Ego Death and Schizophrenic Narcissism
How narcissism protects you!
If you are about to conquer a great big world, or attempt to thrive within it, you need a bit of narcissism to even suppose that such a thing is feasible. Humans have learned that they can change their environments over time. Then it became an expectation, that the best among humans should change their environments the most drastically for the purpose of benefitting the human genome above all other species. Then it became a competition within the species to achieve the most impact on the world. And ultimately, humans developed a baseline of minor, beneficial narcissistic traits that enabled us to eventually conquer space travel! And if the ignorant among us don’t kill all of us off beforehand, we just might become convinced we can conquer the stars…and then conquer them!
Now, for the weird news!
Did you know that no one, ever, in recorded medical history, who was specifically born blind has ever developed Schizophrenia? It’s true!
Did you know that many of the neurological protectors against developing Schizophrenia are found in Autistic Spectrum Disorders? It’s also true!
Would this suggest that the part of the brain processing movement, you know, the eyes part, is mostly responsible for Schizotypal disorders in general? Maybe!
When a person experiences dellusions, they can manifest in any of the five primary senses of hearing, seeing, touching, tasting and smelling. Smell is most closely related to memory. Hearing is a first-responder that usually requires visual confirmation. Touch is independent of the senses, as the brain creates a powerful map of its container in the first 8 months of post-natal environmental exposure. Tasting is very simple premise of salty, sweet, sour, bitter and bland, with the precise measurements of the five creating a sense of Savor called Ulmami.
Without sight, you are at a disadvantage from birth. You cannot detect the motion of light. From the start, you have less tendency to feel narcissistic about your potential for transforming the world and the environment around you, as you cannot “see” a need for change, nor “see” yourself changing anything important to others. These perceptual ideals come from social testing and exposure to interlocutors. Lack of sight from birth enhances the other senses, typically, as the brain is not preoccupied with processing constant visual queues. Thus, multi-sensory perceptual validation becomes way more integral to survival.
With sight, we can confirm visually what we feel by tactile surface testing, what we hear, taste and smell. If you taste something bitter and you dislike it, you look at it and then file away the image of it as unsavory. If you hear a loud bang, you turn to see the source of the bang; could have been harmless, might have been a predator advancing upon you. Multi-sensory confirmation is mostly a relationship between sight and the other senses.
A lifelong complete dearth of sight would give rise to fewer inconsistencies, and thus eschew the likelihood of Schizophrenia manifesting in such a mind as there is less ground upon which to stand, socially, when being told that their perception is limited, and typically after having been adequately educated, elucidates the positive narcissitic traits adopted by the blind.
Autistic people have a shield of intrinsic narcissism that protects them from developing Schizophrenia as their base-line is already socially impaired. They insist they are right even when proved wrong. They hyper-fixate and most commonly avoid excessive social and sensory input; not seeing the need for it, really. They see everyone else playing social games of flirtation and small talk, and may eventually learn with great effort how to engage in those things, but will never understand why everyone else finds it so familiar and comforting, even fun. They will explode your brain with their one niche preferred-topic of fixation (which sometimes changes, but it’s quite rare).
So Schizophrenia then becomes more recognizeable as an impairment in the visual processing center of the brain. As we discussed in a previous article on this Substack, we can with a few simply tests during an eye exam determine whether or not a person is likely to develop Schizophrenia in the future, or is at least susceptible. The exams for such extrapolations include:
Motion detection
Slow movement tracking
Rapid waking eye movement
Waking theta-state disengagement with surroundings.
So if you have a deficit in visual processing, you are likely to think you are asleep when awake, or awake when asleep, safe when in danger or in danger when safe. Prolonged failures at visual reality testing will eventually lead to a form of ego death, which usually creates a personality disorder, but in this case completely abandons the concept of internal objects (such as intrusive thoughts or interojects and internalized idealization of external objects) and then allows for externalization of all objects.
If you are born blind or born with a personality disorder (Autistic), you have natural immunity to this erosion in visual reality testing. This deficit in turn elicits societal pressures to conform to the report of the greater sum’s reality testing. This is perceived by others as Schizophrenic narcissism. When these factors collaborate in the mind of one suffering Schizophrenia, it becomes a voracious consumer of detail-related memories, a symptom I call Detail Management Defecit.
When you ask a Schizophrenic to give details about their dellusions, they will seldom have any at all. My ex-wife (lesbian!!!!) reported and insisted that she had children with a man who had traumatized her by rejecting her after she divorced me to do as God had instructed her and go marry that man. When asked, she would be “unwilling” to tell me how many children she had, or what their names were, out of alleged fear of persecution by the invisible helicopter people with electricity guns and tasers.
I hope this has been helpful in understadning the nature of Schizophrenia and the likely triggers for it.
If you are a Caregiver for a Schizophrenic loved-one, please check the previous article for comfort, strategies, affirmation that is so much needed for our kind.
I married my ex-wife, Rita, in 2002, and she left me in 2008, worked for two years delivering newspapers in my car, moved to woo the guy named Kent in a distant town. She lived there until January of 2012, but was in constant contact with me by phone. We were always together, really, and I gave her everything even when she hated me. It was near her birthday in 2012 that her untreated Schizophrenia consumed her. She ended up in multiple facilities, and after 3 months of total silence, I finally managed to find her. Her family had no knowledge or care about her at all. Missing for 3 months and they never even called to see if she was okay. I did! And I found her! And 3 weeks later she was living with me. She lived with me in so many was as my adopted daughter until she passed away at age 52 on December 6, 2022. I am a specialist in cluster B personality disorders, a former educator at University and it took everything I had sometimes to remind myself that the hurt she caused me was an extension of her own suffering. But in my heart, I always saw my wife, there. Yes, I am traumatized by her passing. I haven’t stopped crying since it happened. But I am here to bring help and understanding to anyone our story and my expertise might provide.
Thank you for reading.
<3