by Mario Mieli
According to Norman O. Brown, man is a neurotic animal:
Man the social animal is by the same token the neurotic animal. Or, as Freud puts it, man’s superiority over the other animals is his capacity for neurosis, and his capacity for neurosis is merely the obverse of his capacity for cultural development . . . For if society imposes repression, and repression causes the universal neurosis of mankind, it follows that there is an intrinsic connection between social organisation and neurosis.11
But Brown is simply applying to the entire course of prehistory the psychoanalytic category of neurosis (which he more or less hypostatises, shrouding the future overcoming of time and history in the mystical veil of the Nirvana principle). It is sufficient for us to consider the psychoneurosis that particularly characterises capitalist society and culture – even if, with respect to the ‘superstructural’ aspect of the history of philosophy, we cannot avoid noting, with Needham,12 the neurotic character of the split between ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ that exists throughout almost the whole of Western thought, from Socrates through to today: the Western neurosis of the separation between matter and spirit. In fact, even when we speak of neurosis and its universality, we must bear in mind that ‘the most general abstractions arise only in the midst of the richest possible concrete development, where one thing appears as common to many, to all’.13
Today, of course, society as a whole is neurotic and schizoid. Capitalist ideology, phallocentric, heterosexual and Eurocentric, founds and constitutes the worldview of one-dimensional man, homo normalis, the fetishistic vision of the human being alienated from himself, from the world and from others by the work of capital. Just like the habitual neurotic condition of people considered ‘normal’, so the whole logic of capitalism is schizoid. Dissociated or rather riven between ego and non-ego, res cogitans and res extensa, desire and ‘non-desire’, sense and intellect, public and private, unconscious and conscious, mechanical materialism and teleological spiritualism, capitalist rationality governs the insane equilibrium of the ‘sane’ individual, more or less adapted to the schizoid social system. The individual who is healthy for Freud is schizoid for Laing.14
Psychiatry often uses the terms ‘schizoid’ and ‘schizophrenic’ as synonyms. But if so-called ‘normal’ life is in fact itself dissociated and schizoid, then the ‘schizophrenic’ alteration of the process of association is far from being the dissociation it is said to be. It is rather a superior and deeper ability to grasp significant relationships between things and/or events that we ‘normally’ define as connected only in a fortuitous way, or rather in a way that is obvious and banal. It is also a still more profound faculty to recognise the evident significance that is hidden in apparently casual relations. For this reason (despite the fact that there are undoubtedly certain borderline ‘cases’), I use the terms ‘schizoid’ and ‘schizophrenic’ essentially in two opposite senses: the former as a synonym for ‘normal’, and to indicate the dissociated character of the commonly held vision of the world; the latter to denote the decidedly alternative and far less dissociated conception of the world which is customarily considered ‘crazy’.
In the countries dominated by capital, a growing number of people end up sooner or later in mental hospitals or similar institutions. So-called ‘schizophrenics continue to occupy a larger number of hospital beds than people suffering from almost any other ailment, and this number is constantly on the rise, day by day, and year by year’.15 These ‘schizophrenics’ escape the one-dimensional rule of the divided self adapted to the customary arrangements of capitalist society; they experience a radically ‘different’ vision of the world, of life, and of Lebenswelt:16 they are an irreducible challenge to psychoanalysis, and its interpretations almost always appear sorry and restricted in comparison with the grandiose multi-dimensionality of their Weltsicht.17 And yet no other aspect of so-called ‘mental pathology’ has occupied and interested ‘scholars’ as much as ‘schizophrenia’.
The term ‘schizophrenia’ is used by modern psychiatry to denote the ‘mental disorder’ that classical psychiatry defined as dementia paranoides or dementia praecox (Morel, Kraepelin).
But is there any relationship between ‘paranoia’ (or ‘schizophrenia’) and homosexuality?
According to Ferenczi (and also Freud and others), homosexuality results from certain factors constituting the ‘pathogenesis’ of dementia paranoides (paranoia) : ‘In the pathogenesis of paranoia, homosexuality plays not a chance part, but the most important one, and . . . paranoia is perhaps nothing else at all than disguised homosexuality’.18 Those individuals who are considered ‘healthy’ and ‘normal’, and are far from any ‘suspicion’ of homosexuality, may, following the sudden surfacing of repressed gay impulses, transform their existence into a ‘delusion’ on the grandest scale. This is the famous case, for example, of Dr Daniel Paul Schreber, chief justice in Dresden, who suddenly ‘went mad’, the most thoroughly studied ‘clinical case’ in the whole of psychiatry.19
The ‘paranoiac’, according to Ferenczi, projects his homosexual interests onto persons of the same sex, but with a negative sign:
His desires, which have been cast out from the ego, return to his consciousness as the perception of the persecutory tendency on the part of the objects that unconsciously please him. He can now indulge his own homosexuality in the form of hate, and at the same time hide (it) from himself.20
In the same way, Freud held that, with Schreber, ‘what was characteristically paranoic about the illness was the fact that the patient, as a means of warding off a homosexual wishful phantasy, reacted precisely with delusions of persecution of this kind.’21 Freud maintained, too, that the rejection of a homoerotic desire explains the ‘persecution complex’. According to Arieti,
The statement ‘I (a man) love him’ is something that the sick person cannot admit, which he seeks to negate with the contradictory statement ‘I don’t love him, I hate him’. ‘I hate him’ is then transformed, by projection, into ‘he hates me.’ In this way, a homosexual desire is transformed into a delusion.22
But if homosexuality, more or less latent, occupies a front rank position in ‘paranoid schizophrenia’, it plays an equally important role in the lives of so-called ‘normal’ (and hence actually schizoid) people. Nor, on the other hand, can the scope of the ‘schizophrenic’ trip be reduced to a badly tolerated gay itch – however true it is that a homoerotic desire of a certain strength, and its inhibition, can lead the ‘normal’ individual into an ‘anxiety state’, a confusion that is propitious to the ‘schizophrenic’ explosion. Analogously, in the case of a self defined gay person, a satisfying erotic relationship with a person of the opposite sex can contribute – at a certain point in life – to the onset of ‘madness.’
According to Silvano Arieti (whose opinion I share only in part),
latent homosexuality is a frequent cause of paranoid states, but it is not a necessary factor; it leads to paranoid forms not because it is an indispensable cause of the paranoid process, but because homosexuality generates major anxiety in many individuals. The latent homosexual seeks to negate their own homosexuality because this form of sexuality is not accepted by society. In certain situations, however, such as when they meet a person to whom they show a special attention, they cannot by themselves negate their emotions. They feel themselves succumbing to their real impulses, and in hopes of evading them, they can resort to psychotic negation. The loved person becomes the persecutor, as Freud has shown in the Schreber case. The patient no longer accuses themselves of the homosexual desires, but rather other persons who accuse them of horrible things, such as being a spy, for example. Parents and their symbols come anew into their frame; and they accuse the patient of being a ‘naughty child’. They are wicked, they are homosexual, they are a murderer, and a spy. All these accusations become equivocated under their emotive aspect.23
All the same, if the extraordinary ‘voyage of madness’ cannot be reduced entirely to a homosexual ma
tter, it is however true – and worth reiterating – that for heterosexuals (i.e. latent homosexuals), homosexual experience or even the simple perception of a gay desire can represent the initial (or initiating . . .) push towards a ‘schizophrenic’ trip. The fear of homosexuality that distinguishes homo normalis is also the terror of ‘madness’ (terror of oneself, of the real depths therein). So, homosexual liberation really poses itself as a bridge towards a decisively other dimension: the French, who call queers les folles [the mad], aren’t exaggerating.
If the public execration of homoeroticism denounces the general repression of desire imposed with force in neurotic society, homosexual experience presents itself as that which allows access to the unknown, to the mysterious world that is constantly present in the unconscious. Counter to Arieti, I believe that for a ‘normal’ person the flowering of homosexuality is indispensable to the determination of ‘schizophrenia’, but not the sole condition, since our depths are more than homosexual – they are transsexual, polymorphous, and they reveal themselves therefore through various experiences, as the resistances that themselves oppose its liberation are varied.
For an open homosexual, for instance, from the perspective of the explosive erotic horizon (in the sense of ‘schizophrenia’), there can be – beyond making love with women – a suite of urophilic-coprophilic experiences, and one finds also gerontophilia, pederasty, and zoophilia: what would be liberatory would be to ultimately disinhibit gay desire itself, and instead staring incest fantasies in the face, opting for tied-up masochistic slavery, for lucid sadistic pleasure and intense autoerotic concentration. What would be explosive would be exhibitionism and voyeurism with your head held high, and fetishism rediscovered beyond fetishistic alienation. What would be liberatory would be to confront the here and now, existence itself and death without trying to escape it, living in the fullness of time, with courage and also in terror, choosing risk and opposing once and for all the blinded, ‘normal’, and neurotic compulsion to repeat.
In any case, it seems pointless to me to try and establish the precise degree to which homosexuality enters into the ‘pathogenesis’ of ‘paranoia’ or ‘schizophrenia’, if one wants to call it that, when – as against the doctors – we do not consider ‘schizophrenia’ a mental sickness, but rather see it as a false premise to trace its etiology back to categories that are restricted and schizoid (because based on the dissociation between ego and id).
For the time being, we shall confine ourselves to noting how the analysis of ‘clinical cases’ of ‘paranoia’ reveals, by extension, the presence in every individual of homosexual tendencies, which can be more or less repressed in the course of life, depending on the situation. It was precisely in the context of his celebrated analysis of the Schreber ‘case’ that Freud maintained: ‘Generally speaking, every human being oscillates all through his life between heterosexual and homosexual feelings, and any frustration or disappointment in the one direction is apt to drive him over into the other’.24
And yet Freud, revealing his own limitations in the face of Schreber’s grandeur, still felt himself constrained to ask whether it was ‘not an act of irresponsible levity, an indiscretion and a calumny, to charge a man of such high ethical standing as the former Senatspräsident Schreber with homosexuality?’ No, because ‘the patient has himself informed the world at large of his phantasy of being transformed into a woman and he has allowed all personal considerations to be outweighed by interests of a higher nature’.25
It follows that Freud, despite being forced to admit the presence of both homo and hetero tendencies in every individual, deemed it basically slanderous to reveal homosexuality in the case of an individual of ‘high ethical standing’ (which presumably Freud also considered himself), unless this person made explicit reference to his own gay desires and fantasies. Freud’s thinking here shows a decisively contradictory turn. If, on the one hand, anyone can be viewed as (also) homosexual, on the other hand Freud could not escape the basic equation in which homoeroticism corresponds to a vice, an aberrant fault of which anyone can therefore be accused. This contradiction, an irrational element in the context of Freud’s lucid (if hasty) analysis of Schreber’s ‘delusion’, is historically understandable, if not justifiable, in its conformity with the morality of his time. (And it is not as if Freud’s time was so distant from our own.)
It’s funny to note how, in his correspondence with Groddeck – who always wrote him as ‘Dear Professor’ – Freud, who always responded ‘Dear colleague’, spontaneously changed ‘colleague’ for ‘Doctor’ (and wrote ‘Dear Doctor . . .’) in the reply to the letter in which Groddeck for the first time mentioned having been in love with him. Then again, Freud was no less of a repressed queer than the other famous ones.
Even though restricted by interpreting the extraordinary range of ‘schizophrenic delusion’ in terms of a ‘distortion of homosexuality’ (Ferenczi), which makes them somewhat reduced and simplistic, the analyses of paranoia by Freud and Ferenczi are almost perfectly fitted to understanding the anti-homosexual ‘paranoia’ of society and the anti-homoerotic actions of so-called ‘normal’ people. As Guy Hocquenghem has written, ‘‘‘society’’ [. . .] suffers from an interpretative delusion which leads it to discover all around it the signs of a homosexual conspiracy that prevents it from functioning properly’.26 The collective, censored, homoerotic desire is expressed under a negative sign towards us open homosexuals: the homosexual love that is socially latent is transformed into hate for us gays. It is clearly not we gay men and women who suffer from persecution mania, as it is we who are actually persecuted. It is society, rather, that maniacally believes itself threatened by our presence, which it defines as a ‘social pest’. Trying to defend themselves from ‘contamination’, and to check this ‘vice’, they attack us.
This is no paradox: the ‘paranoiacs’, the ‘schizophrenics’, the so-called ‘mad’, are in reality far less paranoid than people considered ‘normal’. And in a certain sense, the ‘schizophrenic’ conception of the world is superior, or at least less illusory, than the eknoic27 – but actually paranoic – worldview of homo normalis.
As Norman O. Brown puts it: ‘It is not schizophrenia but normality that is split-minded; in schizophrenia the false boundaries are disintegrating . . . Schizophrenics are suffering from the Truth.’28
On the other hand, to quote Wilhelm Reich:
The schizophrenic world mingles into one experience what is kept painstakingly separate in homo normalis. The ‘well adjusted’ homo normalis is composed of exactly the same type of experiences as the schizophrenic. Depth psychiatry leaves no doubt about this. Homo normalis differs from the schizophrenic only in that these functions are differently arranged. He is a well-adjusted, ‘socially minded’ merchant or clerk during the day; he is orderly on the surface. He lives out his secondary, perverse drives when he leaves home and office to visit some faraway city, in occasional orgies of sadism or promiscuity. This is his ‘middle layer’ existence, clearly and sharply separated from the superficial veneer. He believes in the existence of a personal supernatural power and its opposite, the Devil and hell, in a third group of experiences which is again clearly and sharply delineated from the two others. These three basic groups do not mingle with one another. Homo normalis does not believe in God when he does some tricky business, a fact which is reprimanded as ‘sinful’ by the priests in Sunday sermons. Homo normalis does not believe in the Devil when he promotes some cause of science; he has no perversions when he is the supporter of his family; and he forgets his wife and children when he lets the Devil go free in a brothel.29
Any ‘normal’ person, therefore, is a latent ‘schizophrenic’ just as much as a latent homosexual. But the manifest ‘schizophrenic’ experience is in the highest degree something different from ‘normal’ everyday life: it reveals what we are ‘in reality’, the universal history concentrated in us, and the transsexual and communist potential with which we are pregnant.
; The ‘Schizophrenic’ Trip and Transsexuality
Come then, my pretty Dr Faust, the mantle is spread for the flight. Forth into the Unknown . . .30
We homosexuals know how little concern is shown for those who are ‘deviant’ in the society of absolute values (even if this lack of concern presents itself as exorcism, and hence in reality a very deep concern; otherwise repression could never be so harsh). Just as homosexuality is simply considered a ‘vice’ or ‘perversion’, and dealt with accordingly, so the ‘schizophrenic’, as a general rule, is nothing but an incorrigible ‘psychopath’, to be sentenced to the lunatic asylum, or else ‘curable’ by way of ‘therapy’, this being simply the violent negation of ‘schizophrenic’ freedom, the oppression of mind and body effected by the authoritarian imposition of electric shock, drugs and ultimately lobotomy, with a view to forcibly leading the ‘patient’ back into the confines of the established Norm. The ‘schizophrenic’ must submit to the arbitrary acts of neurotic, schizoid doctors, who understand little or nothing of what they call ‘madness’. Psychiatric textbooks more or less explicitly admit as much.
The labelling of homosexuality as an ‘aberration’, or more fashionably, a ‘variation’, involves a false consciousness in dealing with its real content, recognising the vital passion that inspires it and the aspiration of human desire that it expresses. In the same way, the label of ‘psychopath’ reduces the existential universe of the ‘schizophrenic’ to a ‘clinical case’ to be condemned to imprisonment and derision (or to a pity that is cousin to this). If the homosexual is not understood, because there is neither wish nor need to understand him, and yet he is still persecuted, then the ‘schizophrenic’ is a person ‘who does not understand’, and hence acts out his forced submission to a psychiatric (or anti psychiatric)31 reason which understands everything, to the extent that it can reduce it to the worn out, banal and repressive categories of an ideological illusion passed off as ‘reality’.
