Barfield explores the phenomenon of modern mental illness, such as Schizophrenia, and how it reveals a fundamental alienation of the 'self' from the surrounding world and from the true Self in all of human society, with the Schizophrenics being the ones who are most aware of the alienation. Moderns experience this alienation as varying forms and degrees of insanity, while our ancestors experienced it as "sin". The former feels it is something that is happening
to them, while the latter felt it was something they were actively involved in and, therefore, needed to take responsibility for.
History, Guilt and Habit - Chapter 2 - Modern Idolatry (excerpts)
There are two things that are noticeable about the modern psychology... the first is that the root, the subconscious root, of schizophrenia is increasingly being traced to the experience of what I will for the moment call "cut-offness". The second is that the experience is increasingly being regarded, not as one that is peculiar to the patient, but in a greater or less degree as one that is the predicament of humanity, or certainly Western humanity, as a whole.
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The clinically schizoid are simply the ones who are becoming most sharply aware of it. Thus, they speak of the personality, or the self, as being isolated, encapsulated, excluded, estranged, alienated. There are many different ways of putting it. But what the self of each of us feels isolated from, cut off from, by its encapsulation in the nakedly physical reality presented to it by the common sense of contemporary culture, is precisely its own existential source [the 'true Self'].
Sin and Madness, by Dr. Shirley Sugerman... argues, convincingly to my mind, that what is now conceived and felt as insanity can only be properly understood as the evolutionary metamorphosis of what was formerly conceived and felt as sin.
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But can there by sin without guilt? Paul Ricouer, in his book The Symbolism of Evil, observes, rightly I think, that a feeling of guilt is the fundamental experience of sin. If so, how can this contemporary madness, from which there is evidence that we all suffer, but about which we certainly do not feel guilty, have anything to do with sin? Perhaps because, although we do not feel guilty about the sin, we do feel guilty because of it.
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There is atmosphere of guilt. Take for instance the issue of racialism, the relation between the advanced and the so-called "backward nations", or between white and colored... what was until recently called "the white man's burden" was a burden of responsibility, not of guilt.
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People seem almost to go out of their way to find things to feel guilty about, or to encourage others to feel guilty about. I can think of two reasons in particular why it is bad... such confused feelings of guilt tend to beget paralysis rather than energy... when they do not beget paralysis, feelings of guilt tend to turn rather easily into feelings of hatred and contempt. We may feel a bit guilty ourselves, but we are very sure that a whole lot of other people are much more guilty, and probably ought to be destroyed.
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And just this darker side to the experience of guilt seems to be even more evident when the experience is collective rather than when it is the individual. 'All are responsible for all', said Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov. A noble, a truly human sentiment - perhaps the only absolutely human sentiment there is... It is the irritation of guilt that turns it into the impulse to compel, into a determination to use every kind of violence, every device of indoctrination, in order to enforce on all a systematic equality that must entail a mechanical and inhuman uniformity.
I would add that Jung also explores this aspect of Schizophrenia in
The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease:
The question of psychogenesis in mental diseases other than the neuroses, which are now generally considered psychic in origin, is discussed, and the psychic etiology of schizophrenia is affirmed. Mental processes are products of the psyche, and that same psyche produces delusions and hallucinations when it is out of balance. In turn, schizophrenia is considered as having a psychology of its own. But whereas the healthy person’s ego is the subject of his experiences, the schizophrenic’s ego is only one of the subjects. In schizophrenia, the normal subject has split into a plurality of autonomous complexes, at odds with one another and with reality, bringing about a disintegration of the personality.
