COMMENTARIES
In Defense of Psychosis
Kendra TERRY
William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) was a novelist, artist, occultist and gun aficionado.
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 of the self. We reach from the known towards the unknown, from ourselves towards our lover, from the actual towards the possible, and “beauty spins and the mind moves” (Carson p. xi). 16
DIVISION | R E V I E W
SUMMER 2023
In psychosis, what we find is a similar edge. Psychosis pushes up against the edge at which “the soul parts on itself in desire [and] is conceived as a dilemma of body and senses” (Carson, p. 7). The psychotic individual reaches across the in-between space where breath breaches the boundary that separates internal from external, self from other, and temporarily exists in the space where metaphor conjoins the two in hallucination. An edge that marks the periphery of a standard of normal. An edge that, if they cross, they enter into a sort of parallax of consciousness. A revolt against the skin that surrounds them, the intersubjectivity that engages them, the self that binds them. The edges of a razor just as sharp and just as fragile. But what if there were an in-between space that were like the swimming pool of a synapse, in which the individual in psychosis could float between the action and reaction of its correspondence? And what if it were an edge upon which, if they could temper it, they could find the very edge of themselves? To some, psychosis may appear as neuronal firings gone awry, random and loose, or
