Empathy and hierarchy: A response to Sass

Abstract

The positions Sass offers in his two papers are an invigorating alternative to the psychoanalytic doctrine and medical model of schizophrenia. He offers, first, an argument in favor of the possibility of empathy for the experience of the schizophrenic and, second, a persuasive argument against the psychoanalytic view of psychosis as regressive. Both positions are well developed, offering the particular pleasure of theory well-grounded in data. Both positions have their weaknesses, however, some of which Sass addresses but others he neglects or fails to defend adequately. In the first paper, which focuses on a comparison of the phenomena of the schizophrenic break (for which he borrows de Chirico’s use of Nietzsche’s term Stimmur~g), Sass argues, contra Karl Jaspers, among others, that the schizophrenic experience is available by empathy to a normal person. His evidence for this is the identifiable commonalities between the Stimmung described by schizophrenics and material presented by modernist writers and poets. Despite the convincing quality of the comparison, he neglects an obvious area for disagreement, one that will likely leap to the minds of those persuaded of the correctness of the medical model of psychiatry. The potential objection is that his evidence proves only that the modernists were schizophrenic, or at least schizoid. Sass himself does address this issue briefly in a footnote in the second paper, intended to address the issue of differences between schizophrenia and creativity. Unfortunately, in arguing one case he defeats himself in the other by documenting the frequency of mental illness in the modernists. In other words, although Sass’s argument about the possibility of empathy is predicated on comparing two groups, schizophrenics and modernists, he may, in fact be comparing one group with itself, that is, the single category of schizophrenics and schizoid personalities. A clearer definition of what is meant by “schizophrenic” would assist greatly here, certainly one less simplistic than that which Sass is using, which is essentially a social definition, that is, one who is treated for schizophrenia. All is not lost, however. In his meticulous explication of the Stimmung, Sass has succeeded in displaying his own empathy and evoking in the reader precisely the empathy he is arguing in favor of. Thus, unless the reader and Sass are also mad (not impossible, but perhaps unlikely), empathy for the schizophrenic experience is patent. Reading Sass’s article reminds me of the first time I was with someone who was