too stupid to be psychotic?

Interesting ideas on 'stupid and psychotic' - I steal and repeat this
exchange with a playwright from another ng - the point about language is
that the terms are now always abusive, and undifferentiated. Phil

<bobgrumman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1135966511.651527.12440@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

> Is it possible to be too stupid to be a psychotic?

An interesting speculation, but I suspect not. Instead one could be too
psychotic to be stupid. But these 'disturbances' are hemispherically
opposite, and of quite different natures.

As a definition 'being stupid' is an indicator of false reasoning, or
reasoning power, from a given premise, essentially a left-brain dysfunction
or a lazy or atrophied ability to perform a calculation and come to a
logical result.

Whereas a psychosis is to experience a distorted perception of things - not
necessarily things viewed falsely, but things viewed out of proportion to
their actual state among all things. A glamour, for example, is a form of
psychosis, and is right-brained - the part being taken as a larger
proportion to the whole than it actually is.

There is no necessary relation between the 2 things - one can act from a
sense of glamour but proceed in a rational or logical way, which seems to be
the state of many psychopaths, whose actions are not impaired by their
distorted initial impression.

Consider Macbeth, Bob - why does he not 'hear' the three weird sisters as we
the audience do? Where is his sense of the double-nature of their speech? We
see the sisters through him, as hags, not as a manifestation of the
time-honered and very symbolic tri-une goddess, or as his beloved [for a
male, the beloved is 'the other' the female]. So something strange is taking
place in that early scene, and we become aware that Macbeth does not take in
the fullness of their propositions about him, and perhaps reflect that he
doesn't do so since his own [secret] ambition to become as powerful as
possible blinds him to any true sight or warning, since in the sense I wrote
above, this ambition bloats his sense of worth to obscure more sober
perspective - and in this early play about a psychopath, the lead character
then methodically murders his way through the play.

Cordially, Phil Innes


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