Sample from "Back From the Other Side"

"Around this time I dropped over someone’s apartment from Fisher who wanted some weed. A girl in this group had a startling physical similarity to my first real date from junior high: she was short, almost-pretty, pudgy and Jewish. I had not enjoyed my first make out with her look-a-like six years before. At fourteen, the girl’s kisses mixed with her armpit odor to the point where it left me flaccid and eager to go home. After getting home and starting to masturbate however, it was impossible to avoid the fact that my imagination was far from her or anything heterosexual as I approached the “big O.”
Now a certified stud six years later, I find myself surrounded by first-time smokers and wannabee hipsters. It’s someone’s first apartment and he is eager to show me his posters and record collection with shameless expressions of approval-seeking as he reels off his counter-culture accessories. I tried to accept their idea of me and was waxing stoned about something when this girl who bore this uncanny resemblance to my first fourteen-year-old date says to me “you’re weird!”

I was about to let her know how she reminded me of my Aunt Dora’s plastic seat covers which we were forced to sit on every time we visited those relatives in Bensenhurst, and why did she think that was?” when suddenly I was seized by such overwhelming panic that I could no longer remember what I was saying or why. I just knew I had been vaguely “punctured,” or in some way reproached and attacked somehow by this girl’s rather innocuous remark. I was suddenly out-of-control and in the grip of some horribly overwhelming “space” in which there was only panic. If I was a person inclined to think in such terms, I would cry out that there was suddenly no “G-d” in this new place of existence. Overwhelming vulnerability infused itself with such totality that I was outside the normal space-time arrangement of consciousness.

There was still, however, consciousness of the fact that I was shaming myself in the here and now and even worse, the horror that “this is all real” became suddenly validated. There are suddenly shocked, sympathetic and caring faces around me. The same people who minutes before felt almost privileged to be hanging with me and buying pot for the first time from this “cool guy” were now sympathetically staring. One looked at me sympathetically and said, “It’s all right, man.”

As minutes tick by, I am sure now that every sentence communicated between members of the group has meanings within meanings related to my condition. The vulnerability of my state appears endless as the reference processes of their thought and logic pertain more and more to these thought-filled entities, my unconscious realizations which dovetail into each other in a downward spiral. I try to stabilize myself in this freefall. I must understand and make sense of what is happening. They are, therefore, by this new subjective reasoning and logic under which I am now standing, able to READ MY MIND. What else could their words possibly mean?

“Oh, that’s old stuff,” I hear PERSON ONE say to another (as part of an ongoing conversation they were having but I only started to just listen to). He’s commenting on my conclusion! He’s mocking my realization that they can read my mind! They know and understand that already. I’m lame and slow here! I’m so open and vulnerable!
“Have you seen his new stuff?” says PERSON TWO to the previous speaker.
“Well, that’s what I’m waiting to see,” says PERSON ONE.
I “think” the following a little below consciousness: They are waiting for me to “give them” my new stuff! I must figure out what to say; what this “new stuff is” and give it to them! It must be an expression to communicate my transgression somehow…. that being condescending somehow to the girl?

“Lost in Dora and smoke,” I blurt out. I panic as everyone looks at me pitifully. Psychiatry calls this a “neologism.” It’s basically saying a few words as a response, but they don’t relate to other peoples’ experiences or references. I appear to be simply murmuring nonsense. I finally flee the premises, immediately seeking ways to live as if that entire experience had not happened. I return to a modicum of reality as the schizophrenic process subsides.

“Individuals come to a certain age with implicit assumptions about themselves and the universe. We all depend upon a large number of things that we are really not justified in depending upon, but we have never had any reason to suspect them. The sun rises regularly, our alarm clocks work, and so forth. A great body of assumptions is the foundation upon which our life processes rest. In a remarkable number of young people, however, there comes a time when their faith in this background of implicit assumptions about their own abilities or about the consistency of the universe, and so on, is ABRUPTLY SHATTERED. Then instead of building the rationalizations that we do when someone points out we have been an ass, these individuals go on feeling terribly upset about things. From that time on, instead of building the types of rationalizations with which we normally heal the wounds to our self-respect and all that sort of thing, these people are different from what they were before.” (“Schizophrenia as a Human Process;” Sullivan pp 243)

Let us diverge and enter into the etymology of this neologism, thereby allowing those capable of reasoning outside-the-box an opportunity to do so.
I’ll use the example mentioned by RD Laing in “The Divided Self.” He scratches the surface of something now worth pursuing more fully. He points to a patient who states that “he doesn’t make love to his wife but only to his image of her.” (Laing, pp86)
Let us, in order to better understand schizophrenic processes, proceed to undertake the subjective experience here. “I don’t make love to my wife, I make love to an image I have in my mind.”

There is an existential truth to this matter: When engaging in coitus, the man “existentially” is not making love to anything “really” but his fantasy. As Laing puts it, “… there may be loss of the ‘sense’ of realness in that the individual expresses the existential truth about himself with the same matter-of-factness that we employ about facts that can be consensually validated in a shared world.” (Laing, pp87)

Although the entrance into the “Mirage” of schizophrenic processes (as I call them) may be as varied as the individuals having them, I believe the following remains an entrance gate for many. Imagine you are in a social situation with people of long acquaintance who understand the artistic, autistic and existential meaning of your words when-using our example- you say, “I don’t make love to my wife.” They understand that you mean ‘I make love to an image I have in my mind.’ Let’s say an individual new to the group hears you say “I don’t make love to my wife,” and in turn responds with,
“What the hell are you talking about? You have kids. Are you letting other men have sex with your wife?”

You, as the existential speaker, could RATIONALIZE and say:
 “Within the spectrum of sexual relations, one can imagine submerging so deeply in imaginative worlds of lustful pursuit that it hardly seems appropriate at times to say that the resulting eroticism thus created or engaged in is tantamount to making love to the actual woman one is in bed with. Therefore, I occasionally – with people I know – allow myself a certain creative license or existential motif regarding these sexual relations.”
Instead, there could be a schizoid “failure to react to “rebuff:”
“One finds that the individual who has had a schizophrenic illness has not, in the first place, developed the abrupt manifestations of hereditarily-determined deterioration in the life processes. Instead, he has stood in a significantly and distinctly difficult position in the social situation in which he has lived; … he has come upon certain situations which were most serious in their negative effect upon his self-esteem; and after encountering these situations (which include as significant factors only other people), after perhaps, a rebuff to his self-assertion, he has shown a significant and characterizable failure to react by any of the methods of reacting to rebuff which are more or less well known to all of us from our personal experience.”
“We find that the stricken individual, following the peculiar and characterizable failure to react to rebuff, has lost a great part of that confidence in the integrity of the universe, the goodness of G-d, and so on, which is our common human heritage from infancy; and that from thence onwards he goes on feeling decidedly uncertain about life. Apparently, if one is sufficiently uncertain about life, one loses the cognitive assets which serve us in distinguishing products of autistic or purely subjective reverie from products which include important factors residing in so-called external reality; and when one has lost this ability to distinguish between such reveries and such objects having more external points of reference, one begins to sink into mental processes significantly like those we experience when we are asleep.
With the appearance of a partition in which considerable waking time is spent in a condition in which one is without the ability to tell what has true, genuine, and consensually acceptable external references, and what instead, is purely personal fantasy, there appears a peculiar disorder of social activity (and I might say of even non-social activity), and it is these peculiarities that seem to constitute the essence of schizophrenic behavior.

Consequently, the social pressure of the rebuff (and the additional pressure of failing to react properly) might send the sufferer into schizophrenic processes; that is, into the mirage of trying to communicate the actual content of (in this case) the sexual fantasy itself. This often results in a neologism, for example. “Ted called me up,” he mutters in response to the question “are you letting other guys fuck your wife?”

This content refers existentially to the ACTUAL FANTASY ITSELF that he is having when involved in the coitus under discussion. The sufferer “backtracks” (regresses) within an ever-increasing compulsion to become UNAWARE of what, for some inscrutable reason, he does not wish to become aware of.

“Lost in Dora and smoke” reflected my own reference to my Aunt Dora and my admitted confusion under the effects of this marijuana. Obviously, no other humans are privy to this inner circle of thought, so there is no possible way “consensual validation” can take place. The failure to deal with ‘rebuff’ has sent me into a regression to an earlier time in my personality growth. This “breakdown” mixes such powerful and overwhelming emotion with current (adult) life-situations that verbalized expressions can often only be defined as ‘incoherent.’

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