Interpretation of Schizophrenia - Inner World of The Schizophrenic

Inner World of The Schizophrenic

In Part three of Interpretation of schizophrenia Arieti describes how in spite of its efforts to stay in reality, the patient's defenses finally succumb. When the patient "cannot change the unbearable situation of himself any longer, he has to change reality". Arieti examines the inner world of the schizophrenic.

When a patient states he is Jesus he is compensating a feeling of extreme humiliation at home. The paranoid schizophrenic, Arieti explains, resorts to "teleologic causality" or animism to understand the world. He writes that whatever occurs to the patient is interpreted as willed by the parental alters of the patient. In deterministic or teleologic causality, if Nature's happenings were not willed they simply would not occur. In paranoid projection the schizophrenic takes out from him/herself a disagreeable part of the self onto the world. In Interpretation of schizophrenia Arieti illustrates all of the above theoretical constructions with concrete cases of his clinical experience as a psychiatrist.

Arieti maintains that in every case of schizophrenia that he studied serious family disturbance was found. When the patient idealizes the parent the idealized image of the parent is maintained in the patient's mind at the expense of an unbearable self-image. He speculates that psychosis starts only when the malevolent image of the parent is transformed "into a distressing other". The parent or parents alters enter the mind accusing the patient of "bad child" or other equivalent accusations in voices that the adult patient hears.

Since the 1980s, and into the beginnings of 21st century, biological psychiatric models of schizophrenia almost completely took over the psychiatric profession. Current research into the disorder focuses on neurobiology. Psychological approaches to schizophrenia like Arieti's are a rarity in the profession, although this structurally created circumstance neglects the obvious connection between psychological phenomena and neurotransmitter levels, which can be changed through certain practices, like Yoga, meditation, hyperventilation, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, among others.