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MY FIRST READING of this contribution put me in a lovely haze compounded of the charm of the supple idiom of Irish/English English (we meet a "madman, " not a "psychotic patient"); the beauty of the imagery and allusions from a cultural world exotic to me and serving the schizophrenic experience; and, lastly, capitvation by the quality that is "Francis Kennedy's."
My fascination had some basis in the tantalizing ambiguity of the familiar-yet-unfamiliar in the "madman's searches, " and set me off on my quest for understanding it.
Francis Kennedy presents us with two vistas: one, from the standpoint of the onlooker responding to the psychotic emergency, who sees only the mysterious behaviour, like treetops of a sunken continent; the other, the inner vista of the sunken continent with the treetops only a detail. To change the image, the inner vista gives us a view of the inner unifying story with its own ordering of experience, and, as in a play, movement toward resolution of the struggle of the hero (or anti-hero). Kennedy's symbolization is purposive in its progression, with a kind of stateliness touched by creativity, which reminds me of Baron Corvo's Hadrian the Seventh. It remains for the therapist, or the reader, to harmonize the two vistas.
It is this double view which contrasts with our more usual single vision. Even as participant observer we generally have just the onlooker's view, and we do not know what the schizophrenic patient is experiencing, even when we try to penetrate the code of his symbolic communication. Our inferences and interpretation generally are once removed from the inner experience of the schizophrenic person. Rare