Fearful Symmetry: Blake, McGilchrist, and the Symbolism of the Left Brain

Tyger, Tyger: Predators, the Single Eye, and the Pyramids within our Heads

Introduction: Symbols as Symptoms

In 2014, the psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist gave a remarkable talk on the art and symbolism of patients with schizophrenia or psychosis (‘Neuromania – Spiders, yes, but why cats?‘). The presentation was not only a fascinating insight into the nature of these conditions, and the implicit and intrinsic connections between symptoms and symbols, but also a profound exploration of the peculiar symbolism and imagery that more generally surrounds us in our supposedly hyper-rational cultures, and which artist and writer William Blake also intuited and drew upon in some of his major works.

As pioneering psychologist Georg Groddeck noted, ‘the sickness is also a symbol, a representation of something going on within, a drama staged by the It [das Es], by means of which it announces what it could not say with the tongue’ (The Book Of The It, 1923). Symptom and symbol become almost interchangeable in this world of manifestation and inner-outer realisation. Indeed, Groddeck often refers to ‘the symbol-making It’, observing that ‘the It cannot help but symbolize’.

Groddeck’s remarkable ‘The Book of the It’ (1923)

Groddeck’s theories of the ‘It’ or ‘Id’ profoundly influenced Freud, who formulated the much more Urizenic notion of the ‘id’ as a threatening and destabilising force within our minds, rather than a spontaneous, hyper-aware, and potentially liberating and empowering (healing) energy resisting the forces of the repressive, over-rationalising egoic Selfhood, which Freud championed. Both symptoms and symbols, for Groddeck, were ways for this underlying, imaginative reality or language to communicate itself, a way to ‘give Error a form’, as Blake put it.

McGilchrist explores this innate symbol-making propensity in patients with schizophrenia (a condition which interestingly mimics, as he observes, ‘right hemisphere damage’ and in which ‘the right frontal lobe is underactive’). His discussion notes the remarkable recurrence of the symbol of the Single Detached Eye, for example, in the artwork of this group, as well as their visual and psychological attraction towards the symbolism of cats/tigers, burning forests, pyramids, and sun-like ‘rays’. ‘Cats have a fascination for schizophrenic subjects’, he observes , perhaps representing ‘the more ruthless and Machiavellian aspects of our nature’. He explores the striking commonalities between these paintings from schizophrenic subjects, and speculates on the ways in which they support claims about the two hemispheres and their functions, and indeed how they might relate to and be expressive of wider culture.

Example of the astonishing artwork of David Chick, a patient with schizophrenia, with a curiously floating single Eye in the top right corner. As McGilchrist observes, these very striking detached ‘Eyes’ are a recurrent, persistent, and spontaneous feature of patients with schizophrenia in their art. He notes not only the beauty of the image and the presence of this observing Eye, but also the ‘morbid geometricity’ of the composition, and the linear ‘rays’ seemingly emanating from the ‘sun’. Also ‘the fact that the character seems to be changing sex’, and the apparent ‘depthlessness’ of the whole image, a sort of curious ‘two-dimensional’ representation of reality. These are all features, remarkably, of the iconography and symbolism commonly associated with a number of influential ‘spiritual’ traditions – such as in Gnostic, Masonic, and Hermetic imagery and iconography, including the depictions and artwork associated with Akhenaten in classic Egyptian culture, who shifted his whole culture towards worship of exactly this sort of ‘ray-like’ sun (called the Aten, after which he was named).

Linear solar rays, spatial depthlessness, sexlessness, the detached single Eye, and pyramids: the symbolism of hyper-left hemispheric and proto-schizoid Egyptian rationalism

In terms of symbolism and symbolisation, ‘the disembodied Eye’, McGilchrist remarks, ‘is probably the single commonest finding in patients with schizophrenia’, though he also notes the striking appearance, and frequent reiteration, of the ‘Pyramid’ as a symbol or focus of attention in psychotic subjects. These two - the Eye and the Pyramid - are often found together in hyper-functioning left hemisphere systems of thought.

His whole talk, drawing on a rich combination of neurological, cultural, psychological, and aesthetic frameworks, is revelatory, and essential for anyone trying to understand the appearance of these symbols in various esoteric and ‘religious’ traditions and iconography – from orthodox Christianity and the cultural symbolism of ancient Egypt to the iconography of the Enlightenment and the esoteric symbolism of the American dollar bill – the most widely circulated of modern symbols, as he notes.

Living in a Left-Brain World: in our post-Babylonian culture, the symbolism of the hyper-active left brain is dominant and ubiquitous. This marks, and is expressive of, the dramatic shift from a previous right brain/whole brain way of seeing (what McGilchrist terms the ‘Master’) to a Urizenic, left-brain dominant one (that of the ‘Emissary’, who now assumes the ‘God’ role within the human brain). Images (from top): The single detached Eye in Pontormo’s ‘Supper at Emmaus’ (1525); the top of Jean-Jacques-François Le Barbier’s ‘The Declaration of the Rights of Man’ (1789); the same single eye and triangle on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, as seen on the U.S. $1 bill; the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury, complete with the detached capstone on the top (as on the US dollar pyramid) signifying the original ‘benben’ stone, the basis of the left-brain’s need to ground itself on the illusion of certainty and solidity, in order to wield power; Single Eyes and Pyramids are also everywhere to be found in the videos and iconography of modern ‘pop’ stars such as Lady Gaga, Rhianna, and Katy Perry. They serve to reinforce the control of the left hemisphere on our imaginations and way of thinking about reality: detached, controlled, hyper-rationalising, hierarchical (pyramidical), and kept unconscious. In a word: Single Vision.

The Visionary Arsonist: William Blake, Jonathan Martin, and the Burning Forest

Of particular interest in relation to Blake is McGilchrist’s discussion of the artwork of Jonathan Martin (1782–1838), the brother of the famous nineteenth-century artist John Martin, and someone who frequently heard voices – one of which in 1829 told him to burn down York Minster church, which he duly did (note the theme of burning fire, here literalised), and was promptly put into the Bedlam asylum. There he drew and painted extraordinary – and extraordinarily Blakean – pictures filled with burning tigers and lions, strikingly symmetrical faces, detached hands and eyes, and swirling, spiralling serpents, suggesting some sort of deep nexus or psychological patterning within the mind, connecting all of these features.

Below are four of Martin’s artworks, next to strikingly similar images in Blake’s work:

Burning Forests of the Night: Images (from top): Martin’s ‘England Prepare to Meet Thy God’ next to Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose’ (note also the unusual combination of text and image in both, a characteristic of much schizophrenic art); Martin’s ‘The Lambton Worm and Self Portrait’ and Blake’s ‘The Angel Michael Binding Satan’ (‘He Cast him into the Bottomless Pit, and Shut him up’) (note the subjection of the repressed bodily and imaginative energy which the holy, rationalising, disembodied left brain psyche sees itself now at war with); Martin’s ‘My Dream of My Foot Cut Of’ [sic] and Blake’s ‘Dante and Virgil Penetrating the Forest’ (note the lions/tygers leaping through Martin’s forest, which seems to be on fire with energy); and Martin’s ‘The Likeness of My Father’ and Blake’s ‘The Man Who Taught Blake Painting in his Dreams’ (note the prominence of the foreheads – of the brain – in both; and also the lion with a crown on its head, and Martin’s striking title for the image, which suggests perhaps a deeper, more Freudian, reading of the anti-authoritarian impulse in both artists).

Martin’s artwork, like that of many subjects with schizophrenia, displays a highly unusual and distinctive (and again very Blakean) combination of text intruding onto images. Indeed, as McGilchrist suggests, this spontaneous combination of text and image is historically quite unusual in art, except in the artwork of subjects with schizophrenia.

Blake’s images are remarkable not only for giving such astonishing form to such powerful and often disturbing visions and mental states, but for his ability to distance himself from them (unlike say, for Jonathan Martin – the difference being in part that Blake was not being controlled by his visions). I am not therefore suggesting that Blake was schizophrenic – indeed, he seems to have been in many respects unusually sane and integrated: as one contemporary recalled of him, ‘I saw nothing but sanity’ (Mr Calvert, cited by Gilchrist in his early Life of William Blake).

What makes Blake’s works and thinking so compelling is precisely his remarkable understanding of the mental structures and processes that lay behind these disturbed ways of thinking, endemic to modernity and which he witnessed all around him in industrial and commercialised London, without however succumbing to them – indeed it is his understanding of them that allows him to stand back from them, and depict them so vividly and forcefully.

‘He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only’ – the self-enclosed ‘hall of mirrors’, as McGilchrist describes this self-reflexive, ‘virtual’ aspect of the left hemisphere. Image: Blake’s ‘Newton’ (c. 1795–1805). Note the single eye of Newton, the Urizenic triangular compasses, the narrow focused attention. It was this mode of seeing that would transform the world under industrial capitalism into its own image. Blake saw it coming.

In that sense he was in many ways the first psychoanalyst – as Foster Damon remarks, ‘I do think it extremely likely that the name of Blake the psychologist will figure in the history of science, as well as in the histories of literature, art, and philosophy.’ In particular, Blake saw how these damaging processes and activities were not only experienced individually and subjectively, but also culturally and globally – in the forms of global mental collapse and disintegration that he witnessed in the practices of contemporary industrial capitalism and Newtonian science, driven as they were by a pathological form of exactly this type of schizophrenic instrumental reasoning (see Duffell, Wounded Leaders: British Elitism and the Entitlement Illusion—A Psychohistory, 2014).

It is perhaps significant in this context that McGilchrist defines schizophrenia as not a loss of ‘reason’ so much as a form of excessive rationality. ‘“To lose one’s reason” is the old expression for madness’, he notes, ‘but an excess of rationality is the grounds of another kind of madness, that of schizophrenia’ (The Master and his Emissary). Certain forms of madness such as schizophrenia are thus characterised ‘by an excessively detached, hyper-rational, reflexively self-aware, disembodied and alienated condition’ in which ‘one’s own body becomes no longer the vehicle through which reality is experienced, but instead it is seen as just another object, sometimes a disturbingly alien object’, in a world full of other ‘devitalised machines’. This stance is, he observes, strikingly similar to the basis of the Cartesian philosophy.

Self-portrait of a person with schizophrenia, representing that individual’s distorted perception of reality. Note the machine-like way the subject suffering from schizophrenia understands and sees their body. Today you have to be either a schizophrenic or a materialist scientist to adopt this view of the world. As McGilchrist notes, ‘it is significant that the “normal” scientific materialist view of the body is similar to that found in schizophrenia. Schizophrenic subjects routinely see themselves as machines— often robots, computers, or cameras—and sometimes declare that parts of them have been replaced by metal or electronic components’.

Indeed, McGilchrist characterises this rather abstract and abstracting stance of ‘an excessively detached, hyper-rational, reflexively self-aware, disembodied and alienated condition’ as being common to both schizophrenic thinking and post-Enlightenment philosophy, the intellectual or psychological framework for modernity. As he observes, the ‘conscious effort to distance oneself from one’s surroundings, refrain from normal action and interaction with them, suspend one’s normal assumptions and feelings about them and subject them to a detached scrutiny’ is ‘an exercise which in the non-mentally ill is normally confined to philosophers’. Blake would probably have agreed:

Till a Philosophy of Five Senses was complete
Urizen wept & gave it into the hands of Newton & Locke

– The Song of Los

McGilchrist concludes that this form of excessive hyper-rationality, the characteristic of certain types of extreme psychosis, is the hallmark not only of subjects with schizophrenia but of modern culture itself: ‘Both schizophrenia and the modern condition, I suggest, deal with the same problem: a free-wheeling left hemisphere.’ We are bound within and to this free-wheeling power, not merely through philosophy but through symbols, which work on a far deeper level on us. Hence the ubiquity of such symbols in our supposedly secular and ‘Enlightenment’ modern age.