Wouter Kusters - The Experience of Psychotic Thinking

Everything is lost in translation, but its also duplicated, enlivened, and improved by translation.

Madness as I discuss it in this book is the imperfect translation of the Dutch waanzin , which could also be described as insanity, folly, or craziness ( Wahnsinn in German, folie in French). With the Dutch waanzin , I focus on the range of experiences of all those deemed, in medical jargon, to be psychotic, as I was oncetwice, in fact. Yes, indeed, I was diagnosed as psychotic in 1987 and in 2007, and before, during, and after those periods, I also worked as an academic linguist and philosopher, interested in language, subjectivity, and the conditions and extremes of what is called experience.

From 2010 until 2014 I worked on this book, which has as its first thematic line a philosophical examination of the experience of being psychotic. I have slightly lifted the veil that hangs over the enigma of psychosis, and I follow this with a close examination of what happens in the various phases of the psychotic experience. In doing so I follow and elaborate on the less well-known phenomenological psychiatric literature of the earlier twentieth century, such as that of Eugne Minkowski and Wolfgang Blankenburg, and their modern proponents, such as Louis Sass and Giovanni Stanghellini. What happens to the experience of time and space in psychosis? What happens to reality? How are other people perceived, and what happens to thought? I examine such questions from a perspective of philosophical wonder and openness, fed and inspired by my own experiences as well as those of many others, written down in reports, autobiographies, and narratives, such as those of Daniel Schreber, Antonin Artaud, John Custance, and Harald Kaas.

It was the highlighting, analyzing, expressing, and evoking of the experience of psychosisor madness, the less medically flavored term that I preferwhich made this book such a success in the Netherlands. From its publication in 2014 to the moment of this writing, I have received a steady stream of e-mails and other responses from a host of different readers. I was invited to numerous mental health congresses and meetings, and was asked to give lectures, presentations, and courses to inform and teach psychiatrists, psychologists, and all kinds of other professionals and nonprofessionals who work and live with psychotic people. But didnt they already know, before reading my book, what the experience of psychosis is like? Apparently not. In mental health education today, so much of the psychotic experience is hidden behind medical jargon, behind supposedly objective labels and descriptions, and behind risk management, fear, and attitudes that are theoretical, distanced, and semiprofessional. Consequently, the voices of the psychotic, with their full meanings, intentions, desires, and intensities, are seldom heard.

By following and enlivening the experience of psychosis in such detail through the written word, the book also touched a nerve among other kinds of readersnamely, all those who at one time or another have been labeled psychotic, schizophrenic, bipolar, or any number of related terms. Most of the people from this group who contacted me were not asking for clarification or discussion but were expressing their support and recognition. So many have gone through the same storms, the same depths and heights, the same dark confusions and bright insights, but have never had the chance to allow madness to reenter their consciousness and to be put into words, either for others or for themselves; many of these people were grateful to have finally found a text that acknowledged what it is like. Indeed, some readers had had comparable episodes decades ago, and reading this text enabled them to explore their mad journey for the first time in their lives.

In a way, this is also a dangerous book. My examination of the philosophy of madness reached its apex in July 2007, when I finished a major paper on the philosophy of the experience of time in psychosis. In combination with other stress factors, the steady flow of philosophical deliberation on the subject of psychosis swept me away that summer and plunged me right into the heart of the object itself: a full-blown acute psychosis. It is this possible maddening effect of certain words and thoughts that constitutes the second thematic line of this book. I demonstrate how my own philosophical attitude led to psychotic praxis, and I argue that this is a more common occurrence; that is, a certain kind of consistent philosophizing may very well result in confusion, paradoxes, unworldy insights, and circular frozenness that is reminiscent of madnesswhich in fact is what happened to quite a few philosophers who are far from unimportant, such as Thomas Aquinas, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Georg Cantor. I give examples of this, from myself and others, but I also demonstrate it by letting the controlled language of philosophical observation and reflection slowly but surely shift toward its objectthat is, madnessthe further one reads into the book.

There was yet another kind of reader who was less interested in psychiatry or mental health issues as such. This reader was primarily interested in the book for its perspective on philosophy as a dangerous, possibly maddening activity in which the stakes are, and should be, set high. In a way, then, not only does the book alleviate psychosis and emancipate the psychotic person from medical classifications, but it also emancipates the philosopher from the clinical academic context of narrow textbook study and frees him or her to engage in real-life praxis, philosophy in vivo, which is accessible to everyonenot least of all the madman. In fact, as a third thematic line in this book, I argue that psychosisin spite of all its sufferings and digressionsis best understood as the desire for infinity and absolute freedom, which it shares with so many philosophies.