It may be that the real benefit of having schizophrenic shamans in the past was that they could gently and in an unthreatening manner mirror back to society its own madness, and thus enable communities to come to terms with whatever in their minds or their environment is making them mad. A society cannot heal what it pathological in it (its group projections and neuroses) unless it first realizes that these are mad. A harsh superego that denies even the possibility that there is madness, will not heal itself. One has to come down gently to earth, through the mediation of the schizophrenic.
