The Rabbit Hole: Reading 19th-Century Literature

If you can at all avoid it, please consider avoiding the rabbit hole and staying on the surface of things. Depth doesn’t always yield accuracy; in fact, it often yields projection.

Allow me to explain. Mental health issues, especially schizophrenia, have to do with a system of thoughts that become interlocked and in which a person with schizophrenia becomes trapped. The thoughts are enticing, a sort of waking dream. There is a lot of research into this type of thing, with different major theorists, psychologists, psychiatrists and scholars such as myself, having our own theories about what psychosis is and whether you can avoid it. My take is that some people can avoid it and some people cannot. It depends on if a person is deeply embedded in the meanings and the symbols or not.

For me, with medicine and therapy (when I can respond well to therapy), I am able to stay on the surface of things quite well. Playing piano helps even more, because then I can be expressive without getting bogged down in the rabbit hole of words. Researching my mental health condition also helps provide structure and purpose so that I have language, a sort of handle to grasp, when I’m not doing well.

I’m reading the book The Sandman by E.T.A. Hoffmann right now, and I am pretty sure that the protagonist of the story has schizophrenia. It is a sad, compassionate, and yet sensationalized story, and I don’t recommend it. Because it assumes the worst of people with mental illness. But one thing I’m realizing is that it has to do with the Enlightenment/Romanticism split of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and that that seems to be where the nexus of schizophreniform disorders emerged (the illness itself was first “discovered” or diagnosed around that time, as well). Hoffman says that the protagonist is “inner-divided.”

It gets down to the split between faith and reason, which was dramatized through a deeply Christian and moral lens by Dostoevsky in the famous novel Crime and Punishment. The main character is named Raskol’nikov. Raskol’ means schism or split, in Russian. Raskol’nikov goes down the “is everything permitted” rabbit hole of the day.

You don’t need to read these books, which may themselves generate a rabbit hole, but they teach an important lesson. Namely, that there is a rabbit hole, and that, should you be able to, you should avoid it. In Hoffmann’s book, the main character kills himself, and in Dostoevsky’s book, the main character kills someone else. It all starts with lack of purity and morals and a lack of self-accountability to stay on the right path. A novella called “Fair Eckbert” by Ludwig Tieck also talks about how once you start down off the pure path, it is all downhill from there.

Moral of the story: don’t overthink it, choose the good, avoid evil, don’t repay harm with harm, and take your medicine if you think you’ll go down the rabbit hole without it.