What a great image for a NYT piece on schizophrenia by Matt Dorfman. Louis Sass describes the mental state of schizophrenics as the "mind's eye world." (Paradoxes of Delusion) What he means by this is that unlike the classic psychoanalytic understanding of schizophrenics as people with poor reality-testing and wish-fulfillment notions who are developmentally regressive and primitive, "like the child of age five or younger to whom everything seems real," actual schizophrenics exhibit such characteristics of self-consciousness or solipsism as distance or irony toward their own delusions and a system of "double-bookkeeping" (you may be trying to poison me, but I will still eat the dinner you serve). "It is, to be sure, a self-deceiving condition, but one that is generated from within rationality itself, rather than by a loss of rationality."
