On Thursday, 28 February 2019 at 02:28:17 UTC+4, FBInCIAnNSATerroristSlayer wrote:

"PEDOPHILIC CHRISTIANITY" MADE WESTERN CHRISTIANS "SCHIZOPHRENIC"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4107833/

Did Christianity lead to schizophrenia? Psychosis, psychology and self reference

Roland Littlewood
Simon Dein
University College London

Both geographically and historically, schizophrenia may have emerged
from a psychosis that was more florid, affective, labile, shorter lived
and with a better prognosis. It is conjectured that this has occurred
with a reflexive self-consciousness in Western and globalising
societies, a development whose roots lie in Christianity. Every theology also presents a psychology. Six novel aspects of Christianity may be significant for the emergence of schizophrenia—an omniscient deity, a decontexualised self, ambiguous agency, a downplaying of immediate
sensory data, and a scrutiny of the self and its reconstitution in conversion.

Keywords: Christianity, conversion, indigenous psychology,
proprioception, proto-schizophrenia, schizophrenia, self

This paper proposes that schizophrenia has not been universal, either culturally or historically, but that nevertheless its current near
ubiquity would argue for some approximately universal predisposition.
This we would seek in Christian monotheism’s reflexive consciousness and in its later secular successors. We have previously argued that the possibilities of religion and of psychosis have evolved together,
through a common evolutionary trajectory (Dein & Littlewood, 2011),1 but what in modern times and Westernised societies has got us from the human possibility of schizophrenia (“proto-schizophrenia”) to frank schizophrenia?

Before considering evidence for the nonuniversality of schizophrenia, we have to bear in mind that any attempt to search for the illness beyond
its current perspective leads to the obvious objection that overt schizophrenic symptoms, though present elsewhere, may be apparent only within an already modern and Westernised perspective. Thus when C.G. Seligman, a physician and anthropologist, argued that severe mental
illness was unknown in early contact New Guinea except in situations of considerable Westernisation (Seligman, 1929), he was criticised by anthropologists for ignoring psychosis which might be “concealed” in local patterns of ritual performance (apart from the likelihood that any cases of severe mental illness which came to colonial medical attention
were only likely to be already in a situation of considerable contact
and dominance by the Europeans—and thus “contact” was oversalient). Similar objections make the popular argument that shamanism or
possession ritual conceals or “compensates” schizophrenia (cf. Fabrega, 1982).

Fabrega has argued in a caveat that the “first rank symptoms” of schizophrenia, taken in modern comparative psychiatry as an accurate manifestation of unequivocal schizophrenia, really necessitate “basic Western assumptions about human action and social reality,” particularly cultural conventions of the autonomous self (Fabrega, 1982, p. 56). He
cites such conventions that persons are independent beings whose minds
and bodies are separated from each other and function autonomously; that under ordinary conditions external influences do not affect an
individual; that thoughts are recurring inner happenings that the self “has”; that thoughts and feelings are rather different things but that both are silent and private; that one’s body is independent of what one feels or thinks; and that body and feelings have a purely naturalistic
basis and cannot be modified by external suprahuman agents (Fabrega,
1982). Barrett (2004), finding the Iban of Borneo have difficulty understanding his questions about two first rank symptoms, thought
insertion and thought broadcasting, argues in a related way. His three
Iban individuals (contrasted with 39 European Australians in a matched psychotic sample) who experience these symptoms are all converts to Christianity. He suggests an association with education and reading, and
a familiarity with the idea of an omniscient God who can tell what is in one’s mind. (But equal numbers of Iban and Australians experienced auditory hallucinations.) Traditional Iban notions of thinking, he
proposes, are much more embodied, tied closely to emotion, will, and
desire: their word for “thought” also denotes “speech.”

Given the absence of any objective measures of the psychobiology of “proto-schizophrenia,” are we then compelled to go round in circles when considering the universality of schizophrenia in other societies and historical epochs? In this paper, we propose a fairly broad perspective
of what the “eventual” symptoms of schizophrenia might be, taking into account the apparent overlap with other patterns such as mania or
delirium: and thus in intention at any rate avoiding the category
mistake of assuming that all the manifestations of schizophrenia are and have been universal. Nevertheless, past commentators have inevitably
made judgements in relation to their own categories of illness, and
putting their own conclusions together can never be fully persuasive: we have to move in and out of presumed uniformity and less certain family resemblances.

Go to:
Cultural variation
The idea that Westernisation resulted in a higher incidence of
schizophrenia was common in the 19th and 20th centuries and was
discussed by Kraepelin in 1919/1971. In 1810 Richard Powell had noted insanity was “considerably on the increase” whilst Andrew Halliday (1828) wrote “we seldom meet with insanity among the savage races of
men; not one of our African travellers remark their having seen a single madman” (as cited in Hunter & Macalpine, 1963, pp. 821–822). We can take these comments with a degree of caution. Not only colonial prejudice and Victorian anxieties: the travellers were hardly looking for mental
illness, nor were the early modern doctors attempting to methodically
search out and register all insane people in any community. Imperial psychiatrists in Africa like Tooth and Carothers (as, more recently,
Lopez in Brazil, Beaglehole in Hawaii, and Dhunjibhoy in India) later commented on the infrequency of schizophrenia among communities
relatively untouched by colonialism or Westernisation (as reviewed by
Torrey in 1979) but on the high frequency of toxic, confusional, or
organic symptoms found in apparent schizophrenia (the primary illnesses
here may of course have been an infection), but we have to be aware of
their fairly prejudicial colonial mindset. Yet the Nigerian psychiatrist Adeoye Lambo (1965) agrees that schizophrenia among nonliterate Yoruba
is less likely to be associated with systematised chronic delusions and
is more confusional, anxious, transitory, and affective, whilst urban
Yoruba have the same pattern of schizophrenia as educated modern Europeans.

It is perhaps better to rely on anthropologists (taking into account the local concepts of personhood and illness) who draw rather similar conclusions. Ackernecht (1943) cites some early field studies. In Ghana, Field (1960) however argues the association between education and schizophrenia is simply that the former makes the illness more visible,
but Fortes in 1969 in a different and more administratively remote area, argues rather differently. He carried out his initial fieldwork among
the Tallensi of northern Ghana in the 1930s, and then revisited them
with his wife, a doctor and medical psychologist, in the 1960s. The
Tallensi recognised a chronic pattern called galuk characterised by unintelligibility, confused, and erratic behaviour, an incapacity to
carry out normal social and productive tasks, yet clearly distinguished
from eccentricity or “other forms of abnormality.” Among the local population of around 5,000, Fortes identified in the 1930s only one
instance of galuk amidst plenty of eccentrics, mentally handicapped, and senile individuals. He thinks there were no others and that early death
or social concealment by the generally tolerant Tallensi were unlikely.
By contrast, among the same villages in the 1960s, with local
missionisation and some primary education, Fortes and Mayer find 13
cases, and more in neighbouring areas: “I had to refuse to see any more…” (1969, p. 53). Most of the 13 had previously worked in urban Southern Ghana for a period, either as domestic servants or unskilled labourers.

Firth (1973, p. 224), without citing specific instances, maintains that nonindustrial societies are more tolerant of the symbolisations of
mental illness and are more likely to enter into a successful dialogue
with them. Reviewing data from Ireland and Istria, Murphy (1982, p. 70) argues high rates of schizophrenia occur in situations of “conflicting
or unduly complex demands”; considering the low rates among Tongans and Taiwanese, he speculates that their culture is less individualistic. Devereux proposes schizophrenia as a psychose ethnique, a product of
violent processes of acculturation and oppression (Devereux, 1970, p.
248), and identifies as causal psychological detachment and fragmented
or specialised lives amongst other factors. Communities in the early
stages of Westernisation are less common now, but the World Health Organisation’s various studies on schizophrenia have found in developing countries a lesser incidence, better prognosis, shorter episodes, and a
more affective presentation (Hopper, 2008). Leff (1981, p. 156) argues
that the relationship of schizophrenia to the acute transient psychoses
of the sort commonly described in the Third World (the bouffées
délirantes of Franco-Cuban psychiatry: Littlewood & Lipsedge, 1981) “remains unsolved.” Working from contemporary Western symptoms, he argues that there has been a shift from bodily to psychological modes of expression; thus the bodily equivalents of delusions of control are the symptoms of catatonia (waxy flexibility, mitgehen, echopraxia, and echolalia) more common in developing and rural societies. Jablensky
(1987) argues that schizophrenia is more severe and chronic in
modernised societies and with industrialisation (similarly Cooper and Sartorius [1977] who favour aspects of social response); Hopper (2008) provides a critical review of such “culture” explanations.

Go to:
Historical variation
Early Babylonian, Egyptian, Hebrew, and Indian texts refer to what we
may take as insanity: “impulsive, uncontrolled and unreasonable behaviour” (Rosen, 1968, p. 32; also B. Clarke, 1975) but not in any systematic way; there is simply a general recognition of irrational behaviour along with a demonological explanation. Ideally the term used
for this by physicians or other experts in earlier eras should be supplemented by popular lay perceptions (Macdonald, 1987) and by
detailed biographical descriptions (Macdonald, 1987), but the early
experts did not amplify their diagnoses with the sort of description we need. Without such evidence we cannot easily accept such statements as
this by Zilborg (1941, p. 45) about the classical Greeks: “There were certain mental disturbances, obvious even to the lay person of our day, which continued to remain unrecognised.” Were Socrates’s “voices” really
schizophrenia (1941, p. 41)? How can we know? It appears likely that the Greeks did not clearly distinguish “madness” (μανία, μαινομɛνοus) as
psychosis from “delirium” (παράνοια, παράϕρονɛοντοus). The Hippocratic
corpus (1923/1981, pp. 140, 174) often places the two together and uses
both to refer to something in the course of a fever. There is no word
for, or description of, chronic psychosis here unless this was subsumed
into acute madness or delirium, and both Simon (1978) and Evans,
McGrath, and Milns (2003) state there is no mention of anything like schizophrenia in Greece, and that μανία (mania) simply connotes “frenzy.” Madness in myth, epic, and tragedy relies on extremes of passion (Padel, 1981), with associated temporary illusions (mistaken perceptions; Rosen, 1968, Chapter 3). However, there is some idea of
chronic madness in tragedy (Padel, 1981), and Jeste, Del Carmen, Lohr,
and Wyatt (1985) argue that these are historical descriptions of
something like schizophrenia but that the symptoms have changed over
time, whilst Devereux (1970, p. 274) confidently identifies an increase during the decline of Rome. Certainly something happens here. It is in
the later Roman period that Philo recounts an actual case of a quiet and chronic madman (Rosen, 1968) as does Aretaeus (Zilborg, 1941, p. 77),
and Galen and Soranus, in the early Christian era, both note that mania
then occurred without fever (Diethelm, 1971); by the first century C. E. Celsus refers to a “third type” of insanity, characterised by false images or disordered judgement (as cited in Jeste et al., 1985) but it
was often associated with inappropriate laughter and “foolish amuse[ment]” and thus might correspond to modern mania (Evans et al., 2003).

Like Diethelm, Hunter and Macalpine (1963), in their selection of early modern and modern texts in British psychiatry, easily tag past
descriptions with a label of “schizophrenia” but it seems wiser to refer to accounts where we have some more detailed contemporary description of
the patients. And here we have a long gap between Hippocrates and Galen
and the 17th-century English divine and astrologer, Richard Napier, who
kept modestly detailed records and clinical descriptions of his
patients. Napier (or, rather, his biographer who examined the casebooks statistically) finds a higher than expected proportion of young adults
among those severely mentally disturbed, an association with villages
with a transient population and those with a higher than average
proportion of Puritans and Catholics (both presumably more religiously observant than moderate Anglicans; Macdonald, 1981, pp. 40, 61, 68–69). His “most flamboyant and recognisable kinds of insanity” (madness, lunacy, and distraction) are comparatively rare and account for 5% of consultations: they are characterised by incoherent speech and
unpredictable suicides, by aimless wandering, sudden changes of mood, assaults, self-mutilation, and the destruction of others’ and their own property. These are all distinguished from melancholia and from what we would now term situational and neurotic complaints. Macdonald notes that
it was only later that Locke’s emphasis on cognition and perception was
to place delusions in madness rather than, as previously, in melancholy (thus suggesting that Napier might have underemphasised the amount of insanity by placing it under melancholia).2

Going back to less detailed accounts, the Anglo-Saxon literature now mentions instances of chronic insanity such as a four-year history (B. Clarke, 1975, p. 42) but those recorded are miraculous cures and hence presumably cases with a good prognosis. Cognitive changes are sometimes noted: “his powers of speech, discussion and understanding failed him utterly” (B. Clarke, 1975, p. 42). De Gordon in the 14th century
mentions talking to oneself, failure to finish sentences or explain
them, meaningless remarks and aimless wandering, affective lability and attempts to grasp the impossible and irrational with poor judgement (as cited in B. Clarke, 1975, p. 97). Clarke describes at length the case of
the English King Henry VI: prudish, passive, religiously obsessed, and habitually dressed in black, at the age 31 he had an illness recalling catatonia which lasted for 6 months, plus two relapses, some one and a
half years in all.3

B. Clarke (1975) favours such biographical data when we can get it, to
avoid the emphasis on the obviously acute and frenzied cases which in
the medieval period and later were dealt with by immediate physical restriction rather than observation. By the 16th century chronic madmen
or their imitators (Tom O’Bedlams) were commonly seen around Britain (B. Clarke, 1975, Chapter 9). Thomas Willis in his Soul of Brutes (1674)
said there was no need to give any illustrations but notes their “incongruous notions” (as cited in B. Clarke, 1975, p. 294; and Hunter & Macalpine 1963, p. 191): the pattern of severe mental illness was
apparently well known. Lunacy (Latin insania, furor; Greek mania) now
was generally distinguished from phrenyse which occurred only with a
fever (B. Clarke, 1975, p. 259) but there was little psychological description: simply “like a wylde beast” (as cited in Hunter & Macalpine, 1963, p. 14). By the 19th century, it was common to remark psychological symptoms like “loss of affect” and detachment from surroundings (Hunter & Macalpine, 1963, pp. 879–880), and social and cultural explanations had appeared. Already in the 17th century,
religious enthusiasm had been said to lead to insanity, and in the early 19th century it was recognised that there had been an increase in
incidence in Western Europe, especially in the towns rather than the countryside, and especially in England (1963, pp. 823–841),4 although doubts were raised about selective bias in the statistics. In 1837,
rates of insanity were approximately 1 in 1,000 in Europe (Scotland 1 in 574) as opposed to 1 in 262 in the United States in a survey that took
into account bias and data selection. That until the 1700s delusions
seem to have been included as melancholic rather than manic symptoms (Macdonald, 1981, Chapter 4), and that it was the florid and antisocial patterns which naturally came more readily to public notice may however
of course both argue that recognition of schizophrenia or proto-schizophrenia was likely to have been reduced in the earlier
period, to increase in the modern era when both facilities and
diagnostic patterns resemble more closely our current procedures.

Go to:
Reflexive self-consciousness and modernity
Nevertheless, we are left with some evidence that the transition to
Western European modernity, both historically and culturally,5 has been associated with a pattern of psychosis which, compared with its predecessors, is less “affective,” less florid and confused, which is associated with lasting cognitive changes such as delusions, and is more chronic with a worse prognosis: in short, something resembling our
current idea of schizophrenia. Among the cultural changes that have accompanied this, observers have attributed a variety of not unrelated patterns—“social change” in general, traumatic social change, urbanisation, industrialisation, modern education, literacy, Christianisation, individualism—and conscious self awareness. Most
medical interest has focused on the social response to psychosis: here
we want to emphasise by contrast the psychological schemata in a society which might propel proto-schizophrenia into schizophrenia. Now
schizophrenia is usually thought of primarily as a biological pattern,
so how might “soft” social and cultural changes affect the core symptoms (as opposed to altering prognosis through social responses like stigmatisation)? Jenkins (2004) suggests that it is the individual’s subjective attribution of the proto-symptoms (an attribution located in culture) which affects the eventual manifestation of the symptoms themselves—which are thus as cultural as they are biological. Given
rather individualised and psychological thinking, the proto-voices6 have
now to be externally located in another person (Morrison, 1999), to
which we might add the obvious objection that psychopathologies (just
like “normal functioning”) are a product of both biology and culture.

In this paper we focus on Christianity, not because Christianity is the single salient influence on the modern world, but because it is a significant one that has influenced (indeed it has made possible) the appearance of the industrialised and individualised world, so much so
that a history of the West without Christianity would be meaningless.
All (universal at least) religions provide not only an account of extramundane beings and our ultimate justification, with prescriptive
norm, for social life, but also some account of the nature of humans and
how they function. Though theology is obviously a social representation rather than an internal or external account of lived experience, it will
be evident from the anguished quotations below (particularly those from
St. Augustine’s Confessions) that the convert is constantly trying to align themself with the public dogma, reading and experiencing life
through the new conceptions. We have emphasised conversion because here
the discrepancy between lived experience and theology is especially
salient. Initially: for if successful the convert’s ascribed role
becomes his personal achievement.

The idea of the modern self famously provided by Geertz (1983, p. 59)—a “bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic centre of awareness, emotion, judgement and action organised into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against
other such wholes and against a social and natural background”—would be unintelligible in the absence of Christianity in which its sources may
be located. A theology tells us what a person is, how people differ, how they act and are motivated, a theory of uniformity and difference; it
offers a schema for the natural and ultrahuman worlds, for agency, and
for influence; how appetites, emotions and cognitions arise, what they signify; and a schema of our ultimate destination as beings. Every
theology involves its practical, everyday psychology of human life. We
are not arguing that Christianity contains in embryo everything that we might characterise as “modern.” (Indeed, in the case under consideration, the onset of Christianity seems to have led to a
temporary shift towards demonic explanations of what might otherwise be
seen as illness.7) Nor that the original appearance of Christianity in a pagan world had exactly the same effects for a psychology as
20th-century missionisation; but that the secular modern world has
involved certain psychological conventions of thinking which were
strongly fortified by Christianity, as Marcel Mauss argued in 1938/1979.

Sass (2004), following the work of the phenomenologist Wolfgang
Blankenburg, proposes that psychological hyper-reflexivity is
significant in schizophrenia: reflective self-consciousness and other patterns in which the individual comes to focus on itself and on
features of its own functioning, associated with a loss of the usual taken-for-granted experience of the local world (what, following Blankenburg, he terms a “loss of self evidence,” [2004, pp. 305–307], akin to the well known “delusional mood” of schizophrenia in which the environment is no longer normal for something odd is going on). The initially tacit, including the processes of personal psychological functioning, now becomes the focus of awareness: “a focused,
introspective awareness that derealises sensations by detaching them
from the unnoticed background whilst simultaneously subjecting these sensations to processes of externalisation and reification” (Sass, 2004, pp. 312–313). Aspects of the self are experienced as akin to external objects as the tacit becomes forced, artificial and awkward, and to be examined.8 Reflecting on this only further distances the person from any sense of naturalness or capacity for spontaneous action, thus
exacerbating self-alienation (Sass, 2001). Living with this
destabilising cognitive slippage and the loss of the tacit is made
worse, says Sass,9 by those (modern) societies which encourage the same tendencies, in which everybody increasingly lives in a less stable
external world and is plunged into idiosyncratic internalised
experience, into a set of fragmented pluralistic alternatives in which
the act of choice itself becomes problematic, and in which the
individual self is increasingly restricted in that its processes, indeed
it itself become an object for scrutiny. Sass describes this as “a shift from extraverted traditional societies in which emotional life,
organised through myth and ritual, is at the center, to the more
introverted modern societies in which intellectual processes are far
more dominant” (2001, p. 318), to, as we might say, the triumph of psychology as the dominant mode of personal being. It is our argument
that this “excessive” reflexive self-consciousness in part originated with Christianity and Christian conversion, and, reinforced by the Reformation and the development of popular everyday secular psychology,
has grown in the modern era and is a concomitant of “Westernisation” (modernisation, internalisation) in non-Western societies.10 We will now offer six instances as to how Christian theology might have provided a
route to this psychology.11

Go to:
Scrutiny of the self in the act of conversion
(a) A delocated and omniscient God addressed in an internal conversation
To forsake other gods is not so difficult when you can move away from
them and their geographical sphere of influence—if they are gods of
place and nation. The popular gods of later paganism, amoral and
deceivable (Origen, 1869, p. 414), were still to be found in their place
of origin, and continued their work in a local tradition, although they could relocate. While Christian universalism was to be characterised by belief, Greek and Roman religion had been orthopraxic, later with an
idea that empirical knowledge of the gods was possible through
divination, oracles or emergent fate: these had been generally
orientated to the wellbeing of the collectivity and the gods did not communicate directly with one (Ando, 2008); there was “no proximate communication” with them (nullo inter se propinquo communicato) as Apuleius (1908, p. 11) had put it. But gods and humans were in a
reciprocal relationship where the former could be benevolent when men practised the correct ritual or sacrifice: as the younger Pliny
lamented, the Christians only had to burn a bit of incense and all would
be well. Roman, like modern African, sacrifice was concerned with
warding off disaster or to achieve practical benefits (Peel, 2000).
Smith (1990) has made a distinction between these “locative cults” (which were often syncretic, subsuming one local god into another more powerful) contrasted with the new “utopian cults” such as the Hellenistic mystery religions12 and Christianity which demanded a fundamental change in the individual and hence something like
introspection. And “God is one,” insists the author of the early Shepherd of Hermas (Anonymous A, 2003): drawing on Judaism, the
Christian God now denied the very existence of other gods (Origen, 1869,
p. 429). Omnipresent, he controlled every bit of the world, not just the area around his place of origin. (Similarly the Hebrews who migrated
from Palestine to Alexandria in the late Hellenistic period had had to
do without a God in his Temple in Jerusalem; as they had to, more
radically, after the destruction of the Temple and the expulsion of the
Jews by Hadrian.) Communication with God was now not only by a ritual of place but by an obligatory internal personal conversation—prayer. For
the 19th-century missionaries, “one of the proofs of the sincerity of
our converts…. is the habit of prayer which they have acquired” (Peel, 2000, p. 256). This God was universal, omniscient, and omnipresent:
“What torments my heart suffered in mental pregnancy, what groans, my God!… And though I did not know it, your ears were there,” says St. Augustine, “You knew what I endured; no human being knew” (Augustine, 2008, pp. 119–120). There was no escaping this God for He already knew what you were thinking, but one could try to plead with Him or placate
Him in a silent conversation and he might respond personally: “The Lord did not leave us alone in our affliction” says a bereaved missionary in Yorubaland (Peel, 2000, p. 167). “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit… and to obey is better than to sacrifice. God wants our hearts” an African convert is told (Peel, 2000, p. 185). Missionaries,
evangelising the Yoruba in the 19th century, consciously modelled their
work on the Acts of the Apostles (Peel, 2000, p. 155): “Her ori
[personal deity] is made of cowries and only God who made them should be worshipped” (Peel, 2000, p. 157), just as St. Clement had stated that “We were maimed in our understanding, worshiping stones and pieces of wood… all of them made by humans” (Clement, 2003, pp. 165–166); and similarly Eusebius (Kofsky, 2000, passim). Christianity pushed the
pagans into a universal linear time of redemptive history and away from their cyclical local history (Leach, 1961). Rather than, say, committing
a particular crime in society, the Christian was born in universal sin (which could be redeemed). For the Yoruba, their concern with a deferral
of death was transformed into the promise of eternal life (Peel,
2000)—or damnation.

(b) A private self similarly independent of immediate physical context
yet located in the individual
This new deity could be encountered anywhere—“Wherever two are gathered in my name” (Mathew 18.20)—for Christianity was universal and individual (“neither Jew nor Greek… bond nor free… male or female, for you are all
one man in Christ Jesus” says St. Paul). And ultimate control rested
with Him, Creator and Master of the whole universe, throughout the whole universe. No longer was there any point in threatening your recalcitrant (Egyptian) idol for not coming up with the goods (Cumont, 1911/1958, p.
93): as similarly in colonial Africa, at least according to the
missionaries (Peel, 2000). If God was independent of social context and place, then so was the individual self at least in its conversations
with God (as Dilthey argues). Religious status was no longer signalled
by external signs (circumcision), or social position (the higher stages
of the Roman priesthood had been occupied by aspiring politicians in the course of their career: “The internal status of the officiating person
was a matter of… indifference to the celestial spirits” [Cumont, 1911/1958, p. 91]). “Now it is not our flesh that we must circumcise, we must crucify ourselves, exterminate and mortify our unreasonable

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