Psychotic Symbol use and Nonhuman Identities

Studies of Symbolic Thinking encompass widespread fields of inquiry in philosophy, linguistics, and mythology. My interest in this broad subject lies in the psychoanalytic understanding of the use of symbols in borderline and schizophrenic psychopathology. The concept of symbol use refers to freedom from concrete thinking that permits the abstract investment of commonplace feelings and experience with imaginative, linguistic significance. Both schizophrenic and borderline individuals with signs of thought disorder rely on forms of concrete thinking that indicate limitations in distinguishing differences between the literal and the metaphorical. Schizophrenic patients with a florid thought disorder reveal greater lapses in abstraction ability and a psychotic use of symbols in which language may lose its communicative value.

The eradication of psychological boundaries in psychotic identity disturbance is commensurate with the far-reaching relinquishment of the ability to differentiate internal from external, self from other, and human from nonhuman. The concept of identity disturbance thus signifies either the lack of distinction between self and nonself, or the erosion of one's conviction about possessing a clearly delineated, personal human identity. The term “identity loss” reflects relatively severe forms of each type of identity disturbance. In some psychosis-prone borderline and schizophrenic personalities, reality-testing impairments are accompanied not only by deteriorations in symbolic thinking, but by delusional beliefs about the absence of a discrete, permanent human identity and the presence of a partially animal or other nonhuman identity. Although fantasies about becoming an animal are common in childhood and in totemic societies, there has been relatively little psychoanalytic literature concerning delusional beliefs about being part animal. Such concrete, presymbolic thinking involves underlying relational patterns of primitive anxiety.