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The fragmented psyche does not automatically require or seek mending; or at least there may be a kairos space of time during which it may need, indeed can thrive upon fragmentation. In certain crisis situations the psyche, instead of putting all its eggs in one basket, to play safe and ultimately protect its integrity, may choose to invest fragments of libido into splinter personalities for safe-keeping until the crisis has abated. In therapy situations I have seen this anticipated in dreams, then worked out in situations where a person was facing imminent, possibly life-threatening danger and in an attempt to cushion the impending blow, split into several ego stances. I have called this phenomenon "pre-traumatic dissociation" as an anticipatory move which, unlike the more severe and overridingly pathological Multiple Personality Disorder, does not interfere significantly with the individual's ability to function normally in day-to-day reality.
As a second parameter in the assessment of the overriding effect of pathology, placing woundedness in its mythic context, it's worth bearing in mind, for instance, that Osiris and Dionysus were dismembered, that Psyche had to journey to the Underworld, that Prometheus had his liver repeatedly torn out by Zeus's eagle, and that Medusa was beheaded. As well, in terms of the psyche's ultimate goal of attaining wholeness, centredness and integration, fragmentation is a blow to the hubris of the stable ego, which must relinquish its sense of a fixed identity and must eventually step aside in order to allow the paradoxical Self to displace it as the centre of consciousness.
Shamanism & Schizophrenia
What we call schizophrenic is, as Joseph Campbell has discussed, called (positively) visionary or mystical in shamanic cultures, hence is valued, not feared or sedated with chemicals. As he clarifies in the well-known [1988] TV series, "The Power of Myth", 'The shaman is the person, male or female, who ... has an overwhelming psychological experience that turns him totally inward. It's a kind of schizophrenic crack-up. The whole unconscious opens up, and the shaman falls into it. This shaman experience has been described many, many times. It occurs all the way from Siberia right through the Americas down to Tierra del Fuego.'
Hence working with sufferers of schizophrenia from a shamanic angle can be helpful, since the shaman has in all likelihood experienced similar experiences to those of the schizophrenic. Mainstream reductionist psychiatrists, on the other hand, by and large presume that if an experience (such as chronic depression) is unpleasant, it must be stopped or band-aided, but because an experience is painful or difficult, it doesn't necessarily follow that's it's not valuable, or therapeutically worthwhile as a '
wound which heals'.
As Mircea Eliade has recounted in detail, shamanic initiation is often unpleasant, even at times horrific, and can involve being mythically stripped to the skeleton, dismemberment, or being taken to pieces. If the schizophrenic can work through these kinds of processes with an empathetic therapist, s/he may be able to find healing and some ego stability at the other end of the ordeal. I know of other schizophrenics who have courageously gone off of medication and helped each other through such processes, or (more rarely) who have worked through them alone.
Schizophrenia: The Shaman Sickness
The 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.
Self Retrieval vs Soul Retrieval
Jung once remarked that his work would be continued "by those who suffer", and he was undoubtedly including in that phrase all who have the courage to confront - with the peculiar aloneness and risk that's unavoidable in such work - their inner depths, soul pathology, and shadows. From the perspective of effective therapy (bearing in mind that 'therapy' means 'serving the gods'), the bottom line is that sufferers of schizophrenia as individuals have the right to choose what sort of treatment they wish to accept, but at present they're not being presented by mainstream psychiatry with the option of working through their experiences as an alternative to fearfully band-aiding the symptoms. Coming to terms with the illness takes a lot of guts - on the part of both patient and therapist - but the option exists and sufferers of schizophrenia are surely entitled to be informed that it does.
Paraphrasing Hamlet, then, to intervene, or not to intervene, that is the quesion. During solitary Self retrieval, for instance, when a person may be recovering from grief, or from an ended relationship, or from plain old unrequited love, the energy is gradually reclaimed, in the same way as a snail's stalks, or the leaves of some touch-sensitive plants tentatively re-emerge or unfold after they've been touched. Similarly, the soul's energy doesn't need to be yanked back, or forcefully torn away from its attachment. It needs gentleness and slow movement, not sudden jolting or other forms of hasty retrieval.
Through my own experiences of grief, loss and wounding, and though being privileged to share the painful experiences of others, I have learned that the soul lets go when in the kairos of its own time-frame it is ready to. It undergoes a gradual transition from acknowledging the soul-bond, to relinquishing dependency and belongingness, to acknowledging the reality of separation. The soul like a child must in such times be weaned off, because its vulnerability and woundedness so often belong to the Puer, the eternal child archetype of trust and openness that has more often than not drawn it into the situation in the first place. The hopeful and idealistic Puer, earthed and sometimes shocked through the harsh facts of human relatedness into the realm of Soul, thereby becomes, if it accepts its lot with growth in understanding and no bitterness, the willing victim of sometimes painful reality. In some circumstances, then, interventional soul retrieval, perhaps out of a desire for a quicker remedy, or even out of a well-meaning shamanic longing to help the suffering soul escape its pain, could become a hasty substitute for a more gradual, natural process of Self retrieval. For it is through bathing in the gentle alchemical fire in which the agony of passion is gradually transmuted to the gold of 'com-passion', that the Wounded Healer is most thoroughly forged.
Source: <a href=http://www.jungcircle.com/embrace.html>Embracing the Fragmented Self: Shamanic Explorations of the Sacred in Schizophrenia & Soul Loss</a>