbalization, is no contribution to a possible understanding of what the individual is saying. Conversely, an understanding of what the individual is saying does not contribute to a knowledge of how his brain cells are metabolizing oxygen. That is, an understanding of what he is saying is no substitute for an explanation of the relevant organismic processes, and vice versa. Again, there is no question here or anywhere of a mind-body dualism. The two accounts, in this case personal and organismic, taken up in respect to speech or any other observable human activity, are each the outcome of one’s initial intentional act; each intentional act leads in its own direction and yields its own results. One chooses the point of view or intentional act within the overall context of what one is ‘after’ with the other. Man as seen as an organism or man as seen as a person discloses different aspects of the human reality to the investigator. Both are quite possible methodologically but one must be alert to the possible occasion for confusion.

The other as person is seen by me as responsible, as capable of choice, in short, as a self-acting agent. Seen as an organism, all that goes on in that organism can be conceptualized at any level of complexity – atomic, molecular, cellular, systemic, or organismic. Whereas behaviour seen as personal is seen in terms of that person’s experience and of his intentions, behaviour seen organismically can only be seen as the contraction or relaxation of certain muscles, etc. Instead of the experience of sequence, one is concerned with a sequence of processes. In man seen as an organism, therefore, there is no place for his desires, fears, hope or despair as such. The ultimates of our explanations are not his intentions to his world but quanta of energy in an energy system.

Seen as an organism, man cannot be anything else but a complex of things, of its, and the processes that ultimately comprise an organism are it-processes. There is a common illusion that one somehow increases one’s understanding of a person if one can translate a personal understanding of him into the impersonal terms of a sequence or system of it-processes. Even in the absence of theoretical justifications, there remains a tendency to translate our personal experience of the other as a person into an account of him that is depersonalized. We do this in some measure whether we use a machine analogy or a biological analogy in our ‘explanation’. It should be noted that I am not here objecting to the use of mechanical or biological analogies as such, nor indeed to the intentional act of seeing man as a complex machine or as an animal. My thesis is limited to the contention that the theory of man as person loses its way if it falls into an account of man as a machine or man as an organismic system of it-processes. The converse is also true (see Brierley, 1951).

It seems extraordinary that whereas the physical and biological sciences of it-processes have generally won the day against tendencies to personalize the world of things or to read human intentions into the animal world, an authentic science of persons has hardly got started by reason of the inveterate tendency to depersonalize or reify persons.

In the following pages, we shall be concerned specifically with people who experience themselves as automata, as robots, as bits of machinery, or even as animals. Such persons are rightly regarded as crazy. Yet why do we not regard a theory that seeks to transmute persons into automata or animals as equally crazy? The experience of oneself and others as persons is primary and self-validating. It exists prior to the scientific or philosophical difficulties about how such experience is possible or how it is to be explained.

Indeed, it is difficult to explain the persistence in all our thinking of elements of what MacMurray has called the ‘biological analogy’: ‘We should expect,’ writes MacMurray (1957), ‘that the emergence of a scientific psychology would be paralleled by a transition from an organic to a personal… conception of unity’ (p. 37), that we should be able to think of the individual man as well as to experience him neither as a thing nor as an organism but as a person and that we should have a way of expressing that form of unity which is specifically personal. The task in the following pages is, therefore, the formidable one of trying to give an account of a quite specifically personal form of depersonalization and disintegration at a time when the discovery of ‘the logical form through which the unity of the personal can be coherently conceived’ (ibid.) is still a task for the future.

There are, of course, many descriptions of depersonalization and splitting in psychopathology. However, no psychopathological theory is entirely able to surmount the distortion of the person imposed by its own premisses even though it may seek to deny these very premisses. A psychopathology worthy of its name must presuppose a ‘psyche’ (mental apparatus or endopsychic structure). It must presuppose that the objectification, with or without reification imposed by thinking in terms of a fictional ‘thing’ or system, is an adequate conceptual correlate of the other as a person in action with others. Moreover, it must presuppose that its conceptual model has a way of functioning analogous to the way that an organism functions in health and a way of functioning analogous to an organism’s way of functioning when physically diseased. However pregnant with partial analogies such comparisons are, psychopathology by the very nature of its basic approach precludes the possibility of understanding a patient’s disorganization as a failure to achieve a specifically personal form of unity. It is like trying to make ice by boiling water. The very existence of psychopathology perpetuates the very dualism that most psychopathologists wish to avoid and that is clearly false. Yet this dualism cannot be avoided within the psychopathological frame of references except by falling into a monism that reduces one term to the other, and is simply another twist to a spiral of falsity.

It may be maintained that one cannot be scientific without retaining one’s ‘objectivity’. A genuine science of personal existence must attempt to be as unbiased as possible. Physics and the other sciences of things must accord the science of persons the right to be unbiased in a way that is true to its own field of study. If it is held that to be unbiased one should be ‘objective’ in the sense of depersonalizing the person who is the ‘object’ of our study, any temptation to do this under the impression that one is thereby being scientific must be rigorously resisted. Depersonalization in a theory that is intended to be a theory of persons is as false as schizoid depersonalization of others and is no less ultimately an intentional act. Although conducted in the name of science, such reification yields false ‘knowledge’. It is just as pathetic a fallacy as the false personalization of things.

It is unfortunate that personal and subjective are words so abused as to have no power to convey any genuine act of seeing the other as person (if we mean this we have to revert to ‘objective’), but imply immediately that one is merging one’s own feelings and attitudes into one’s study of the other in such a way as to distort our perception of him. In contrast to the reputable ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’, we have the disreputable ‘subjective’, ‘intuitive’, or, worst of all, ‘mystical’. It is interesting, for example, that one frequently encounters ‘merely’ before subjective, whereas it is almost inconceivable to speak of anyone being ‘merely’ objective.

The greatest psychopathologist has been Freud. Freud was a hero. He descended to the ‘Underworld’ and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa’s head which turned these terrors to stone. We who follow Freud have the benefit of the knowledge he brought back with him and conveyed to us. He survived. We must see if we now can survive without using a theory that is in some measure an instrument of defence.

THE RELATIONSHIP TO THE PATIENT AS PERSON OR AS THING

In existential phenomenology the existence in question may be one’s own or that of the other. When the other is a patient, existential phenomenology becomes the attempt to reconstruct the patient’s way of being himself in his world, although, in the therapeutic relationship, the focus may be on the patient’s way of being-with-me.

Patients present themselves to a psychiatrist with complaints that may be anywhere in the range between the most apparently localized difficulty (‘I have a reluctance for jumping from a plane’), to the most diffuse difficulty possible (‘I can’t say why I’ve come really. I suppose it is just me that’s not right’). However, no matter how circumscribed or diffuse the initial complaint may be, one knows that the patient is bringing into the treatment situation, whether intentionally or unintentionally, his existence, his whole being-in-his-world. One knows also that every aspect of his being is related in some way to every other aspect, although the manner in which these aspects are articulated may be by no means clear. It is the task of existential phenomenology to articulate what the other’s ‘world’ is and his way of being in it. Right at the start, my own idea of the scope or extension of a man’s being may not coincide with his, nor for that matter with that of other psychiatrists. I, for instance, regard any particular man as finite, as one who has had a beginning and who will have an end. He has been born, and he is going to die. In the meantime, he has a body that roots him to this time and this place. These statements I believe to be applicable to each and every particular man. I do not expect to re-verify them each time I meet another person. Indeed, they cannot be proved or falsified. I have had a patient whose notion of the horizons of his own being extended beyond birth and death: ‘in fact’ and not just ‘in imagination’ he said he was not essentially bound to one time and one place. I did not regard him as psychotic, nor could I prove him wrong, even if I cared to. Nevertheless, it is of considerable practical importance that one should be able to see that the concept and/or experience that a man may have of his being may be very different from one’s own concept or experience of his being. In these cases, one has to be able to orientate oneself as a person in the other’s scheme of things rather than only to see the other as an object in one’s own world, i.e. within the total system of one’s own reference. One must be able to effect this reorientation without prejudging who is right and who is wrong. The ability to do this is an absolute and obvious prerequisite in working with psychotics.

There is another aspect of man’s being which is the crucial one in psychotherapy as contrasted with other treatments. This is that each and every man is at the same time separate from his fellows and related to them. Such separateness and relatedness are mutually necessary postulates. Personal relatedness can exist only between beings who are separate but who are not isolates. We are not isolates and we are not parts of the same physical body. Here we have the paradox, 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.

Psychotherapy is an activity in which that aspect of the patient’s being, his relatedness to others, is used for therapeutic ends. The therapist acts on the principle that, since relatedness is potentially present in everyone, then he may not be wasting his time in sitting for hours with a silent catatonic who gives every evidence that he does not recognize his existence.