The Madness of King Lear

 

A correspondent’s son suffers schizophrenia, and is also prone to taking drugs, notably LSD. She laments it all as an “escape from reality.” 

The truth may be more subtle. 

To begin with, is an escape from reality, defined as our daily routine, always a bad thing? We are actually morally obliged to take regular escapes from this “reality. “This is the reason for Sabbath observance, for example. And there is a certain symbolism in the consecration of the wine.

Is taking a vacation an escape from reality? Is watching a movie? In a sense, yes. Both draw us out of our everyday surroundings; this allows us to relax. Simply by “getting away from it all,” we can often evaluate our problems from a new perspective, and perhaps even solve them. Trapped in the daily struggle, we cannot.

Yet to see taking a vacation to Rome, say, or watching a Shakespeare play, or attending mass, as escapism is also perverse: it sees only what we are leaving, not where we are going. It is like walking backwards on our pilgrimage.

It may be fairly common for people to drink alcohol for pure “escapism.” Alcohol dulls the senses, and slows reactions. We are probably less able to deal with our problems intelligently on alcohol. But experimenting with LSD is a different matter. People often think they have learned new things about reality from taking LSD.

I am not advocating LSD use. It is a blunt tool, and dangerous. But psychosis may be similar. The fact that this person, my friend’s son, when he is not experiencing schizophrenic symptoms, wants to take LSD, suggests that the psychosis is giving him some benefit. He is learning something from it, or at least escaping some intolerable daily situation.

Shakespeare, who must be considered one of the greatest psychologists who ever lived, suggests as much in King Lear:

Our foster-nurse of nature is repose,

The which he lacks; that to provoke in him,

Are many simples operative, whose power

Will close the eye of anguish.

…

The king is mad: how stiff is my vile sense,

That I stand up, and have ingenious feeling

Of my huge sorrows! Better I were distract:

So should my thoughts be sever'd from my griefs,

And woes by wrong imaginations lose

The knowledge of themselves.

In either case, simply trying to block the symptoms of schizophrenia, as we currently do, will be harmful. Schizophrenia looks like the working out of some problem.