Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [33]
For example, the metarepresentation, "I intend to catch the bus," could be perceived by a schizophrenic patient as "Catch the bus," and "My boss wants of me 'you must be on time'" as "you must be on time,"6 thus making the patient experience delusions of control or think that he/she hears disembodied voices talking to or about him/her. The latter, called "a third person hallucination," can result from perceiving a metarepresentation, such as, "Eve believes 'Chris drinks too much,'" as a "free floating notion 'Chris drinks too much,'"7 and so forth.
Note that although people with autism also lack metarepresentational capacity (to the same degree to which they lack Theory of Mind), the above delusions associated with failure of source-monitoring are typical for patients with schizophrenia but not for those with autism. Frith and his colleagues explain it by the "markedly different ages of onset" for autism and schizophrenia. The former manifests itself in the first years of life, whereas the latter usually develops in the early twenties, when the
patient's theory of mind is already in place:
The majority of autistic children fail to develop [Theory of Mind]. They are unaware that other people have different beliefs and intentions from themselves. Even if they manage, with much effort and after a long time, to learn this surprising fact, they will be only able to infer the mental states of others with difficulty and in the simpler cases. As a consequence they cannot develop delusions about the intentions of others. Furthermore, they will know, over a lifetime of experience, that their inferences are likely to be wrong and will therefore be ready to accept the assurance of others as to the true state of affairs.
In contrast, schizophrenic patients know well from past experiences that it is useful and easy to infer the mental states of others. They will go on doing this even when the mechanism no longer works properly. For the first 20 years or so of life the schizophrenic has handled 'theory of mind' problems with ease. Inferring mental states has become routine in many situations and achieved the status of direct perception. If such a system goes wrong, then the patient will continue to "feel" and "know" the truth of such experiences and will not easily accept correction.8
In Sections 8 and 9 below, I focus on fictional protagonists failing to keep track of themselves as sources of their representations of other people's minds and thus "feeling" the truth of their (wrong) mind-attributions. I show that such failures could be used by the authors wishing to tease their readers by making them unsure of what is really going on in the story and which representations originating in the characters' minds they could trust. However, before I get to the narratives that cultivate this kind of conceptual vertigo in their readers, let us consider a more manageable example of a character clearly marked off by the author as mentally unstable.
Fedor Dostoyevski's novels feature many self-deceiving sufferers. Prominent among them, however, is Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladova 0Crime and Punishment), a gentlewoman by birth and education, now a desperately poor widow dying of consumption among her starving children. Katerina Ivanovna repeatedly invents stories that enhance her past and future and immediately starts believing in these fantasies herself, to the raucous delight of cruel onlookers. For example, at the funeral of her alcoholic second husband, she comes up with the idea that she will soon receive a pension for him (which can never happen), and she decides to use that pension to open a boarding school for refined young ladies. Some
2: Metarepresentational Ability and Schizophrenia
of her listeners are simply amused by such ravings, but others, such as her landlady, find her plans as to how to run the school, which county to locate it in, and whom to hire so convincing (for Katerina Ivanovna herself believes in them) that they begin seriously advising her on how to ensure the hygiene and good morals of