#mishara

The very act of thinking about or reflecting requires a splitting of the "I" (Ichspaltung) into an currently thinking or reflecting "I" and a reflected (already past!) "me." When we are caught up in perceiving or experiencing things, there is a loss of self (Selbstverlorenheit), a naiveté about our role in constructing the experience: "Admittedly, the moment I begin to reflect, the naïve perceiving by the self-forgetting I is already past. I am only able to grasp this by reaching back - in the reflecting - into what has 'remained in consciousness' as retention, an immediate memory which attaches itself backwards to the original experience" (Husserl,  my translation and emphases). I am able to reflect on my original naïve self-forgetting which is absorbed in the experiencing only because the I itself has 'split' (Ichspaltung) into a reflecting I and the object of its reflection, the naïve I just previously engrossed in experiencing (i.e., the self now as object or "me"). The splitting or objectifying of one's subjectivity as past is passive and occurs automatically. It is not ...that reflection "introduces" the splitting.

Broad and sweeping general statements have been made about Kafka and modernism. For example, Kafka, has been called "the representative writer of our century" (Karl), but, given Kafka's documented proclivities for social isolation, we ask representative for whom? Similarly, Sass calls Kafka "a figure representative of the age," and "one of the most representative of twentieth century writers." Nevertheless, Sass also makes the highly controversial remark ... that Kafka presents "the most vivid evocation of schizophrenic experience in all of Western literature." That is, according to Sass, Kafka is both modern (representative of the age) and depicts the schizophrenic condition. He is characterized by Apollonian "detachment" and "indifference," which, for Sass, is shared by both modernism and schizophrenia. Unlike Sass, I make no effort, apart from Kafka's possible cluster headaches, to diagnose Kafka on the basis of his literary work. However, to the extent that we consider the problem according to Nietzsche's Apollonian vs. Dionysian opposition, there is no doubt on which side of this dilemma Kafka himself stands. Kafka writes, "What are you building? - I want to dig a subterranean passage. Some progress must be made. My station up there is much too high. We are digging the pit of Babel." That is, building = writing (as in "The Burrow") cannot be achieved from the lofty heights of reflective awareness (as we have seen from Kafka's "The Bridge"). There is no reflective distance here. Kafka's preoccupation with the self's depths (as already suggested by the symbolism of the mirror in his story "Unhappiness") was not born from Apollonian, detached reflection of hyper-concentration, what Merleau-Ponty describes as an "aerial perspective." It was also not born from a putatively buried, tacitly functioning, but also neurobiologically implausible "operative" hyper-reflexivity. Rather, Kafka describes his own writing as a Dionysian descent in which the self becomes dissolved in its own origins (i.e., according to the symbolism of rebirth, which the "twice born" Dionysus himself experienced). For Kafka, writing is a trancelike Dionysian activity at night opening the endless inner darkness of self as an abyss without bottom. Recall Kafka's own descriptions of the writing process, e.g., "From the depths I would drag it up! Without effort!," or, "All I possess are certain powers which, at a depth inaccessible under normal conditions, shape themselves into literature ..." or that it is "not alertness but self-oblivion [that] is the precondition of writing," and cited above. Here, self-depiction in art hardly takes an Apollonian turn (in the sense of Sass' concept of hyper-reflexivity). In Kafka's stories, "A Dream," "A Hunger Artist," and "The Burrow," digging into or merging back into the earth exerts an insuppressible attraction on the protagonist. The burrowing into earth, the (endless) inner journey of the self as underworld in the short stories ... is a Dionysian attempt to access the self from inside in terms of its inner depths (Kurz, Mishara), not the Apollonian perspective or the detached aerial view of hyper-reflection.

Sass appropriates Bleuler's concept "doublebookkeeping" as the schizophrenia patient's ability to function in both the everyday world shared with others, and the world of the delusions and hallucinations. For example, a delusional patient claims that she is being poisoned and yet, continues to eat the hospital food. Sass explains that the patient does not act on the delusions and hallucinations because they are "felt by the patient to exist only 'in the mind's eye," that is, what Sass calls the hyper-reflexivity of "an Apollonian illness." Citing Sechehaye's Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl, Sass defines this Apollonian illness: "... many schizophrenic patients describe the world of psychosis as a place not of darkness but of relentless light - light being the natural metaphor for conscious awareness... [and then citing Sechehaye] 'where reign(s) an implacable light, blinding, leaving no place for shadow' (my insertion). Sass writes: "In my view, the experience of many schizophrenic patients involves not an overwhelming by but a detachment from normal forms emotion and desire, not a loss but an exacerbation of various forms of self-conscious awareness." It is hard to imagine how such Apollonian "relentless light" could become automatic or unconscious in so-called operative hyper-reflexivity when it is a metaphor for conscious awareness itself. Sass continues that in such an illness, there is "not an overwhelming by but detachment from the instinctual sources of vitality, not immersion in the sensory surround but disengagement from a derealized external world, not stuporous waning from awareness." In contrast, I have proposed that Berze, Conrad, Binswanger, Blankenburg, Ey, Straus and numerous other psychiatrists in the phenomenological tradition (with regard to whom Louis Sass claims, incorrectly I believe, direct lineal descent) describe schizophrenia completely differently as a Dionysian illness. For example, the phenomenological psychiatrist Conrad characterizes the paranoid delusional patient in a world between waking and sleeping, "a world of fluctuating Gestalten, concerning which up to this point the poet has much more knowledgeable things to say than the psychologist" (my translation). As schizophrenia for Conrad is a being "caught between sleep and wakefulness," double bookkeeping is not some intellectual indulgence, an intensifying of intact rational or attentional processes, an ability to detach and participate willy-nilly in two worlds by straddling them. Rather, as in the disorder sleep paralysis, the patient is simultaneously aware of two "realities," the compelling reality of her hypnagogic hallucinations or felt presences (from which the patient is unable to critically detach) on the one hand, and the world of her awake life on the other. Caught somewhere in between, it is not that she belongs to both worlds but to none, and tries unsuccessfully to find her way back. By comparing the experiences of schizophrenia with sleep paralysis, I am not endorsing the so-called "rapid eye-movement (REM) hypothesis" of schizophrenia, but rather that schizophrenia, like dreaming, hypnagogic or autoscopic hallucinations involves a disengagement or reduction of what cognitive neuroscience calls conscious controlled processing, not its exacerbation (whether reflective or pre-reflective, controlled or automatic, top down or bottom up, or whatever other variant of his hyper-reflexivity concept Sass wishes to claim). Experimental and neuroimaging results with schizophrenia patients decidedly do not support the "Apollonian" interpretation.

Narrative is the ability to frame imaginary time within real time. By focusing and narrowing the audience's or even the narrator's attention on scenes in imaginary time (i.e., away from the present context of embodied-sensory experiencing), narrative induces a trancelike state.