Schizophrenia: The Shaman SicknessThe path is always lonely and demanding for those called to shamanism, and doubly so for those who must contend with Western culture's refusal to accept the overwhelming reality of the disturbing realms of vision and torment in which these potential shamans dwell. Along with having to endure the loss of ego stability, hence the frightening blurring of outer and inner realites, sufferers of schizophrenia are often forced to contend with psychiatric notions, ruled by the Apollonian myth of reason, monotheism and normality, which demand that such "deviant" Dionysian states be subdued with medication, or punished with incarceration in mental institutions.
The schizophrenic's reason and senses, like those of the shaman during initiation, are assaulted by concrete revelations of the heights and depths of the vast Otherworlds of the collective unconscious. Simultaneously, the schizophrenic is forced to slot into the sometimes petty humdrum and routine of daily existence. The invasion of the ego by archetypal forces transforms the individual profoundly and irreversibly; no-one who has endured such a crisis can confine the expanded horizons of their consciousness to the tame boundaries of cultural norms. Yet instead of encouraging and bolstering the development of such transcendental levels of awareness, mainstream psychiatry seeks - out of fear of the unknown, the unconscious, the numinous, the irrational and the abnormal - to stifle it under the euphemistic and patronising guise of 'treatment'.
The schizophrenic, being intensely introverted is automatically poorly adapted in a society which narrowly defines personal identity in terms of appearance, behaviour and social status. S/he lives in a discontinuous reality which can become a terrifying bombardment of overlapping realities, voices and chaotic perceptions. Everything takes on mythical overtones. The players in the archetypal dramas are often gods who are potentially both benevolent and destructive. Mainstream psychiatry deals with this overload by numbing the mind and trying to force the individual to readjust to cultural norms. At the same time, the "patient" is robbed of a unique mode of learning that many schizophrenics sense to be immensely valuable and worth pursuing. And unfortunately the law is in the psychiatrists' hands to take away what others treasure as an experience of the awesome power of the sacred.
Soul Loss & the Land of the Dead
If the schizophrenic is overwhelmed and debilitated by experiences on which the mystic thrives, the shaman treads, or rather hops along a multidirectional path between centred focus and woundedness, fragmentation and soul pathology. In shamanic ecstatic trance, the ego is not submerged but rather deliberately and temporarily displaced, destabilised or disempowered for the purpose of trance-journeying. The schizophrenic's loss of ego, however, does not parallel the mature and responsible shaman's subsequent healing vocation; it is rather akin to shamanic initiation, which can be quite traumatic or devastating,
As Jung notes, activation of the Land of the Dead is often associated with soul loss. In 1916, shortly before his uncanny experience of a band of spirits from ancient Jerusalem visiting his home and ringing the doorbell, Jung wrote down a fantasy of his soul having flown away from him. Since the soul as anima is mediatrix to the unconscious, in a sense she relates as well to the realm of the dead, since the unconscious corresponds to the ancestral, mythic land of the dead. Hence if one fantasises about the soul vanishing, it means that it has withdrawn into the unconscious as the land of the dead. Here, as Jung notes, it produces an animation which gives visible forms to the ancestral traces, this giving the dead a chance to manifest themselves. Soon after the disappearance of Jung's soul, the dead appeared to him and the result was his Seven Sermons to the Dead, written in the person of his (then) spirit guide, the Gnostic scholar Basilides. Jung considered this to be an instance of loss of soul, which, as he notes, is a phenomenon often found among primitives. (4)
Interestingly, one eulogy for Jung contained the remark that he was a schizophrenic who healed himself, precisely the definition of an initiated shaman. Indeed, a discussion of the blatant shamanic elements of Jung's life forms a fascinating study in itself. Briefly and broadly, I'll mention here his converse with his spirit guides, which included a Wise Old Man figure, Philemon, and later his attendant, the blind girl Salome; his detailed and vivid familiarity with the landscapes of the collective unconscious, his shamanic ability to help others navigate this potentially dangerous terrain, his prophetic and sometimes disturbingly powerful dreams and visions, his early fear of madness and his double personality, his shamanic dream of becoming a woman, and his initiatiory midlife crisis that began with his taking a courageous plunge alone into the Abyss.
Jung, although he does not denigrate shamanism, nonetheless views it early in his career as an expression of a primitive consciousness which views soul as external, or projected, while contemporary therapists tend to focus on psyche as an inner structure and dynamic. But these either-or perspectives are, I suggest, both inadequate spatial metaphors, or verbal conventions that say little about how we and the World actually experience soul. Jung's later experiences, for instance, betray his own externalization of soul, as is revealed when he recounts in his autobiography that he feels at times 'spread out over the landscape and inside things and am myself living in every tree, in the plashing of the waves, in the clouds and animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons . . .' Further on, Jung ends his autobiography with the confession that 'plants, animals, clouds, day and night' fill him such that he feels a 'kinship with all things.'(5)
If, then, individuation does not shut one out from the world but rather gathers the world to itself, so soul-making gathers the individual to all-pervasive soul, anima mundi expanding into the even more inclusive sphere of unus mundus. Here, through the explosion of the isolated ego, soul's diffusive movement outward meets soul's infusive movement from outer to inner as the two merge in an imaginal Cosmos, whose Centre, as all shamans know (through 'gnosis'), is everywhere.
Schizophrenia as InitiationMany diagnosed schizophrenics will deny that their condition is primarily an illness:
"It certainly feels more like an initiation of some kind," expands Chris. "For all the pain it has brought me, I wouldn't be without it, as it has made me so much more aware of a lot of things."
Another example: Sadie had graduated from university not long before succumbing to schizophrenia at the age of 24.
"I could say that it happened overnight, that I suddenly found myself in an intensely strange, terrifying yet beautiful place; but it would also be true that it had been coming to a head for some time. I'd had a strange sense that it was going to happen for many years, and had read fairly widely on the subject, but as it turned out, nothing really could have prepared me for it when it did finally come. I was more lost than I ever would have thought it possible to be."
Friends and family were disturbed by the change that came over her, and within two months she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
"The last thing I wanted was to go there. The way I felt at the time, I felt it would destroy me to go in there, but I was powerless to resist. I'd lost the ability to express myself - words held too much meaning. I would listen to something as banal as a football match commentary, and to me it would be the story of the last battle of the gods. Everything was so vast, so deeply mythological. I'd see the arcane history of the world in everything, every little detail would hold another clue, and I was trying to hold all this information together, launched upon a mythic quest that terrified and excited me in ways far more real, far more vivid, than my life ever had up to that point."
Sadie later added:
"Yet as a direct result of my experiences, I've been able to pull my friends out of psychoses which otherwise would have held them fast. Shamans are able to make it through the confusion because there are older shamans who have been there themselves, and can help them. I have a few friends who are diagnosed with schizophrenia, and we all feel this way."
But if there are medications that will help the schizophrenic to function again, why don't they want to take them? Why are they so distrustful of the medical profession?
"To be honest, I don't think your average psychiatrist really has a clue," said Chris, a little guardedly. "My psychiatrist has never even read any Jung. It's impossible for me to respect that, and dangerous for me to allow him to administer drugs that affect my mind. It is, after all, my mind. My medication makes me very lethargic, but I'm bullied into taking it, and my appeals to reduce it, gradually, aren't considered. People are horrified at the thought of Medieval tooth-pullers, and I think as we learn more about the mind, in years to come people will feel much the same way about our psychiatrists. My doctor kept trying to make me believe that the things I was seeing and hearing and feeling were delusions, whatever he thought he meant by that. But what I was experiencing was real, in the truest sense of the word. The experiences of schizophrenics are incredibly similar to each other."
Sadie's thoughts ran along similar lines.
"The doctors are just on the look-out for symptoms that match what it says in their medication manuals . . . My medication made me sluggish. I wasn't myself. I was existing, but not living . . . . If I complained, or questioned the way I was being treated, my behaviour became, in the eyes of the doctors and nurses, symptomatic of the schizophrenia. There was no way I could win. I made a decision to gradually phase myself off the medication that had been forced on me, although I was very afraid to do so."
"I still see and hear things though. In fact, it is largely through characters I have met in my dreams that I have been able to work out how to help myself. In other words, by immersion in what I have been experiencing, rather than trying to block it out."
Drum healing is also helpful:
"I think it's the beat, the rhythm", adds Chris. It does wonderful things to your mind. Since I started dancing in this way, I haven't felt the need to take any kind of drug. I'd love to get a group of people together to visit schizophrenics and all sit round in a circle somewhere playing hand drums, bongos and whatever. Methods like this have been used for thousands of years to pull people out of psychoses. I think we need to try more ways of helping these people to get their lives back. I know it can work - I have my life back, better than ever. And it's all the more precious for having gone away."
More here:
http://www.jungcircle.com/embrace.html"
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