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Thursday, February 05, 2004
Yap: Dementia praecox
By Januar E. Yap
Meanwhile
“It takes one to know one.”
—Anonymous
Dementia praecox is the scientific term for schizophrenia, a pathologic degeneration of one’s mental processes. In our language, demented, crazy.
A schizo experiences two kinds of hallucinations: visual and auditory. That is, of course, self-explanatory. When you turn to your left and see Smeagol, that’s visual hallucination. When, from out of the blue, you suddenly hear someone whisper “My precious,” that’s auditory. Unlike delusions, hallucinations technically aren’t pegged from reality.
To distinguish: You’re gazing at a politician who suddenly turns into Mr. Bean in the middle of his speech, that’s delusion. With hallucination, on the other hand, you dwell entirely on a different plane, far removed from your milieu.
You’re sitting on a bench at the park, but you think you’re a tank wheel rolling on Afghan dunes. You have often seen schizos mumbling in some corner; he could be thinking of himself as a jackhammer. I chanced upon a schizo, whose portentous gray matter turned him into a boulder, in some institution once. He was so stiff the staff had to lift the poor bundle of flesh to his bed before they could inject him with a muscle relaxant.
How does one become crazy? I don’t mean the substance-induced crazy, but the how-the-hell-did-it-happen crazy. Three things, as Freud would explain it: id, ego, superego. The most crucial in the trio is the ego, which plays in the realm of reality.
The other two operates on principles of pleasure (id) and morality (superego). The ego, and I hope I’m not getting too phony and technical, finds its formative stage in early childhood.
I’ll skip drawing that line from ego to dementia. In simple terms, a weakness in ego makes one’s hold on reality feeble. At an early stage, one is helplessly prone to escape from reality, developing the habit of daydreaming. In the long run, one loses touch or the ability to distinguish reality and fantasy.
What am I trying to say I’ll tell you next week. I’m out of there, meanwhile.
(February 5, 2004 issue)
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