From When the Sun Bursts, by Christopher Bollas, out this month from Yale University Press. Bollas has been a practicing psychoanalyst for more than forty years.

People who work with schizophrenics often describe something that might be called schizophrenic presence, or the experience of being with someone who has seemingly crossed from the human world to the nonhuman. It can be an eerie and uncomfortable feeling. Those who knew the schizophrenic before his or her breakdown may feel that they are encountering the person’s bizarre double. Action is accomplished painfully. Ordinary, everyday gestures become mechanical. The schizophrenic reaches for…