Trust that which gives you meaning
and accept it as your guide.
- Carl Jung
Schizophrenia is commonly viewed as a paradigm of disintegration and breakdown. It may surprise some to discover that schizophrenic experience often includes visions of the center, and that these visions can provide a sense of well-being to the disoriented sufferer of psychic breakdown. Concerning the meaning of the center, Derrida once listed all the names which it has been called in the history of metaphysics; "It could be shown that all the names related to … the center have always designated an invariable presence — eidos, archē, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject) alētheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth".
In the visions of schizophrenics, the center is most often experienced as an ultimate source of supernatural power; the power to heal and the power to protect. The center is thus not associated with a specific religion or even a personal god. C.G. Jung observed that the encounter with the center is often accompanied by the production of a certain kind of visual art by the individual known as a mandala or centralized pattern; as a rule a mandala occurs in conditions of psychic dissociation or disorientation, for instance […] in schizophrenics whose view of the world has become confused, owing to the invasion of incomprehensible contents from the unconscious. In such cases it is easy to see how the severe pattern imposed by a circular image of this kind compensates the disorder and confusion of the psychic state — namely, through the construction of a central point to which everything is related, or by a concentric arrangement of the disordered multiplicity and of contradictory and irreconcilable elements. This is evidently an attempt at self-healing on the part of Nature, which does not spring from conscious reflection but from an instinctive impulse (my emphasis).
He also hinted that a mandala may be "acted out" by movement in a circular pattern around a center, the center being the mandala. His conclusions about schizophrenics were confirmed by J. Weir Perry, who studied schizophrenics for forty years and wrote many books about it, including The Self in Psychotic Process. He observed the symbol of the center as well as many other symbols in the visions and drawings of schizophrenics.
The appearance of the center as a powerful locus of healing, which I call the "mandala experience," can be seen in the life of John Nash, who suffered from schizophrenia and has recently become famous for the depiction of his life in the movie entitled A Beautiful Mind. The tendency to experience the center as a constructive force in the midst of psychic distress and disintegration raises questions about whether one can also find such hitherto undetected moments of constructiveness in fictional accounts of disintegration which have been compared to schizophrenic breakdown. One such account is Kafka's Description of a Struggle, a work in which a symbol of the center appears in the midst of such a psychic disintegration. However, first I will give an account of the "mandala experience" as discovered by Jung during what has been called his "schizophrenic" breakdown.
Jung's Mandala Experience
It was through Jung's own difficulties that he discovered the role of the center in psychic disintegration. It began in 1912, when Jung was at midlife, and in his autobiography he calls it his "confrontation with the unconscious". After it was over he had broken with Freud never to look back, and was well on his way to his own unique approach to psychology.
Jung's confrontation with the unconscious was very serious, and is increasingly being seen by modern interpreters as one which bordered on schizophrenia. "Newer interpretations by nearly all investigators have proceeded on the assumption that Jung's very sanity, and not just an interesting experiment in insight and introspection, was at stake". Moreover, as early as the 1960's, D.W. Winnicott, a psychoanalyst, went as far as saying that Jung was already a childhood schizophrenic. "Jung, in describing himself, gives us a picture of child schizophrenia, and at the same time his personality displays a strength of a kind which enabled him to heal himself. At cost he recovered".
Unfortunately Winnicott doesn't cover Jung's "confrontation with the unconscious" which occurred when he was an adult. I will not discuss the confrontation in its entirety, I only wish to point out that it had the features of a schizophrenic breakdown particularly at the beginning, and the beginning was the most troubled. In addition, it was during that time when Jung discovered the effects of the symbol of the center.
The schizophrenic features of his breakdown are threefold; first he had a couple of hallucinations, secondly the content of his hallucinations and subsequent dreams contain the symbols of death and renewal featuring imagery of the center prominently. Finally, at the beginning of the breakdown there were no intervening archetypal figures, Jung was confronted directly with the unconscious. This is typical of schizophrenia according to Couteau.
Concerning the hallucinations, Jung describes himself as being "seized by an overpowering vision" which last about one hour, in other words a psychosis, a feature of schizophrenia. The vision contains the symbols of disintegration in the form of apocalypse and death. In it, the natural order is being disturbed in a kind of reversal of opposites, order becomes disorder, dry land becomes flooded:I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country. I realized that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood.
The same vision recurred two weeks later. At this point even Jung concluded that he was "menaced by a psychosis". He did not realize that he is already having one.
Unlike many schizophrenics, the symbols continue in dreams, not during a psychosis. Soon after the "sea of blood" vision, he has a dream of rebirth and the center:There stood a leaf bearing tree, but without fruit (my tree of life, I thought), whose leaves had been transformed by the effects of the frost into sweet grapes full of healing juices. I plucked the grapes and gave them to a large, waiting crowd.
Throughout mythology tree of life has been an image of the symbol of the center, often imbued with supernatural qualities. For example, Dumuzi, the son-lover of the Inanna was himself called the "Lord of the Tree of Life." In Ancient Egypt, the sun-god was born from the highest branches of the tree of Isis. Again from Egypt, Osiris was reborn from a tree. In the image of a tree, the center takes on the qualities of power, growth and springtime renewal. Here, in Jung's dream, it bears the fruit to feed the crowd. The dream also contains the symbol of apotheosis, as Jung feeds the crowd in a manner which brings Christ to mind when he fed the multitudes.
At this point the similarity between Jung's visions and schizophrenia starts to waver for two reasons. The first one I have already mentioned. It concerns the fact that Jung's subsequent productions of the unconscious are in the form of dreams and fantasies, and have none of the terrifying, involuntary quality of psychosis so common in schizophrenia. Secondly, according to Couteau, the schizophrenic confrontation with the unconscious lacks the mediation of the anima;I began to comprehend in a new way the notion of severe illness as a magnifying glass of the soul, from which sometimes the only benefit seems to be insights gained about psyche by the analyst observing "from the outside," for many of my patients, estranged from the mediating function of the anima, were instead confronted directly with the chaotic abyss of the collective unconscious. Yet even for these patients, the presence of a therapist, especially one who could serve as a surrogate anima—a therapist routed in soul-making—provided a vital link to their souls.
Every production of the unconscious which Jung experienced after the initial hallucinations would have such a mediating figure in it including the anima herself in the form of Salome. There are also Siegfried, Ka, whom Jung called the "spirit of nature," a "brown-skinned savage," as well as Elija, the "wise old prophet," and Philemon, the "winged sprit," to name a few. Schizophrenic imagery is largely unpopulated by such figures.
Jung also had a dream of the center which he admits, kept him going. In this dream he was in Liverpool, a "dirty, sooty city:"It was night, and winter, and dark, and raining […] I had the feeling that there we were coming from the harbour, and that the real city was actually up above, on the cliffs. We climbed up there. It reminded me of Basel, where the market is down below and then you go up through the Totengässchen ("Alley of the Dead"), which leads to a plateau above and so the Ptersplatz and the Peterskirche.
When we reached the plateau, we found a broad square dimly illuminated by street lights, into which many streets converged. The various quarters of the city were arranged radially around the square. In the center was a round pool, and in the middle of it a small island, while everything round about was obscured by rain, fog, smoke, and dimly lit darkness, the little island blazed with sunlight. On it stood a single tree, a magnolia, in a shower of reddish blossoms. It was as though the tree stood in the sunlight and was at the same time the source of light. My companions commented on the abominable weather, and obviously did not see the tree. They spoke of another Swiss who was living in Liverpool, and expressed surprise that he should have settled here. I was carried away by the beauty of the flowering tree and the sunlit island, and thought "I know very well why he has settled here." Then I awoke.
The ascent upwards, the crossing of the threshold to a center which is in the image of a tree is something which will occur again and again in the experience of schizophrenics as I have discussed elsewhere. For now, it suffices to give Jung's own comments on the dream:This dream represented my situation at the time. I can still see the grayish-yellow raincoats, glistening with the wetness of the rain. Everything was extremely unpleasant, black and opaque—just as I felt then. But I had had a vision of unearthly beauty, and that was why I was able to live at all. Liverpool is the "pool of life." The "liver," according to an old view, is the seat of life — that which "makes to live".
He represented this dream in a mandala. One can see the blackness of the surround, with a flower which looks like a magnolia in the center. The image grows increasingly brighter, with the brightest spot at the center.
Figure 1 - Jung's mandala with a stylized version of magnolia tree in the center
(Jung Archetypes, Fig. 1)
Jung remarked of the visions he had during his time of disintegration and subsequent reintegration; "Today I can say that I have never lost touch with my initial experiences. All my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912, almost fifty years ago. Everything I accomplished in later life was already contained in them, although at first only in the form of emotions and images. These dreams included his "vision of unearthly beauty," which sustained him. It was thus a vision of the center, or in Campbell's words, the "universal source".
The point is, that out of Jung's own suffering, which has been argued to be a disintegration of schizophrenic proportions, came the vision of the transcendent, the mandala experience from which he would draw inner strength from for years to come...
Source: The Mandala Experience: Visions of the Center in Schizophrenia and Fictional Accounts of Disintegration
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