#dionysis

The first-rank symptoms include various hallucinations or delusions in which patients lose a normal sense of owning or controlling their actions, sensations, or thoughts-as when patients feel that all their inner experiences are under the control or scrutiny of some other being, or even that someone other than themselves is actually thinking their thoughts or looking out through their very eyes.

"Then I realized why I was studying his face so closely," writes Barbara O'Brien in Operators and Things, an autobiographical account of her schizophrenic illness. "Hinton was tuned in on my mind and was studying the analyst's face through my eyes."

Schizophrenic patients may also believe, for instance, that what appear to be other human beings are really phantoms or cleverly designed machines quite devoid of any real consciousness, or that the entire universe is responding to each peristaltic movement of their intestines.

Jaspers speaks of "metaphysical delusions" that reflect experience of a shattering of the self, or a sense that the universe itself is in some imminent danger or has even ceased to exist. Schizophrenics may believe that they have invented everything they encounter-that, for example, they themselves have invented the story they have just read.

One patient claimed that he used to be a drawing in a book but had finally escaped and come to the hospital. Another declared that he contained within his own body all the heavenly bodies while also maintaining that these heavenly bodies simultaneously existed in the outer world. Such delusions are not explicable as wish-fulfillment fantasies-at least not readily so-for even if they do, at some level, involve intense wishes, the wishes themselves seem in need of considerable elucidation before they can be empathically understood or can play an explanatory role.

Nor is the characteristic tone or atmosphere of many such delusions consistent with the psychoanalytic interpretation of regression to a primitive or Dionysian form of consciousness. For one thing, the famous "flat affect" observed in so many schizophrenics, as well as the devitalized and derealized quality that often permeates their experiential world, hardly suggests a regressed state charged with the energy and vitality of the primary process.

According to Eugen Bleuler, "schizophrenics can write whole autobiographies without manifesting the least bit of emotion. They will describe their suffering and their actions as if it were a theme in physics.'

Dionysus: God of Wine, Madness and Ecstasy

Dionysus kids 🍇Don’t care what other people think 🍇Excellent cooks 🍇Commit to the bit 🍇Will randomly drop off the face of the earth with no explanation

Xmas time is coming ✨

This is my first piece in my gods and skulls series!! This is a jaguar for Dionysus (if you couldn’t tell) 🍇

He looked up. “What do you mean?”

“You have five sons and a wife on Naxos,” I said. “We all grow older, day by day. You know this and yet you leave us, time after time. Why do you seek the love of the world when you have us only for our brief lifetimes? Why must you seek to force a city into submission while your sons’ childhoods drift into dust, nothing but memories that you cast aside?”

He was quiet for a long time. He poured more wine and drank it with a silent urgency, an intent I had never noticed before. “You do not understand what being a god means,” he said, at length.

“It means you will have an eternity after we are gone. Perhaps you should think of that,” I said softly.

His head snapped up toward me. “I think of nothing else!” He stood, looking too tall for the small space, all of a sudden a caged creature, restless and prowling its confines. “Being a god and loving mortals means nothing more than watching them die. I know that all too well. Every time I see my children learn a new skill, acquire a new word, take another step away from us, I see their shadows drifting in Hades’ halls years from now, beyond my reach. You as well—one day nothing but smoke and ashes.” The passion in his voice subsided, but his words remained just as cruel. “Can you blame me for thinking it better to garner the love of a thousand mortals instead, to hold the adoration of a city instead of one consort’s frail, mortal flesh?”