In Defense of Psychosis

It was Bedlam all over again. Foucault's pendulum had swung too far and, again, we failed to evolve.

The first thing you notice when you walk into a psychiatric inpatient unit are the patients loitering by the door, pacing back and forth, like broken wind-up G.I. Joe figurines. Once fighting, now relegated to the circular motion of group therapy, Saran-wrapped sandwiches, and vital signs in perpetuity. A door locked to all those without a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in their back pocket, abridged and boorish. A door with signs like “ELOPEMENT DANGER!” and “XXX.” You walk in farther and you see nurses trailing patients, patients like kids all over again, infantile, stripped of their freedom, needing to be watched over, tended to, told NO, shown how to live.

When we think of “madness,” we are thinking of psychosis. In psychosis, we see a breakdown between subject and object; internal events are projected onto the outside, interpreted as if they belong to an external entity, whether it be to God, the government, or the rotation of the world itself. What if, however, the psychotic individual's sense of what is real were not reduced, cavalierly, to psychopathology? What if the seeming loss of contact with an external reality so characteristic of psychosis in fact put them in contact with the subtle, the vital, the real?

In Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson (1986) talks about edges. It is at the edge of oneself where one finds romantic love, desire, eros. “Eros is an issue of boundaries. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive…. The experience of eros as lack alerts a person to the boundaries of himself, of other people, of things in general” (Carson, p. 30). What Carson evokes specifically here is an act of reaching, of going beyond the boundary