Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
schizophrenic people with a verbal and conceptual splitting that matches the
split up of the totality of the schizoid being-in-the-world. Moreover, the sec-
ondary verbal and conceptual task of reintegrating the various bits and pieces
will parallel the despairing efforts of the schizophrenic to put his disintegrated
self and world together again.
(Laing 1960: 19-20)
By studying schizophrenics in isolation and in parts, psychiatry threatens to
itself become schizophrenic, and schizophrenics incomprehensible.
This problem of conceptual splitting parallels closely the problem of AI,
suggesting that mechanistic explanations of the sort necessary to build agents
are also responsible for their de-intentionalized appearance. The symptoma-
tology of institutional psychiatry is reflected in behavioral black-boxing in
behavior-based AI. In the next section, we will explore alternatives to this frag-
mentation in psychiatry, searching for clues for dealing with the problem of
schizophrenia in AI.
Anti-psychiatry and narrative psychology
In the '60's and '70's, Laing and other sympathetic colleagues, termed 'anti-
psychiatrists' for their opposition to mainstream psychiatry, suggested that
the schizophrenizing aspects of institutional psychiatry can be avoided by
changing our viewpoint on patients: instead of thinking of schizophrenics
as self-contained clusters of symptoms, we should try to understand them
phenomenologically, as complex humans whose behavior is meaningful. The
schizophrenizing clinical approach reifies the patient's behavior into a cluster
of pathological symptoms, with no apparent relation to each other or the pa-
tient's broader life experience. “[S]he had auditory hallucinations and was de-
personalized; showed signs of catatonia; exhibited affective impoverishment
and autistic withdrawal. Occasionally she was held to be 'impulsive.' ” (Laing &
Esterson 1970: 32) The phenomenological approach, on the other hand, tries
to understand the patient's experience of herself as a person:
[S]he experienced herself as a machine, rather than as a person: she lacked a
sense of her motives, agency and intentions belonging together: she was very
confused about her autonomous identity. She felt it necessary to move and
speak with studious and scrupulous correctness. She sometimes felt that her
thoughts were controlled by others, and she said that not she but her 'voices'
often did her thinking.
(Laing & Esterson 1970: 32)
