In conclusion, the new notion of mental illness and health can be summarized as follows. Since the revision of the daseinsanalytical approach to mental health and illness sheds new light on the overall ontological structure of human existence, it is also necessary to spell out how the post-existential analysis changes the character and the mutual relation of the authentic and inauthentic existence. One can say that the appropriate approach to suffering also changes the view of the inauthentic existence that ceases to be a mere privative modification of the authentic existence and becomes its necessary counterpart which balances the disruptive power of the openness of being. Without the inauthentic existence, being-there would immediately dissipate in the chaotic openness of being. In order to exist, being-there must thus maintain a balance between the authentic and inauthentic way of being. This labile balance can be compared to the way Deleuze and Guattari describe the oscillation between the schizophrenic and paranoid tendency of life. Although one should not confuse the ontological analysis with schizoanalysis, their comparison may prevent the normative usage of the authentic existence and the underestimation of all the risks connected with it.

We have tried to demonstrate that the precondition of a non-normative view of mental disorder, i.e., one which wouldn’t regard it as a mere privation of a normal state but would reveal it as an original phenomenon, is the interpretation of the clearing of being as chaotic openness in which the order of our experience arises and perishes. What appears against the background of the chaotic openness, in which our existence dwells in that it initially and for the most part turns away from it, is that mental disorder is determined by the way in which one relates to order and chaos. Unlike the socialized existence in the world of common everydayness where order prevails over chaos, the mentally disturbed existence is marked by an extreme sensitivity to the urgency of the all-devouring chaos. However, it is precisely the heightened sensitivity for the openness of chaos in which countless possibilities arise and perish that prevents us from branding mental disorder as a mere deficiency of normality. The normative approach to mental disorder is unacceptable also given that the fixation to the firmly given order of world that marks the everyday mode of existence is far removed from real health. The thesis that mental disorder is an utterly original, irreducible way of being does not of course mean that there is no difference between health and illness. Rather, the opposition between health and illness shouldn’t be viewed solely from the perspective of health, from which mental disorder does appear a certain negation. Just as illness can be perceived from the viewpoint of health, health can be viewed from the perspective of illness which – as if through a magnifying glass – shows what is always already hidden in health, albeit in the form of an unclearly divined threat. In its primary otherness that distinguishes it from health, illness not only makes it possible to understand better what it is to be healthy, but also opens a new, more penetrative way of looking at human existence as such. As Nietzsche says, “being ill is instructive, we don’t doubt, more instructive than being well.”¹

Let us therefore repeat one more time how illness differs from health. The difference between health and illness lies not only in the contradiction between order and chaos; the ill is not simply one whose experience disintegrates in chaos, just as the healthy is not one who maintains a perfect order of experience. Since our existence essentially stands between order and chaos, the difference between health and illness rather depends on the mode in which order and chaos relate to one another. It depends on whether the dynamic connection in which order and chaos provoke and potentialize each other is preserved, or whether the relation between order and chaos is purely negative. One can speak of true health only when human existence stands between order and chaos in that it preserves their dynamic tension and develops it further. Our belonging to both order and chaos is best attested to when we abandon the established order of the world and expose ourselves to the gaping openness of chaos, out of which new order and sense arise. On the other hand, mental disorder occurs when the polarity of the firm order and annihilating chaos is experienced as an insoluble dilemma. Instead of a dynamic connection of order and chaos, it is their separation and absolutization that takes place here. Chaos and order manifest themselves no longer as two constitutive areas in which human existence dwells, but as two inconsolable spheres between which human existence is cleft. Where a healthy human being experiences a dynamic connectedness of order and chaos, the ill person feels a painful cleavage that coerces him/her to seek shelter from the devastating effect of chaos in the rigid order. While health allows us to undergo the breakup of the order of experience and partake in the birth of a new order out of the infinite chaos of possibilities, mental disorder compels us to cling desperately to the frail order of experience unless we want to drown in the sea of chaos. Every single drop, every vestige of chaos can become fatal. The need to maintain the uncertain order of experience can bring a mentally ill person so far that he/she is practically unable to change opinion. As one of Laing’s patients says: “You are arguing in order to have pleasure of triumphing over me. At best you win an argument. At worst you lose an argument. I am arguing in order to preserve my existence.”² Unless compelled by the desperate need to protect itself, human being can change its perspective on the world and its role in it even if the cost is the disintegration of the whole order of its experience and breakdown of the integral constitution of its individual being. The possibility of such a change, which in no way precludes the capacity for keeping one’s conviction unless it is proven wrong, is unbearable for the mentally ill, however. His/her misery lies in the fact that he/she is situated in an either-or situation: either the existence in the integrated order of experience, or the fall into chaos. Either life, or death.

Yet, it would be too simple to regard this state as a pathological defect and to restrict oneself to a mere enumeration of the possibilities of which human existence deprives itself by either becoming hermetically closed in a fixed order, or falling hopelessly into chaos. Rather than to explicate the peculiar sharpening of the polarity between order and chaos in the notions of deficiency, it is much more pertinent to understand it as a certain modification of the relation between order and chaos.

Order keeps incessantly emerging out of chaos and dissolving therein again. The stable order, order with clearly defined contours, comes into being only when it is separated from chaos by a horizon which protects it from the annihilating forces of chaos. This horizon can be more or less impenetrable, and the degree of its impenetrability is precisely what decides whether the relation between order and chaos is conjunctive or disjunctive. Whereas in the first case the relation between order and chaos is modulated by means of a process during which order opens itself to chaos, lets itself be penetrated by it or dissolves in it in order to give way to a new order that takes its place, in the other case order and chaos merely contradict each other. As long as one can speak of “mental disturbance” here, then only in the sense of a disturbance in the dynamic connection between order and chaos, in which the door of the possible keeps opening and closing itself.

But who can ever say about himself/herself that he/she fully stands the ground of the chaotic openness in which the order of experience arises and perishes? Who does not restrict the dynamic connection of order with chaos for the sake of at least somewhat peaceful and balanced existence? Is it not the case, in the end, that most of us are neither really healthy, nor really ill? Do we not find ourselves mostly between health and illness, in the state of being somewhat healthy and somewhat ill? That perfect health is hardly attainable is attested to by the fact that free vulnerability to chaos, in which not only the order of experience, but also the unity of individual being disintegrates, is connected with suffering.

If we still reserve the right to speak of mental disorder, it is mainly because the confrontation with chaos is experienced in pathological states not as a moment of ecstasy or rapture, but as a state of immense suffering. Not even the bipolar affective disorder is in its manic phase an expression of a joyful ecstasy, but rather a headlong escape from suffering. The state in which this suffering appears in its extreme form is the schizophrenic collapse in which chaos fully breaks out.

Facing the extreme danger to which the weakened schizophrenic is exposed, psychiatry must not remain inactive. Its duty is to alleviate the patient’s suffering, for which purpose it can avail itself of medication, which narrows down the frame of personal experience, thus enabling the patient to come to terms with the disintegrative effect of chaos, and it can also use the protected environment of the psychiatric asylum, where a certain daily order is observed. By virtue of all these measures, the schizophrenic can manage to reintegrate the disintegrated order of experience and consolidate the shaken individual being. Thus, the patient can reach a relatively stabilized state and regain control over himself/herself.

Real cure, however, lies not in stabilization reached by means of greater or lesser restriction of the patient’s world, but rather in the gradual reduction of the barriers which prevent human existence from freely exposing itself to the disintegration of experience and participating in its renewed birth from out of the wild chaos. The objective of therapeutic help is therefore not to remove the patient’s suffering altogether, but to help him/her accept it as an integral part of his/her existence, i.e., to learn to live with it as something from which he/she need not desperately flee or to which he/she must hopelessly succumb.

Especially nowadays, when suffering is understood as the opposite to health, and consequently repressed with the help of all possible means from the human life, it is increasingly necessary to point out the fact that we must not only remove suffering, but also learn to accept it to a certain degree.³ Against the tendency to identify health with the absence of suffering whose excess is heralded in illness we should adopt the view that suffering forms an inseparable part of human existence understood as dwelling in the gaping openness of chaos. To remove from human existence the suffering from disintegration of its individual being and from the breakdown of the order of its experience would mean to eliminate from within it all possible ways of breaking through the everyday being-in-the-world. Without suffering, our existence would be impoverished of not only the possibility of joyful rapture and ecstasy, but also of the possibility of leaving the firmly established order of one’s world and searching a new order and sense. For suffering is the price we pay for our freedom.

What is offered here is actually a perspective on suffering: suffering that springs from our vulnerability to the gaping openness of chaos is not something per se that is to be detected and removed. Suffering and health are correlative notions because they mutually condition and supplement one another. Every health has an ingredient of suffering, and vice versa. One could of course doubt whether the ultimate form of suffering, such as the schizophrenic disintegration of personality, still encompasses some traces of health. But it is precisely here, in this limit of our experience, that what eludes us in the everyday, socialized mode of existence is brought to light; that is, that suffering forms the dark side of health understood as the ability to expose oneself to the openness of chaos, in which all order arises and perishes.