The Non-Being in Psychosis; about Antonin Artaud

Abstract

The study of the processes related to psychosis led us to pay attention to the problems of being, and specially to the pathology of its articulation with the ego, as well as correlatively, to the problems concerning non-being. We specially refer to the fact that when ego disintegration takes place in the schizophrenic process, a disintegration mainly due to the pathology of primary identifícations, the ego and being become disarticulated in such a manner that being is no longer seized by the ego, and thus recovers its primitive state of cosmic being. This implies substantial changes in the perception of space and time, which means that being recovers the spatial-temporal coordinates which it had before the ego was built, so that the ego’s “closed space” (Pontalis) is changed into a being open to the world, and linear time changes into circular time. According to our point of view, when this transformation of individual being into cosmic being takes place, the remainder of the individual ego experiences this being without limits, as if it were non-being. We find in this shattering of being as regards the ego, the main reason for the deep pain which afflicts the psychotic. This pain would corrode the psychotic’s body, yet, upon losing its limits, it stops being a body with drives, it no longer has a natural state so as to turn into a supernatural body, outside of and beyond of what is human. While this unlibidinized body is an easy prey of
the death instinct, the doors of Infinity and Eternity are open for this being that has lost its limits.