Newsletter 10 October

Dear Reader,

I'm Ariel Swyer, a psychologist interested in hearing voices and psychosis (as well as the history and philosophy of my discipline's earnest and flawed attempts to measure and understand these phenomena).

In thinking back over my first year at Cultmind, there are a couple of different "cultural artefacts" that have been on my mind. One is a little 1970s memoir called The Eden Express, by Mark Vonnegut (son of the legendary writer Kurt Vonnegut). I had been carrying around an increasingly tattered copy of it for years thinking "I ought to read this", and it had finally reached such a profound level of tatter that it was verging on actual disintegration. Published in 1976, it chronicles Vonnegut's experience of psychosis (at the time attributed to schizophrenia, but later determined to be bipolar disorder).

After graduating from Swarthmore College in 1969, at "the ridiculous age of 21", Vonnegut and his friends head for British Columbia on a wave of back-to-the land optimism and acquire a small farm. It is here that psychosis creeps into Vonnegut's world. It's vivid and interesting writing with the humor and creativity of thought of someone very clearly related to Kurt Vonnegut. And it has a lot to say not only about psychosis, but the absurd and unwieldy experience of having a mind in general.

As I read it this summer (mostly on the train) I also found myself thinking about my own sort of intellectual roadmap. I thought about Swarthmore, the alma mater that Mark Vonnegut and I share. It's a place where a bunch of intense and funky kids are thrown together on a tiny campus and spend four years staying up way too late and ranting about all the things we're thinking about.

I also thought about Kurt Vonnegut whose post-modern anti-war novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, has always been a kind of landmark in my personal geography. At the age of 15 I sat down under a tree, read the book, and at the end I looked up, and the world had gotten a lot more interesting. Yes, the book seemed to say, this place is strange and silly and sad, and it's all totally mind-boggling and worth talking about.

One idea that has persistently interested me about people's experiences of hearing voices is the way they refuse the ordinary confines of time and space. Those who hear voices describe them speaking from "different dimensions", or "sedimentary layers" within the mind. They deeply complicate any sense of the border between the inside and outside of the self. And they break the rules of time - the voices of the dead, or those that live in the past speaking into the present. Reading does this too. It spills our minds out across time and space. "Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time" Kurt Vonnegut writes in Slaughterhouse-5, going on to describe an optometrist who has stopped moving through time in a linear way and keeps being thrown into different moments of his life. I felt a bit like this, reading The Eden Express this summer and thinking about my current research interests, but also getting to wander through my past, thinking about how I got here.