Escisión, simbolización e integración de la identidad

Abstract

The inner-outer dualism, with its associated conception that the mind is a reality isolated from the world, permeates our everyday thinking. This article begins by demonstrating from the philosophy of the twentieth century the unreality of this separation and the stability of internal constructions. Once we isolate the mind in our imagination, we feel authorized to dream of magical shortcuts to overcome the isolation, such as telepathy or, in the psychotic, transparency or the sounding of thoughts, the theft of ideas, the imposition of ideas from the external world. We are not minds, permanent or eternal, inserted in a world that we see passing around us; we are temporary beings. The self is a representation, an internalized metaphor that we turn into a stable but fragile metaphor in the face of a changing reality, which endows us with immortality and consoles us. The psychotic is the one who lives the split because he has not been able to handle the conventionality of that double language, and accept that reality is at the same time fixed and changing, for this reason they need to adhere to permanent objects, with the quality of stable things. The psychotic is the one who believes in the official language at face value, is sick of conventions. If everyone knows the patient's thoughts, in some way this means that the thoughts are not locked in the head, an idea contrary to cultural belief, which produces terror because it is experienced as unnatural, cancels the division of interior and exterior, which means the experience of loss of identity and agency, the lost of control. Delirium is developed as a way of clinging to reality in the face of extreme disavowal of one's perceptions or feelings.