How is the loss of equilibrium between the economic and the symbiotic modes of relation manifested, to the detriment of the latter? Mainly through the establishment of anaesthesia of feeling, and consequently with hypertrophy of the rational faculties to compensate for lacks in the affective field.
A mentally ill person can be recognized by their weak empathetic ability (although they can arouse strong emotional involvement, through psychotic induction arising from their denied emotive component) and through rejection of any possibility of a symbiotic relationship. It is usually defined as an impenetrable wall of selfishness. Indeed the person seems only worried about himself, but the fact is that he is not able to invest affectivity which is not available to him, in anything or in anyone.
This means that he is considered bad, or worse, dishonest and criminal. Instead the person is ill; seeing symptoms of illness instead of manifestations of an interior evil in his deviant behaviour is the first step in effecting a cure.
"Now we can better understand - wrote Séchéhaye in the introduction to the book mentioned above - that schizophrenia consists in a disassociation between affectivity, which is deeply disturbed by loss of contact with life, and intelligence which remains unchanged and which, like a film camera operator, registers everything that takes place. Naturally, there are periods in the illness where the stuporal state is accentuated and where indifference is such that it does not enable perceptions to be fixed in mnemonic traces".
The psychoanalyst was clearly right when she noticed that in every psychotic, and also Renée, affectivity was "profoundly disturbed". She attributed the cause though to "loss of contact with reality".
Our scientific research shows that precisely the opposite occurs: the affectivity of psychotics is "profoundly disturbed", in other words almost totally blocked, by anaesthesia of feeling, whereby the ill person manages to render himself insensitive to emotional pain (in the same way that the production of endorphin anaesthetizes physical pain). The result is that the overall perception of reality is limited to rational data, while all affective data are lost. The "loss of contact with reality" is therefore the consequence of the anaesthesia on affectivity.
Deprived of perception through affectivity, the world takes on a completely different aspect from what we are used to. Just as a fruit, deprived of water when freeze-dried, loses its identity, taking on the appearance of dust, so the world around, deprived of the affective data that hold it together in an overall unity, appears to the psychotic to be devoid of meaning.
Here is the description given by the author of "Diary of a Schizophrenic" of how reality devoid of feeling appears to her. "During the lessons - writes Renée on page 10 - in the silence of the classroom, I heard noises coming from the street: a tram, people talking, the neigh of a horse, a horn, and it seemed to me that each of these noises detached itself from its object to remain carved in the air, immobile and without meaning. Around me, my companions with their heads bent forward, seemed to be bundles or puppets operated by an invisible mechanism; the teacher talking, gesticulating, writing on the board, also seemed a grotesque puppet. And always that overwhelming silence, interrupted only by noises from the street, from afar, and that pitiless sun heating the classroom, and that immobility without life. A boundless fear gripped me; I felt like screaming. Sometimes unreality surprised me early in the morning while I went to school. Suddenly the street stretched out endlessly and white under the light of the sun; people bustled here and there like swarms of insects, the cars travelled in all directions without aim and in the distance I heard the persistent sound of a bell".
The description of this world where every behaviour, everything, every sound loses meaning, and people appear like insects, or puppets moving like automatons, for no specific reason, is that of a world without love, which stretches out like a desert before the mentally ill person who, to protect himself from emotional pain, has had to renounce all feeling.
It is surprising how lucidly Renée is aware of all this, and with how much precision, clarity and simplicity she manages to communicate when she writes on page 27: "These people who in reality had acted for a specific purpose, with a precise motive, were emptied of their soul and devoid of their meaning; of them nothing remained except for a body manipulated like an automaton, without emotions and feelings. All this was terrible".
But again it must be repeated that psychotics develop remarkable rational faculties to compensate for their lack of access to feeling; and also that, given the particular view of things that they have, reality deprived of feelings seems like an x-ray, and enables them to isolate in this way details which are not particularly obvious to others, who, with their normal perception, see everything as one whole with their affectivity. The rational way of viewing reality which psychotics use often reveals to them aspects which are "invisible" to others, and when they realize this, it enables them to gain benefits, obviously economic and in proportion to their illness, so that they often appear to be "smarter".
But in fact they are only putting the opportunities they have to unscrupulous use ("without feeling"). As Séchéhaye correctly observed, they give the idea of recording what they see, because they have cold perception, without emotional involvement in the world around them. As to the causes that prevent the perceptions of psychotics from "being fixed in mnemonic traces", they go back to one clear reason: the lack of affective investment in what they perceive, and again the impossibility of establishing an emotional relationship with reality.
Memories are all the more vivid if they relate to events that are emotionally involving, and in which emotional "investment" is made. The psychotic cannot do this, so that he must have recourse to strong economic motivations, to make up for this lack. His coldness, his selfishness, his impotent rage and his panic can be understood only if we manage to understand what he feels when constantly faced with an arid world without love. And we can also understand why he denies all this, disguising himself with an appearance of normality which almost always works.
It is precisely this disguise, behind a normal appearance, which facilitates what the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung called "psychic contagion". What is psychic contagion? Psychic contagion affects all normal people who have anything to do with a psychotic, modifying - sometimes to a considerable degree - their vision of reality and sometimes even the features of their own personality, transforming them into victims of exogenous psychosis. They pick up the contagion through empathy, and in the absence of evidence which enables them to discover its origins, they end up by thinking that the patient's pathological conflicts are their own.
But how is it possible for a psychotic to transmit to others his own emotions if he is not able to use feeling? In fact he is very careful not to access his own emotional sensitivity, which for him is a source of pain. He anaesthetizes it precisely because he has emotional sensitivity.
On a physical level, anaesthesia makes a part or all of the nervous system insensitive. But doesn't destroy it. It continues to work, to transmit and to receive, though with difficulty. The emotional relationship between a healthy, balanced person, and a psychotic echoes what happens at a physical level during a local anaesthetic, when part of the nervous system not affected by the anaesthetic continues to receive signals coming from the anaesthetized part, though they may be deformed (swelling, thickened skin).
On an affective level, the phenomenon is very similar. Anaesthesia of feeling drastically reduces emotional sensitivity in the psychotic, but cannot prevent normal people around him from picking up his emotions, starting from anaesthesia of feeling itself. Psychic illness therefore shows itself not only in behaviours where the psychotic's lack of feeling seems explicit, in the form of indifference, cynicism, selfishness, exhibitionism, cruelty, daringness, anaffectivity, difficulty in relating, impotent anger, extreme eroticism, attachment to money, to power, need to control others, and the search for and use of medicines and substances which reinforce the anaesthesia itself.
It is also revealed in the same effects which he induces in sane people, and which in healthy people - who suddenly find they have these behaviours, and don't have the least suspicion that they don't belong to them - are based on complex motivations and justifications, needed to make them fit in with the environment.
As a result of serious disinformation it is still erroneously believed that there is some usefulness in the mentally ill person attending school or being part of a working environment, when in fact, in those conditions and without appropriate psychoanalytical treatment, there is absolutely no possibility of socialization in an intrinsically autistic personality. "Psychic contagion" means that around the ill person real epidemics of madness can occur. In a school classroom, in fact, the presence of one psychotic is enough to at the very least block the whole class at minimum levels, and at work to lead the department if not the whole company to paralysis, constant conflict and collapse.
Amongst operators who take care of psychotics, international research has now demonstrated that unfortunately there is a high risk of going mad (burning out), as well as taking on pathological behaviours which are not recorded because they are not recognized as such.
But the most serious effects are suffered by the people who are closest to psychotics, their school friends, their colleagues, their family, and most of all their parents.