metaphoricness

— In time, the irrational refusal to accept the reality of an other-controlled existence ends in the pseudoschizophrenic posture, in which the offended but innocent self-styled victim complains, “I am damned if I do, and I am damned if I don’t.” This double bind – as Gregory Bateson and his colleagues call it – is characterized by the most hopeless confusion of literalness and metaphoricness. Like the schizophrenic patient, the embattled and confined and angry and anxious part, persisting in his metaphorical identity with the collective good, seems doomed to some permanent rupture with reality.