As a follow-up to my previous post, I started looking around in the books on my shelf, and came across Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Surprisingly, in that book, he only talks about the concept of the ego once or twice. The main time is actually in regards to schizophrenia, and how it is a condition (or threat) of ego loss. He quotes a psychiatric patient who wrote:

When I am ill, I lose the sense of where I am. I feel ‘I’ can sit in the chair, and yet my body is hurtling out and somersaulting about three feet in front of me.

It is really very hard to keep conversations with others because I can’t be sure if others are really talking or not and if I am really talking back.

Gradually I can no longer distinguish how much of myself is in me, and how much is already in others. I am a conglomeration, a monstrosity, modeled anew each day.

My ability to think and decide and will to do is torn apart by itself. Finally, it is thrown out where it mingles with every other part of the day and judges what it has left behind. Instead of wishing to do things, they are done by something that seems mechanical and frightening … the feeling that dwell with a person is outside longing to come back and yet having taken with it the power of the return.

Jaynes’ theorizes that what we know of as consciousness is a rather later development in history, rather than having originated at some primal point in nature. He posits that ancient man “heard voices” which they took to be gods which informed their daily actions. It’s pretty interesting, although I prefer the model of this phenomenon which I outlined elsewhere in more detail in relation to the monotheistic & polytheistic theories of the mind.

Anyway, I was just thinking how weird it is that in western thinking (especially contemporary), that ego loss - going crazy, schizophrenia, etc) is seen as one of the most tragic things that can happen to you. But then you have entire systems of Eastern philosophy, the goal of which are to systematically dismantle or overcome the ego (especially through withering its instrument, desire). I guess it’s the classic mystic vs. madman thing. Perhaps part of the difference is that mystics are able to handle ego loss, and come back and communicate, whereas madmen are not. It’s been a while since I read Jaynes’ book, and I forget whether or not he goes into this dichotomy, but I think it’s a pretty important one to look into.

In the meantime, I have some other posts which deal with schizophrenia from a few different angles:

1. Marijuana linked to schizophrenia - and bullshit medical studies (and also a related article)
2. Schizophrenia definitions
3. Shamanism & schizophrenia
4. Sluggishly progressing schizophrenia
5. Terence McKenna’s Schizophrenia as a vortex

Also, while we’re on the topic, I found this really cool quote about schizophrenia a while back. The page it comes from doesn’t give much of any context for the quote, but I think it has to do with those Deleuze & Guattari dudes:

Literally, the fractal mind. A logos that affirms multiplicity and the occupation of all possible points. The schizophrenic is like the electron : if we predict the position, we cannot predict the velocity ; if we predict the velocity, we cannot predict the position. Like a nomad travelling through smooth space, the schizophrenic, like the electron in an electron cloud, may appear anywhere within the field, occuping all positions while singularly fluctuating between positions aleatorily. Schizophrenia is a Cageian simultaneity of happenings : the nose runs, the mouth babbles, the hands fiddle, the eyes roll, the feet shuffle, the diaphragm laughs or hiccups, the anus fars, the Eucalyptus adds its scent to the moment, the moon at that angle in the sky … Schizophrenia is a process of compiling lists and letting go of syntax. Social schizophrenia is a simultaneity of spontaneities, a flux of ad-hoc organizings of activity, a surrealist engagement of “collective self-management” as the transtruction [ construction - deconstruction process] of dissipative structures. All of this is distinguished from clinical schizophrenia, which is alienated, repressed schizophrenia isolated from desiring-production and collective creativity. Liberated schizophrenia is schizophrenia that has come into its own as an Escherian, topological celebration of fractal generativity!

[I like that thing about compiling lists.]