Schizophrenia is a way of simply dividing the mind into personalities in which one can be two different people as the occasion suits.

 

It is a normal way to cope with a often hostile environment.

 

I once met a priest – a good guy who God had saved from the valley of the shadow of death, of schizophrenia.

 

He told me schizophrenics are bright sensitive people.

 

Having a good friend who is a schizophrenic, this fits the description.

 

You see, how do you cope if you are highly bright and highly sensitive in a inhospitable coldish reality?

 

On one hand your soul feels love, but your brain senses danger.

 

One way – a highly skilled way would be to develop different personalities.

 

Freud believed that normal people have a lot to learn from mental disturbances for the simple reason is that they too are normal people coping under extreme circumstances and as he had occasion to mention that the difference in mental disturbances to normal people is only FID Frequency, Intensity, and Duration.

 

In other words, what normally happens is people develop a single personality.

 

This personality may not even be of their choosing, for example an aggressive person who is filled with anxiety and as a defense mechanism is aggressive to ensure that he is not vulnerable.

 

The schizophrenics may instead have two personalities: one to be kind, another to be aggressive.

 

But all of this is only an introduction to what I wanted to say.

 

This is my latest epiphany.

 

Another way of looking at the drivers of our car, our thoughts, speech and actions would be to call them voices.

 

We have five kinds of voices that can be talking in our heads and indeed we actually vacillate between them though we are primarily in one of them.

 

The lowest would be ego, this is a person – as we had occasion to mention – who actually has extremely low self esteem hence develops a grandiosity image of oneself but is usually jealous of those who have healthy self-esteem, hence develops into malicious types of speaking.

 

His speech is belittling, often sarcastic, which is a safe way to belittle others.

 

The second would be the healthy self esteem but under fear, hence like a child who will lie if caught – I think often women fall into this category for by nature they have more fear than men (and statistics prove this) hence their speech is shall we say, lies protecting their vulnerability.

 

The next type of speech – which I believe this is more in men who have less fear – delusional loves.

 

Men are incredible fantasizers – there are more ideas created in a man’s mind in a single day than in a woman’s lifetime.

 

As Jerry Seinfeld says, that boys who read comics are not fantasizing, rather merely seeing their future options.

 

The fourth would be the ideal, namely where intellect overrides both fearful (which fear must be cured through trust in God but that’s for another article) and delusional loves.

 

And last but not least there is God’s voice, the voice of the Rebbe of the generation or when God communicates to us, or going to a Mashpia (spiritual Chabad mentor which the Rebbe says, God comes through that person as one is using God system.)