Abnormal Normality & Normal Abnormality

This last chapter of Part One of The Matter With Things is on the subject of what severe mental illness -- e.g., schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism -- can tell us about about the brain. I've mentioned before that in such illnesses we can vividly see processes that are subtly at work in everyday neurotics. 

We're all crazy, or rather, the way I learned it -- and I haven't thought about this for decades -- there's a kind of complementarity between psychotic and non-psychotic minds (for example, dreams are rooted in a different kind of logic that would qualify as crazy if it ruled the day). 

But "psychotic" isn't the best way to put it, because it implies madness when the complementarity is normal. It only becomes abnormal in a state of imbalance. 

Looked at this way, it's even possible to be "too normal," i.e., cut off from one's kooky side. Back in the 1990s I read an article by Christopher Bollas that actually proposed something called "Normotic Personality Disorder," for people who are too blandly normal: squares, baby. Let's see if I can dig it out.

Can't find it, but I was surprised to discover that there's actually a wikipedia entry for normopathy: it involves  

the pathological pursuit of  comformity and societal acceptance at the expense of individuality.... Normopathy is difficult to diagnose because normopaths are integrated in society. 

Bollas, who called it normotic illness, considered it an obsession with fitting into society at the cost of the person's own personality.... 

Normopaths perform best given a strict protocol to follow. They constantly seek outside validation. The normopath may ask a friend what they think about a new song, dress, or hairstyle before forming an opinion. Normopaths look to others to inform them how to think or believe.

The concept of normopathy parallels Winnicott's idea of the false self, which is formed in response to the demands of the external environment rather than from within.

Here are some of the proposed diagnostic criteria: 

--Anxiety of examining one’s psyche with diminished curiosity about inner life.

--Hyper-rationality in dealing with others and an intense focus on factual data to seek reassurance.... For the normopath, human feelings are troublemakers that require “formulaic structuring in order to be controllable.”

 --Loss of connection between feeling and speech. 

--Horizontal thinking, the inability to prioritize and create relative values and meaning. 

In this context, it seems to me that individuation is freedom lived, and freedom is individuality actualized. Conversely, in our regime of identity politics, "A person loses his individuality and becomes typical of a certain class of people."

And all of this sounds very much like a hyperactive LH or hypoactive RH. Again, as mentioned in yesterday's post, the concepts are familiar, regardless of where they are situated in the brain. 

For example, we know that language is mainly in the LH, but knowing this tells us nothing about Shakespeare, plus we can know all about Shakespeare's works without knowing about his left brain. Likewise, E = mc² irrespective of what part of the brain came up with it.  

In any event, it seems that mental illness can be conceptualized as a hemispheric imbalance, which necessarily "changes what we find in the world." And looking at these imbalances "sheds light on normal experience, revealing its ordinary and therefore overlooked structure." 

Illness "allows us to observe normal human behavior and cognition via their pathological counterpart." I suppose this is similar to how the injuries of war taught us so much -- albeit the hard way -- about anatomy and emergency medicine.  

In parts of this chapter McGilchrist touches on the question of why our civilization has lost its mind, attributing it to the LH essentially eclipsing the RH (there will presumably be much more on this subject in parts two & three). He mentions a prophetic book that was published 30 years ago called Madness and Modernism: Insanity in Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought, documenting how

people with schizophrenia bore a close resemblance to phenomena not just found in, but at the core of, modernism.... 

Sass not only "illustrates his thesis in detail, across numerous domains," but shows how many of these modern luminaries were frankly on the "schizo-autistic spectrum." 

This seems to be a hint of things to come later in the book: that a hypertrophied LH and atrophied RH may underlie our societal plunge into "mechanism, scientism and bureaucracy," accompanied by an "inauthentic materialization, technicalization and mechanization of everything."

The LH Narrative is superimposed on all of this, but again, I don't think we have to know anything about neurology to see this. The Narrative functions as a pseudo-whole that is a pathological compensation for the absence of a true integrating synthesis of reality. It is less a blobby swamp than a rigid grid.

There's also an implicit recognition of how identity politics furnishes the disordered person with a faux "wholeness" to help organize the fragmented self into something manageable. For the majority of left wing activists, the activism is but a defense against unmetabolized, unrecognized, and projected parts of the self.  

It starts at the top, with our class of credentialed idiots who live in the map and not the world, where words only refer to other words, and where abstractions are "more real than actualities.... the triumph of theory over embodied experience." These resonate 

with academic trends in the humanities, with scientism, and even with the world-picture of the average Western citizen.

"In all forms of dialogue today," it "often feels as if one is talking to a machine." 

You're not a machine. You get the point.