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Once upon a time, before psychoanalysis was born, those who were mad dictated how we were to theorize about them. “We have voices in our heads,” they said “Evil persons and evil spirits oppress us, and give us no choice but to act as we do.” And obligingly, in our preanalytic naiveté, we thought it best to agree with them
“They are possessed by demons,” we said, two hundred years ago. It seems that we used the theories of the mad to explain their madness I'm sorry to say we haven't moved very far beyond such nonexplanatory explaining. We are still ready to believe in internal demons that possess the mad, albeit demons renamed according to the current fashion. But a rose by any other name is still a rose, and calling a demon a “chemical” doesn't change anything either. The bad-chemical theory of schizophrenia is based on no evidence, although the prevailing rhetoric is that “it is becoming increasingly clear that..” Well, I've heard that chemical demon story for forty years, and nothing is clear yet I'll say a word or two about my own theories shortly.
This edited book is the latest case in point. Volkan and Akhtar have gathered for us a startling (although we should be used to it by now) cluster of strange—let's call them silly—theories, theories that merely restate what schizophrenics say about their own state of mind.
Nietzsche, Freud, and a handful of their successors tried to persuade us to do better, but I'm not sure they succeeded. It may well be that the hope for human wisdom is naive, and that self-deception and avoidance are eternal. We humans are incorrigible in our wish to find tangible pathology in others, pathology such as bad demons, bad genes, bad chemicals, and—dare I say it?—bad racial characteristics. When we see difference, is our only possible response to call it “pathology”? I say, “Stick to the words difference and suffering. Much safer.” My teacher, Karl Menninger, said that calling someone schizophrenic was no different from calling him a nigger