When the Sun Bursts Quotes

“The schizophrenic position is one where a self’s embedment in the solace of the quotidian is breached, and consciousness is confronted with both the complexities of thought processes and the raw materials of unconscious function.”
― Christopher Bollas, When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia

“But the United States lost more than its innocence in the 1960s. Its moral deterioration constituted one of the most catastrophic collective mental breakdowns the world had ever witnessed.”
― Christopher Bollas, When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia

“Often, the schizophrenic is not trying to tell you something; instead, he seeks to wrap you up, syntactically, in his way of experiencing the world.”
― Christopher Bollas, When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia

“Even though we shall never know what infants think, we can assume that their first experiences of the world are sensory. These will be made up in utero, for example, of the sound of the mother’s heart and internal organs, the infiltration of light, the senses of movement and taste, and later the sense of smell. What is important is the heterogeneity of the primitive sensorium in its apprehension of lived experience. I believe that many schizophrenics return to this early sensorial world, to somatoform experience and representation. Before wording or conceptual thinking, somatoforms express the self ’s nascent experience through the body’s lexicon. One difficulty we face in understanding schizophrenics is the extent to which we have lost touch with such early forms of experience and representation.”
― Christopher Bollas, When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia

“David, a young man in his mid- twenties, looked at me warily. I had asked him how he knew that something crucial in him had changed. He was silent for a while, and then said, “When the sun burst.”
For David this was a defining moment. He knew he had seen the sun burst. It was impossible that they had not seen this; it could only be that they were lying to him. Why would they do that? It must be because they were in cahoots with the forces that burst the sun. So he had to shut himself up, remain still. He did this for ten years, until his next schizophrenic “episode.”
What does David teach us? Let’s pursue one line of thought. Life is normal until the apocalypse. Even if the signs of catastrophe seem mild—a feeling of being out of place, but it passes, the impression of hearing voices, the sense that something has entered the body—the schizophrenic will never forget those first experiences. Some process seems to be altering the self without any conscious choice involved in the mutation. After these shocks, everything changes. The world is not the same; people are no longer safe. But the rest of humanity seems oblivious. In schizophrenia, unlike other psychotic distresses, there are usually a number of these apocalyptic moments in which the person’s world view is changed.”
― Christopher Bollas, When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia