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the experience of a reality which he is not holy enough to live with, which he
cannot explain away . . . [and which] scares him into interpreting its unremit-
ting strangeness, its burning intensity of significance, as the manifestations of
human or even cosmic malevolence, calling for the most desperate of counter-
measures, from murderous violence at one end of the scale to catatonia, or
psychological suicide, at the other.
Huxley's first-person account of his mescaline experience served to fill in a
phenomenology of enlightenment and madness that Bateson had left unde-
veloped, and it was this specific phenomenology that informed the sixties
imagination of both—and that, conversely, made schizophrenia a key referent
(among the much wider field of mental conditions that concerned Walter,
Ashby, and orthodox psychiatry). 9
We can return to Bateson. In 1961 he took the development of his thinking
on schizophrenia one step further in his new edition of Perceval's Narrative , a
first-person account of madness and spontaneous remission dating from the
early nineteenth century. In his introduction to the topic, Bateson described
madness as a temporally extended process with a distinctive structure, which
constituted a higher level of adaptation than those modelled by Walter's tor-
toises or Ashby's homeostats. 10 Here is the key passage (Bateson 1961, xiv):
Perceval's narrative and some of the other autobiographical accounts of schizo-
phrenia propose a rather different view of the psychotic process [from that of
conventional psychiatry]. It would appear that once precipitated into psycho-
sis the patient has a course to run. He is, as it were, embarked upon a voy-
age of discovery which is only completed by his return to the normal world,
to which he comes back with insights different from those of the inhabitants
who never embarked on such a voyage. Once begun, a schizophrenic episode
would appear to have as definite a course as an initiation ceremony—a death
and rebirth—into which the novice may have been precipitated by his family
life or by adventitious circumstance, but which in its course is largely steered
by endogenous process.
In terms of this picture, spontaneous remission is no problem. This is only
the final and natural outcome of the total process. What needs to be explained
is the failure of many who embark on this voyage to return from it. Do these
encounter circumstances either in family life or institutional care so grossly
maladaptive that even the richest and best organised hallucinatory experience
cannot save them?
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