L1. Posterus Praecox

Eugene Bleuler (1857–1939), an influential figure in early psychiatry, was not only the first to speak of ‘depth psychology’ but also, in 1908, coined the term ‘schizophrenia’. A correspondent with Freud, he also met with Velikovsky and prefaced the latter’s early paper on neural telepathy.1 In a 1921 book (whose second-edition title translates as Natural History of the Soul and of Your Becoming Conscious: Mnemonist Biopsychology), Bleuler wrote of the psychic disintegrations symptomatic of schizophrenia as representing a kind of centrifugal unpeeling into separate, yet parallel, biopsychic units. This gives reason, he inferred, to think of consciousness itself as an aggregate system of nested inclusions, and accordingly Bleuler claimed that he saw no ‘scientific reason to limit the psyche to the conscious functions’:

It is possible, or not yet dismissed, that consciousness arises in very different places; it is not out of the question that in the same organism there are truly several psyches, or, several very different kinds of consciousness: autonomous complexes of the human cortical tissue [Rindenplastik], ‘souls’ of the spinal cord and its foci, phylogenetic consciousnesses residing in the same brain, alongside the individual’s psyche, yes, even a conscious psyche from the functioning of bodily organs is conceivable—yet, of course, this would be even less like our cortical-psyche [Rindenpsyche] than the buzz of a beetle….

What Bleuler referred to as the ‘split-off segment-psyches in schizophrenics’ he saw as representing a relapse, down the spinal pylon, to less centralized, more segmented forms of consciousness.2 Schizophrenia could then be read as a retrogression through what Bleuler had elsewhere called the ‘phylo-psyche’, or ‘Psychoide’—the registry and agglomerated mneme-stack of all the subcortical accretions comprising our ‘central nervous system’.3

Bleuler had inherited the diagnostic category of what he eventually came to taxonomize as ‘schizophrenia’ from Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926), who first brought sustained attention to the illness in the late 1890s. Kraepelin had referred to the affliction as ‘dementia praecox’. (Defined by precociousness of onset—or what is essentially an untimely madness—schizophrenia has always been a horological sickness.) For Kraepelin, ‘one of the creators of psychophysical research into posture’, rigid and bizarre spinal poise quickly became a key indicator for diagnosis of the condition.4 He highlighted the negativism and catatonia of patients displaying ‘praecox’ symptoms, and, as Sander Gilman records,

Researchers argued that there was some type of vestibular involvement that could be used to explain the perceived S-curve of schizophrenic posture. Such schizophrenic postures, along with other physical signs such as shuffling gait, inflexibility of the neck and shoulders and a resting posture, were explained [as] a regression to primitive labyrinthine reflex, characterized by flexion, internal rotation and adduction.5

One article, published in The Lancet in 1902, focused on schizoid postural stereotypies, prominent among them ‘attitudes of crouching like a beast’.6 Again, the malady was understood as a time sickness.

Kraepelin may have popularized the term ‘dementia praecox’, but its first recorded usage comes from Heinrich Schüle (1840–1916). The elder German psychiatrist had already homed in on the catatonic and postural aspect of such illnesses, taxonomizing them as acute forms of ‘cerebrospinal insanity [cerebrospinalen Verrücktheit]’.7 In his 1880 Handbuch der Geisteskrankheiten (Handbook on Spirit-Maladies), Schüle, seemingly in a moment of abandonment to enthusiasm, writes of schizoid mental states as being the ‘delusional dream-flowers [wahnhafte Traumblüten] of the spinal nerve-tree [spinalen Nervenbaum] from which they blossom—the hallucinations of an abnormally functioning sentience-nerve’.8

From Velikovsky through Bleuler—from the ‘immortality’ of experience to the privately recorded biographies of our Rindenplastik and its spinal nerve-tree—early psychiatrists and psychoanalysts were all drawing upon a notion of ‘memory’ that had dominated late nineteenth-century thought. Therein, the idea of ‘mnemonics’ had risen to the position of explaining the very tendency for universal matter to assume persistent form and exhibit regularities. Characteristic of this general trend, Charles Sanders Peirce asked ‘may not the laws of physics be habits gradually acquired by systems’?9 In other words, might the synechistic shape of our universe be a question of habit-formation and habit-retention? Here, ‘memory’ and ‘cosmogony’ became the same thing, essentially making the universe something like a gigantic nervous system. However, unlike Acheropoulos’s later intimations, this memory was utterly and totally unconscious.