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quite disparate attitudes, feelings, expressions of impulse. The patient's in-
tonations, gestures, mannerisms, changed their character from moment to
moment. One may begin to recognize patches of speech, or fragments of be-
haviour cropping up at different times, which seem to belong together by rea-
son of similarities of the intonation, the vocabulary, syntax, the preoccupa-
tions in the utterance or to cohere as behaviour by reason of certain stereo-
typed gestures or mannerisms. It seemed therefore that one was in the pres-
ence of various fragments, or incomplete elements, of different 'personalities'
in operation at the one time. Her 'word-salad' seemed to be the result of a
number of quasi-autonomous partial systems striving to give expression to
themselves out of the same mouth at the same time.
(Laing 1960: 195-196)
Laing goes on to describe Julie's existence in ways that are eerily similar to the
problems with autonomous agents we discussed in the last section: “Julie's be-
ing as a chronic schizophrenic was... characterized by lack of unity and by divi-
sion into what might variously be called partial 'assemblies', complexes, partial
systems, or 'internal objects'. Each of these partial systems had recognizable fea-
tures and distinctive ways of its own” (197). Like the parts of behavior-based
agents, each subsystem exists independently, with its own perception and ac-
tion. Subsystems communicate, in Brooks' phraseology, 'through the world,'
not by being integrated as a unified whole:
Each partial system seemed to have within it its own focus or center of aware-
ness: it had its own very limited memory schemata and limited ways of struc-
turing percepts; its own quasi-autonomous drives or component drives; its
own tendency to preserve its autonomy, and special dangers which threatened
its autonomy. She would refer to these diverse aspects as 'he', or 'she', or address
them as 'you'. That is, instead of having a reflective awareness of those aspects
of herself, 'she' would
perceive
the operation of a partial system as though it
was not of 'her', but belonged outside. (198)
In this sense, there is a direct link between schizophrenia and behavior-based
methodology - and symptomatology.
Depersonalization
While we can presume that artificial systems do not particularly care about
being fragmented, for schizophrenic patients this feeling of coming apart, of
losing life, of being reduced to a machine, is intensely painful. It is therefore
ironic that, as a number of critics have argued, psychiatric institutions them-
selves reinforce this feeling of mechanicity and lack of autonomous self. For
