Psychosis as an Interpretation Disease (addendum to last blogpost)

I want to write a kind of addendum to my last blog post, because I think I am still confused about an essential point related to psychosis. In my earlier post, I argue that psychosis does not happen within the shared social world, but a better way to phrase this is to say that psychosis does happen in the shared social world - the shared social world is primary - but the shared social world is interpreted in madness as occurrent, as a location for private minds, and this arguably is what makes psychosis psychosis - that is, the misinterpretation of Dasein as occurrent, and therefore isolable, ripped out of contexts, and involving private mental states. What does this mean?

We could say that psychosis is an interpretation disease. Why? We could start with being, defined by many as the shared set of social practices that allow us to skillfully and transparently cope. To cope means in part to use equipment and, in using equipment, to have the equipment withdraw. (Not only does the equipment withdraw - we withdraw. We get in the flow.) When I use my shoes, I am not aware of my shoes, unless they break down. When I hammer a nail, the hammer withdraws, and I am just hammering, etc. In a way - a point raised by Sean Kelly - the earth withdraws when I am on it. This way of being of equipment, that involves inconspicuousness when it is working, and conspicuousness when it is not, Heidegger calls, at least in certain English translations, "availableness" or "readiness-to-hand."

But what happens if we stop hammering, and stare at the hammer? If we are not aware of aspects, but focus on properties? If we notice its weight and color, and the materials it is made out of? Then we have moved from one way of being, availableness, into another way of being, occurentness. Occurentness is decontextualizing something, then recontextualizing it in a new projection. It happens when our absorbed coping is interrupted, and it is a form of theoretical reflection, which Heidegger describes at one point as "depriving the world of its worldliness in a definite way." (qtd. in Dreyfus, 80)

What I want to basically argue is that psychosis is a form of occurentness, a form of decontextualizing, or staring. Louiss Sass also makes this argument through the work of Wittgenstein in his The Paradoxes of Delusion. But what does this actually mean?

We could say that, when one is psychotic, one interprets their self as their own, and therefore a site for the possibility of private mental states. Psychosis is a misguided sense of ownness. We can't blame someone who is psychotic for this - they are experiencing symptoms that lead them to think, understandably, that what they are experiencing is the result of private mental states. A psychotic, in some sense, sees things that other people cannot see, even if one can notice behavioral irregularities that might suggest someone is responding to hallucinations and delusions. But when one is hallucinating, or experiencing the world through delusions, the sense is that these are private mental states. What is the relationship between occurentness and private mental states?

We could simply say that a private mental state is a decontextualized interpretation. When we start along the Cartesian road and interpret there being an abyss between subject and object - there being a "subject" and "object" at all, as opposed to being-in-the-world - then we start to think that private mental states - what Wittgenstein called a private language - are possible. But private mental states are errors in interpretation and therefore in a weird sense not real. When we say that someone who is psychotic cannot differentiate between the real and the unreal, in a way what we are saying is that they are interpreting their own being as decontextualized, as occurrent. But because Dasein is not primarily occurrent, but rather Dasein, then this interpretation is false, and harmful.

Psychotics, as Sass points out, are solipsists, because as soon as one posits the notion of a private mental state, then the world is cut off, and then one is presented with the problem of the reality of the world. But this issue would not happen were we to begin with the shared social world, and see solipsism as a misinterpretation of the shared social world. Psychosis, then, is an understandable misinterpretation, because one's symptoms lead one to believe that one is experiencing private mental states, when that is not the case.

When one is decontextualizing one's self, because of psychotic symptoms, one loses one's own sense of history, one's own autobiography, and this happens in psychosis, where one experiences a kind of deep tear in the self, a rip in the fabric of the self, and therefore a distorted self-image. Delusions of grandeur, for example, involve distortions of one's self-image, a kind of different sense of oneself that comes to eclipse one's earned or achieved sense of self over time. Psychosis is the process of one person staring at themselves, making their selves conspicuous in a certain way, and then experiencing the world as similarly decontextualized and recontextualized. So sanity would mean then regaining the social world, even though in reality it was never lost to begin with.