The Three Ships

Three of us sailed together for a time. Same sea, same storms, different ships.

The names I reached for afterward are sociopath, schizophrenic, and depressive. We did not know these words then, and the words would not have helped. What we knew was that something was broken in each of us, and that the broken thing was not the same thing. The same sea threw us, but our vessels listed in different directions, took on water through different cracks, and what kept each of us alive would have sunk the others. Those names are not diagnoses.

I am writing as the one whose PTSD was treated. Treating it helped me deal with the depression, but that was a much longer task, and it continues. The broken world will likely never be repaired, and that will continue to haunt me. I still carry the burden, yet it feels so light. I can testify to one ship. I can witness the other two.

The site’s three-circle mark represents body, mind, and soul in circulation. I draw three remembered patterns by changing it. One ring detaches, breaking the shared surface. Another set of circles dissolves into itself, the self lost inside the collective weight. Another fragments, with gaps where I expected continuity.

Within all three I saw the same distortions — forgetfulness, suspicion, outsized claims about the self — directed at different objects.

The friend I call the sociopath seemed to forget the bond. On my ship, what was forgotten was the self. My other friend forgot the continuity, and seemed to know it. Select each distortion to see where it points:

The same geometry, laid out as a reference card — three distortions, three objects, nine cells, each drawn from what I saw:

When I saw my friend’s other mode — the “bad boy” who could do what the sociopath did, without constraint or remorse — it appeared to me as a demon. Not metaphorically. The encounter had the quality that the word “demon” was invented to name.

Breuer recognized this in 1895. The split-off psyche, he wrote, “ist jener Dämon” — is that demon — “nur ist es kein wirklich fremder, sondern ein Theil seines eigenen” — only it is not truly foreign, but a part of his own. The move was not to deny the demon. It was to relocate what carries it.

Jung took the phenomenology further. His term for what I witnessed was possession by a complex. The clinical vocabulary that replaced the demon language is more precise about mechanism. It is less precise about the encounter. His word names what I stood in front of, not what produced it.

The diagnosis, as I remember it, was “bipolar with schizophrenic ideation,” or something like that. It is a clinician’s name, remembered loosely, and I will not make it carry my drawing. What the demon language keeps, and the clinical language loses, is the discontinuity: the same friend could seem alien and then intimately present. What carried that change, I cannot say.

The super-ego is the collective living inside you. Not my father’s voice alone, though his voice is in it. Not society’s voice alone, though society’s voice is in it. The voice of the collective itself — the shared substrate that Jung mapped, the thing the framework calls the Soul pillar — speaking from within, as me, in my own voice, with my own self-punishment.

In the friend I call the sociopath, the judge seemed silenced — overridden. In me, the judge was savage — amplified by over-coupling, sentencing for crimes the defendant did not commit.

My oldest trip was not a drug. It was a childhood fever. The Jerry Lewis Marathon was on, and I saw what I believed were the dead, and they blamed me for their deaths. I believed them. I was a child, and the super-ego’s verdict was absolute: you caused this. I carried it for decades.

MDMA did not silence the judge. The judge is still here. What MDMA did was let me see the verdict for what it was. False. The guilt was real as an emotion. It was false as an attribution. I felt guilt for that which I had not done. That is what MDMA showed me. That is what it helped relieve me of.

The burden did not disappear. I still carry it. But the false guilt is gone. What remains — the actual weight of the empathy itself — feels so light. Not because it is small. Because it is no longer compounded by a lie.

The judge remains. The sentence was commuted.

When I felt the love that led to the healing — when I felt that I, completely undeserving and undeniably broken, could be forgiven — I did not experience it as a pharmacological event. Its pharmacology can be studied; this is science, but it is something more, and I honestly do not know how to approach it.

The experience of being forgiven — forgiving myself, because the judge is within — had a quality the traditions call grace, redemption, and, when a substance produces it within a ritual container held by a living community, sacrament.

For me, it was both medicine and sacrament.