In The Man Without Qualities Robert Musil makes an exceptional portrait of the perception of this type of disorder. One of his characters, Moosbrugger, is a lonely carpenter who is apprehended by the police after murdering a prostitute. The brutality of the crime arouses the interest of the press, which does everything in its power to label him insane. Indeed, Moosbrugger is what we would now call a psychotic, and yet he was a gentle man who rarely resorted to violence. His problem was how he divided what is inside from what is outside:

… he would hear voices or music or a blowing and buzzing, also a whizzing and rattling, or shooting, thundering, laughing, shouting, talking and whispering. It came from everywhere at once; it was in the walls, in the air, in his clothes and in his body. It seemed to him that he carried it around with him in his body, so long as it kept silent; and as soon as it came out, it hid in the surroundings, but never very far away from him. When he was working, the voices would generally talk at him in scraps of words and short sentences, scolding and criticising him, and when he thought something, they said it out aloud before he himself had time to, or spitefully said the opposite of what he meant. Moosbrugger could only laugh at the idea that they wanted to declare him insane for that. He himself treated these voices and visions no differently from monkeys. It amused him to watch and listen to their goings-on. That was much, much better than the tough, heavy thoughts that he himself had.¹

In this world of soft boundaries, in which the inside goes out and outside comes in, Moosbrugger is in constant danger of losing his identity. During the most severe crises his world appeared as a single surface: 

The table was Moosbrugger.

The chair was Moosbrugger.

The barred window and the bolted door were himself.

There was nothing at all crazy or out of the ordinary in what he meant. It was just that the rubber bands were gone. Behind everything or creature, when it tries to get really close to another, is a rubber band, pulling. Otherwise, things might go right through one another. Every movement is reined in by a rubber band that won’t let a person do quite what he wants. Now, suddenly, all those rubber bands were gone. Or was it just the feeling of being held in check, as if by rubber bands?²

En la psicosis el adentro y el afuera desaparecen en su papel de polos que dan orden al mundo (2.3). Pero esta circunstancia, como se deriva del estudio de Jaynes, puede tratarse no sólo de una patología sino de una herramienta de organización perceptual y social.

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1. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, Part I, 283. ↩︎
2. Ibid., Part II, 111. ↩︎