The first thing to understand the difference between the two realities — the psychological one and the physical-material one — is the steps that mind takes in order to interpret reality. We should take the physical world as the first influence that subjects itself to acquire representation in order to be interpreted, as soon, we have figured out the three steps, physical reality, representation and interpretation. To delve our understanding we should skip the second step by now and assume that mind interprets the physical reality based on its own parameters. The way we physically describe a situation based on movements, forces interactions and Cartesian locations is far from the psychical version of the very scene. For that we ca come to memory as the first source of data. The remembering of a fact — except by some rare photographic memory cases — is based on our particular impressions about a former physical fact what opens us to tell thousands of versions of the same scene told by different view points, mainly, different interpretations of the same. The capability of mind to re-interpret and so recreate the fact comes from the simplest to the most complex situations. As example, we could take the action of a hand waving good-bye, that sharply could be described by the hand movement and the forces interactions involved, that without cultural charges and certain interpretation capability of the mind we wouldn’t be able to take a meaning out of that. The meaning that we take as the fact do not describe precisely the movement as itself nor the environment it went on, but, anyway, this interpretation or impression of a “good-bye sign” is what mind takes as the action itself and even what memory takes as main to keep.
The difference between the physical and the mental world is deeply set in most — “normal” — people even if it is only clearly noticed in some extreme-pathological situations. The disease we take as schizophrenia is where the mind-researches most perceive how the interaction between the being and the external world is distorted by the mind own interpretation. Once something that is not physically real turns to be mind real we come with the question if that is supposed to be treated as so. A classic situation that happens constantly among the yond children is when they turn to think that a monster is living in its wardrobe. The monster is not physically there and when the father opens the wardrobe and checks “Look, there’s nothing in there but clothes” we got wrongly to figure the supposed creature as unreal and probably a childish fear. So, we miss the fact. The adult that is said to be grown cannot distinguish that his view and the child’s view are in conflict between two different realities — the physical and the psychical realities, or we should call the conflict between two psychological realities. If for the child, even not physically real, the monster is there and interacts and, by some way, interacts with it how could we call it unreal once we take as the existing condition for anything the capability to interact with and affect reality? The monster affects the children and changes its own psychological reality, so we can’t assume this mental being as fairly unreal at all.
The way we sense and remember the physical world should be clearly different if we could interpret the physical reality directly, but we have to pass by the second step —at first skipped — we will call representation. The “good-bye sign” we talked about earlier is not affect due to simple interpretation but it is first distorted by its representation, which is neither up to the action nor the conscientious mind to elaborate. Another case we should take to delve, let’s suppose that someone is in a deep need to urinate and a barely-closed faucet is dripping water. At first step — physical scene — we describe the fact sharply as it is — a dripping faucet — but that is not how it comes to our conscientious mind to interpret. Before the fact comes to us it passes through our subconscious mind that relates the dripping water to our deep need to urinate and the fact doesn’t come to us as itself but associated with our deep need to urinate and representing to us this need before the fact itself. The facts don’t come to us only affected by our interpretations but also distorted by our feelings, emotions, drives and particular relations with the situation itself — these last filters are not up to our conscientious mind to apply but already come to us applied by our subconscious mind. This involuntary distortion is present in everyone’s interpretation in different degrees, what defines the schizophrenic condition is an extreme take-over of the representation over the conscientious mind. By extension, we could say that everyone is up to some schizophrenia even if not considered so. Even, what we call a more logical or scientific view of the world is the reduction of the subconscious filter — representation — close to its unperceptivity but never its disappearance. The question that comes to us at last is that: if we consider the excess of the subconscious filter a disease classified as schizophrenia, shouldn’t the sheer existence of the same also be pathology?
It can sound weird to logic that the excess of itself can be as its lack a disease to be considered.
