On approaching schizophrenia through Wittgenstein

Louis Sass disputes that schizophrenia can be understood successfully according to the hitherto dominant models—for much of what schizophrenics say and do is neither regressive (as psychoanalysis claims) nor just faulty reasoning (as “cognitivists” claim). Sass argues instead that schizophrenics frequently exhibit hyper-rationality, much as philosophers do. He holds that schizophrenic language can after all be interpreted—if we hear it as Wittgenstein hears solipsistic language. I counter Ž rst that broadly Winchian considerations undermine both the hermeneutic conception of interpreting other humans in general and Sass’s hope of interpreting schizophrenics in particular. I then go on to argue that even if these Winchian considerations are not accepted, Sass in any case doesn’t take sufŽ ciently seriously Wittgenstein’s use of nonsense as a term of criticism. Solipsism is not something we can understand so as to be able to understand analogically the schizophrenic’s “world”—for there is no such thing as understanding it. Solipsism is nonsense, is nothing—there is no “world” there, in solipsists (as I show by reference to Cora Diamond’s reading of Wittgenstein). Nor in any actually analogous cases of schizophrenia. Their “alienness” is the alienness of nothingness; roughly, of the fantasy of “logically alien thought”. Suppose you say of the schizophrenic: he does not love, he cannot love, he refuses to love—what is the difference?! (Wittgenstein, 1980) This paper concerns the most elusive, perhaps the strangest, surely the most philosophically charged of “mental illnesses”: schizophrenia. My central question might be put this way: what kind of light (if any) can Wittgenstein’s philosophy shed on this near-unapproachable phenomenon? “Schizophrenia” is a strange (and heterogenous) psychopathology. It has strenuously resisted efforts to interpret it. Karl Jaspers is only one of its more famous analysers to have despaired at times; he declared it “incomprehensible”, “psychologically inaccessible” and “closed to empathy” [1]; somewhat unlike, say, depression, and most “neuroses”. The aim of this paper is to set out my arguments as to whether we can hope to interpret “schizophrenic language”, and thereby to establish how, if at all, to “read” this especially difŽ cult form of “mental illness”, via a reading of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Rupert Read, SOC, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK, email: [email protected] ISSN 0951-5089/print/ISSN 1465-394X/online/01/040449–27 Ó 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/09515080120088111