The Tell-Tale Heart

 

I am not a fan of Edgar Allen Poe. To me, his writing is over the top—fear-jerking, cheap thrills.

But I just went through “The Tell-Tale Heart” with a student, and I think Poe may have a lead here on the true nature and cause of what modern psychiatry calls “paranoid schizophrenia.” 

In the story, the narrator is driven to psychosis by a guilty conscience. And not only guilt over murdering an old; he murders the old man in the first place out of guilt. A bad conscience made him imagine the old man saw into his soul and was judging him.

Poe does not tell us what he feels guilty about in the first place; but the clue is his insistence throughout the tale that he is not mad. He is more concerned about this than about being convicted of murder—he is resisting the obvious insanity defense. Why?

Out of pride. It is literally vitally important to him to convince the reader that his version of reality is the correct one. He must have the ability to impose his will on reality, and not concede to it.

In other words, a schizophrenic is a narcissist overwhelmed by his guilty conscience.

This is consistent with a mystery I read of a long time ago, in a book about Florida’s “death row.” It claimed that virtually everyone on death row seemed fully insane, delusional. Even though they were all judged sane and able to stand trial when they were convicted. And this included contract killers, mob killers—people who did it professionally, as a job. It seems implausible that such people were psychotic at the time they committed their crimes; a psychotic cannot plan well enough for a mob hit. 

Possibly the fear of death drove them mad; but most of us see death coming at the end of our lives, and do not go mad expecting it. It seems more likely the psychosis was provoked by having the chance to meditate over their former deeds.

M. Scott Peck, and Robert Fleiss, have both observed that narcissists when challenged can become psychotic. After all, their everyday assumptions, if examined closely, are already delusional. They all secretly think they are better than everyone, a Napoleon, or the god Siva, or the virgin Mary, or the promised Messiah. They will delude themselves with ideas of their own exceptional talents: like Poe’s narrator boasting of his extremely sensitive hearing, and of how clever he was in how he committed the murder and hid the body. This is how narcissists talk.

Shake them up enough, and the mask they wear to hide these assumptions from others slips. They openly declare themselves Napoleon, or Siva, or the Virgin Mary.

Paranoia comes with schizophrenia. Paranoia is itself a clear expression of egotism. It is the belief that everything is about you. Someone on the television is speaking directly to you. The CIA is trying to control you—obviously, they consider you that important. Everything is a message for you personally.

This is all the opposite of depression, which is caused by a sense of inferiority.

But in either case, the obvious and necessary cure is the same: to bring God and submission to God into the mix.