by Mario Mieli
As a rule, the ‘mad’ person is considered asocial. According to the psychiatrists, the ‘irrationality’ and ‘paralogical thinking’ of the schizophrenic ‘jeopardises his relationship with the community and his adjustment to it’.32 But this ‘community’ which psychiatrists speak of is the absolute negation of community. ‘In the West, with the capitalist mode of production, a stage now marked by the autonomy of exchangevalue, the last residues of community were destroyed’ (Jacques Camatte). The human community is replaced by a material (sachliches) community of things governed by capital. As Camatte goes on to say:
In reality, the movement of production presents itself as the expropriation of man and his atomisation – the production of the individual – and at the same time as the autonomising of social relations and the products of human activity, which become an oppressive power over against him: autonomisation and reification. Man is therefore separated from his community, or more precisely, this is destroyed.33
Thus it is not the community, but the totalitarian negation of community, to which the so-called ‘schizophrenic’ experience is maladapted. And if the ‘schizophrenic’, so defined, is asocial, then the homosexual too is asocial, a true social plague, since he refuses to form a family or even a straight couple according to the canons of prevailing socio-sexual law. In reality, it is the anti-homosexual taboo that leads to the negation of true community, by condemning totalising relationships between people of the same sex; it is the system that is asocial and inhuman, in as much as the real domination of capital constitutes the maximum negation of the human community in the entire course of prehistory that separates us from the dissolution of primitive communism.
It follows that the asocial result, as it is seen in the (pre)judice of dominant ideology, generally contains within it something that is profoundly human, frequently oriented towards the (re)conquest of true community. Perhaps the ‘megalomaniac delusion’ of a ‘paranoic’ grasps in solitary recognition the immense importance of the human subject and his life, and his ‘persecution complex’ shows a tragic awareness of the real persecution meted out to the human individual in capitalist society. Christ – if one may say it – rots today in the prisons and asylums.
But the time has come for general in(re)surrection, given the destruction that is heavy in the cancerous air of capital (the cloud of pollution at Seveso34 was only the first of its kind), and the life that we are forced to repress can (re)surge free and communally in its full potential. It is time to put the brakes on the engine of the system and bring it to a halt. It is time to (re)conquer the planet and ourselves, if we do not want the machine that humans constructed, and which subsequently autonomised and turned against them, to end up bringing about a complete catastrophe. Adjustment to the system means accepting the extermination that is perpetrated against us; it means making ourselves accomplices.
Time is pressing: we can no longer meekly put up with the enforced status quo, continuing to identify ourselves with a sexual Norm that is functional and consonant with it, but which divides us from one another by insisting on the condemnation of homosexuality, which divides male from female by counterposing men and women, and which divides us from ourselves because it is based on the repression of our polymorphous desire, so rich and transsexual. We need men, who are today so obtusely phallocratic, to accept that they too are pregnant with a life that is not to be aborted, a ‘femininity’ that must not be crushed by the deadly destiny of this male-dominated society. They also must – but this is a gay ‘must’ – come to establish new relations both with women and with other men, and finally to understand and uncover in themselves the half that they have always repressed, coming to express and communicate to others a new mode of being and to become gay, conscious, open and anti-capitalist. There is no longer time to act as puppets of the system, wretched clowns who take themselves so seriously in order to repress the gay life within themselves, and to oppose the revolution and the affirmation of women that is the essence, flavour and content of the revolution itself.
The new world that we bear within us, and which some of us are beginning to realise, understand and express, finds its prophets, its forerunners and its poets in the ‘mad’ women and men of both present and past, who – far from being idiots – have in fact understood too much. As Reich put it:
When we wish to obtain the truth about social facts, we study Ibsen or Nietzsche, both of whom went ‘crazy’, and not the writings of some well-adjusted diplomat or the resolutions of the communist party congresses.35
The social collective, the world, history and the universe, act and interact in the ‘schizophrenic’ trip. Existence takes on a different light, new and very old meanings are gathered in the air, in the streets, among people, in animals and plants. Consciousness expands: the ‘mad’ person begins to experience consciously a large part of what is ‘normally’ unconscious.
How exceptional are the Memoirs of the ‘paranoic’ Schreber, compared with the analysis that Freud made of them! Schreber’s ‘delusion’ expands into the great orbit of religion, history, transsexuality; it is made up of peoples and wars; it sweeps aside the customary conceptions of time and space, and fuses life with death, as Schreber actually sought to live out his own death. In the words of Gilles Deleuze:
Schreber’s Memoirs, whether paranoic or schizophrenic (it matters little), present a kind of racial, racist or historical delusion. Schreber’s delusion is one of continents, cultures and races. It is a surprising delusion, with a political, historical and cultural content.36
In actual fact, for those who know what is really meant by ‘schizophrenia’, Schreber’s Memoirs are not particularly surprising, for in any ‘voyage into madness’, the social collective, nations, and even the remote past and the cosmos are thrown into fundamental and transparent relief, which has little in common with the opaque ego-istic view of the world. Beyond the veil of Maya, many of the customary barriers between the self and others break down, both between the ego and that which is apparently ‘outside’, and between the ego and the ‘internal’ world of the unconscious. There is nothing surprising, therefore, about the Schreber ‘case’ as opposed to any other ‘delusions’; the psychonazis themselves admit that, ‘schizophrenic symptoms’ are generally extremely similar. Schreber’s experience is only surprising in comparison with the Norm, with the myopic survival of homo normalis, in the same way as are the adventures of so many other ‘mad’ people, whether present or past, who are not and never will be famous.
Deleuze is quite right, moreover, in maintaining that, in his analysis of the Schreber case, ‘Freud does not deal with anything rigorously, and reduces the judge’s delusion simply to his relationship with his father’.37 The ‘schizophrenic trip’, on the contrary, reveals how our entire ontogenesis must be understood in the light of a phylogenesis ‘projected’ from the darkness of the unconscious towards the ‘outside’, and rediscovered in other people and the environment. For in all of us, in fact, history is present – even if this is still prehistory, lying latent, because repression has forced us not to see, not to feel, and not to understand, not to recognise ourselves in others. The ego and the illusion of ‘normal reality’ are the result of the individualistic atomisation of the species, an atomisation that followed and replaced the gradually destroyed community. So-called ‘delusion’ is therefore a ‘state of grace’, since in the individual affected the desire for community reawakens and seeks to assert itself in surroundings which are hostile to it and in fact its negation.
In a text published in 1924, ‘Neurosis and Psychosis’, Freud observed that while in neurosis the ego, because of its submission to ‘reality’, represses a part of the id, in ‘psychotic’ ‘schizophrenia’ the ego, in the service of the id, withdraws from a part of ‘reality’. The ego accepts part of the id. In this case, ‘the ice of repression is cracked’ (Jung). But the id is also a ‘collective unconscious’. What surfaces to consciousness, therefore, besides all personal reminiscences, is i
n part the contents of this collective unconscious. And this, being ‘detached from anything personal [. . .] is entirely universal, and [. . .] its contents can be found everywhere’.38 It is the latent community that surfaces, and with it a certain ‘primordial effervescence’. We can understand, therefore, how ‘there exists an invisible world that is unappreciated – the true world, without doubt of which our own is simply a marginal fringe’ (Jean Cocteau).
The perception of transsexuality, one’s own and that of others, is of particular importance in the ‘schizophrenic’ trip. Just as hermaphrodism is a gateway into magic, so the ‘schizophrenic’ adventure is magical because, in this sudden and progressive change in experience, a central element proves to be the (re)discovery of that side of ourselves which Jung defined as ‘anima’ or ‘animus’. The transsexual aspiration generally remains relegated to the subconscious, and only rarely rises to the level of consciousness (Freud, for example, showed the ‘bisexual’ nature of fantasies).39 Frequently, this happens only via the mechanism of negation. But the question of transsexuality is fundamental. In the words of Harry Benjamin:
For the simple man in the street, there are only two sexes. A person is either male or female, Adam or Eve. The more sophisticated realise that every Adam contains elements of Eve and every Eve harbours traces of Adam, physically as well as psychologically.40
Although homosexuality itself ‘rests’ on the deep-rooted conception of and belief in the differences between the sexes, we gays are still in a position giving better access to a conscious validation of transsexual fantasies, of the transsexual ‘nature’ of desire. There is of course more than a short distance between here and Casablanca.41 But in the ‘schizophrenic’ trip, all the same – in particular when undertaken by conscious homosexuals – the transsexual fantasy is transformed into the overwhelming effective experience of transsexuality. If we can take up the words of Jesus according to the Gnostic Saint Thomas, then one day ‘the two shall be one, and the outside shall resemble the inside, and there shall no longer be either male or female’. From being latent, transsexuality now becomes manifest.
Plato already taught that it was only by way of madness or mania that man could come to discern the truth of Love;42 and in the Symposium, when Socrates speaks of Love, he quotes the wise woman Diotima of Mantinea.43 Through this intervention, the language of philosophy was fused with the Eleusian mysteries; just as in the Phaedrus, the incantation Socrates speaks in praise of Love is completely full of mystical tones, the revelations of mythology and a poetry inspired by the divinity of the countryside and of nature.44 In the same way, the ‘schizophrenic’ mystery rises to the highest peak of the truth of love.
I believe that if we are to try and overcome the limits of our rationalistic discourse on sexuality, we have to approach the erotic themes and contents of ‘schizophrenia’; the erotic desire is a thousand times higher than the limitations of our intellectual conception of love, made up of ‘romantic’ themes (in the broad sense) and psychoanalytic categories, chained by the chastened and alienating functions of monosexuality and the repression of all other tendencies of desire. Such limitations risk leading us to foresee the stabilisation of an illusory peaceful coexistence between the sexes and between heterosexuality and homosexuality, falling back into the gloomy perspectives of latter-day bourgeois enlightenment. If the minority of open gays can unveil such hidden truth as to the ‘nature’ of the human being and our underlying desires, what profound truth on the human universe and the full significance of sexuality is disclosed by the experience of the ‘mad’?
The classical conceptual categories, and the everyday language in which these are expressed, are ill suited to describe the sensations and experiences of ‘madness’. For not only does the ‘schizophrenic’ often know and feel himself hermaphrodite or in the process of becoming so, at times he also discerns hermaphrodism in the people around him. If he is in contact with heterosexual couples, for example, he may find himself suddenly picking up their intimate and astonishing ‘fusion’; on the telephone, a woman speaking to him about her husband can to his ears gradually but distinctly change her voice into that of the husband. She ‘is’ her husband, since he exists within her. The ‘mad’ person perceives how other people (un)veil their own transsexuality. He understands the extent to which their conscience is a bad conscience, is unfaithful, since in his presence they pretend not to know what they show themselves to be. And since, as a general rule, they behave repressively towards him, the ‘schizophrenic’ can also conclude that they mistreat him because they repress themselves, because there is a mysterious law that threatens them, and in the service of which they act.
Perhaps I have tended to generalise from an experience of my own, which, after a varied trajectory, brought me into clinics for the ‘mentally ill’ some two years ago. True; it is wrong to generalise; and yet I feel that I have lived situations that are true, in as much as they contain within them something universal. And this is why I have exceeded what are considered the ‘normal’ bounds of extrapolation and generalisation.
The serious problem for me, rather, is to maintain in retrospect the reality I lived so strongly at that time. Other people invariably oppose this as a pit full of vain hallucinations, though in actual fact everything presented itself to me as fully evident, clear and irresistible. If life in the ‘society of the spectacle’ is a stage production, then I have refused to perform. For I had a vision of the extraordinary scope of existence, the richness which this absurd social constriction prevents us from naturally enjoying.
Today, far too often, we are all forced in part to perform, forced into that ‘normal’ hypocrisy that enables us to go around ‘freely’. If this book is worth little, that is due above all to the falseness that is difficult to avoid in writing, being necessarily reproduced in daily life. All the same, as a friend said to me, it is more important to go forth than to drag along; in my case, this means proceeding coherently with my ‘madness’, with that which, once revealed, it is impossible to deny, and which forces us to live for the best. Didn’t Freud say that the superego represents the unconscious and becomes the spokesman of its demands in consciousness?45
The transsexual sentiment was one of the reasons, and also one of the results, of a gradual alteration in my perceptions of my body and mind, of the ‘external’ world and other people. At times I felt myself really a woman, at times spiritually pregnant, at other times the reincarnation of a woman. Besides, to use a certain jargon, my hidden fantasies, and with these the ‘archetypes’ of the collective unconscious, became ‘projected’ – or were rather encountered – ‘outside’; the ‘schizophrenic’ experience enabled me to grasp many of the secrets hidden behind the recurring representations of the ‘normal’ past. Routine was shattered, and the repetition compulsion beaten. I could sense in any single act of the day the interaction between freedom of choice and ‘conditioning’, between myself, things and other people. The meaning of sexual attraction became brilliantly clear; it was the first sign and the most evident expression of intersubjectivity. Desire was sensual and candid, in turns humorous and serious, disgusting and consuming.
At the same time, the European metropolis seemed to me like a Mecca, its people entranced and terrified. Coincidences and surprises multiplied, and my hesitations when confronted with magical phenomena declined in the face of disconcerting evidence, sure encounters in which I realised fantasies that I had believed I had for ever to abandon to ‘reality’. ‘Reality’ was replaced by truth.
‘Madness’ is materialist. To investigate the truths of what lies below, and, suspending prejudices without – yet – jettisoning them, to confront them with the succession of actual facts (Ferenczi saw materialism as the prototype of ‘paranoiac’ philosophy).46 In the process, sensitivity grows more refined.
As Edgar Allen Poe put it: ‘And now have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over acuteness of the senses?’47 The transsexual perception is double: it d
iscovers that the majority of people are at least half-buried. The city looks like the realm of the living dead. And yet other people’s faces reflect the divine along with the ghosts and demons. In nature, in the sky, and in other people, the ‘mad’ person contemplates himself and the grandeur of life, without anyone else seeing within him. The unconscious sees itself…
Freud’s references to the unconscious are far too close to Kant’s utterances on the noumen, the thing-in-itself that is assumed but cannot be experienced. But the ‘thing-in-itself, the truth, can be experienced. It is only ‘narrow-minded and ignorant people [who] take the profound as if it were uncouth, and relegate the marvellous to the realm of fiction’.48
If the non-ego can be taken to embrace both the id and the ‘external’ world, then ‘mad’ people demonstrate how awareness of the underneath bridges individuality and the barriers between ego and non-ego. Once the dual separation of both the ‘external’ world and the id from the ego is overcome, then it is clear that the ego is ‘normally’ nothing but an oppressive barrier (in as much as it is the product of oppression and based on repression) between our underneath and the cosmos. The id (the internal non-ego) and the ‘external’ world (the external non-ego) mutually illuminate one another, since they are always reciprocally determined. And if the ‘schizophrenic delusion’ is seen as solipsist (in the sense of the solipsistic or quasi-solipsistic doubt that is at times experienced), this is not a product of ‘megalomania’ or an accentuated individualism, but rather of the lack of a vital response on the part of others to the ‘mad’ person’s need for communication and direct community. If other people insist on forcing him into their own dissociated and ‘normal’ individuality, then to the eyes of the ‘schizophrenic’ they may well all appear, from time to time, ‘people made of shadows’.
