Abstract
In this paper, we use a phenomenological approach to compare the unusual ways in which language can be experienced by individuals with schizophrenia or severe mood disorders, specifically mania and melancholia (psychotic depression). Our discussion follows a tripartite/dialectical format: first we describe traditionally observed distinctions (i.e., decrease or increase in amount or rate of speech in the affective conditions, versus alterations of coherence, clarity, or interpersonal anchoring in schizophrenia); then we consider some apparent similarities in the experience of language in these conditions (e.g., striking disorganization of manic as well as schizophrenic speech, interpersonal alienation in both schizophrenia and severe depression). Finally, we explore more subtle, qualitative differences. These involve: 1, interpersonal orientation (less concern with the needs of the listener in schizophrenia), 2, forms of attention and context-relevance (e.g., manic distractibility versus schizophrenic loss of orientation), 3, underlying mutations of experience (e.g., sadness/emptiness in melancholia versus disturbances of basic selfhood in schizophrenia), and 4, meta-attitudes toward language (i.e., greater alienation from language-as-such in schizophrenia). Such distinctions appear to reflect significant differences in underlying forms of subjectivity; they are broadly consistent with work in phenomenological psychopathology on other aspects of experience, including body, self, and social world. An understanding of such distinctions may assist with difficult cases of differential diagnosis, while also contributing to a better understanding of suffering persons and of psychological factors underlying their disorders.
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Notes
We thank two anonymous reviewers for their astute suggestions on revising this paper.
This paragraph is nicely summed up in philosopher Merleau-Ponty’s (1945/1962) lapidary statement: “The spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning a world.”
A shared feature of our experience of both language and other persons is that both are intimately bound up with the phenomenon of “expression”—viz, with the manifestation of thoughts and feelings and their communication to others, whether by word, facial expression, or bodily tension or movement. As Sartre, Levinas, and other philosophers have pointed out, expression implies something that is both immanent and transcendent, both present and beyond. Words, like faces, have a certain sensory presence, visual or auditory; but in both cases this presence directs our attention inward as well as outward—inward toward what is presumed to be a grounding awareness or emanating consciousness, outward toward the meanings or worldly objects that are being indicated. Jean-Paul Sartre (1966) described the face as a “visible transcendence”; in similar fashion, a word, as normally experienced, can be considered an “audible transcendence.” In this sense both a word and a face—at least as normally experienced—share a certain “aura”: that of a sensory presence whose immediacy always points beyond. Emmanuel Levinas (1969) argues that a face is authentically a face only if it is recognized as comprising an “infinity” and not a “totality,” which is to say, as something whose meanings are rich and ambiguous enough to transcend any single interpretation by the viewer. In the absence of the above-mentioned aura, one may feel oneself in the presence of something uncanny, e.g., of behavior that is somehow other than fully human, or a sound that functions as something far less, or far more, than a word.
Such a comparison may also have relevance for psychotherapy or other psychological treatments. A better understanding of possible ways of experiencing language in psychopathology should help in developing empathy and improving one’s therapeutic alliance with a patient—as well as in accurately targeting specific areas of interpersonal experience for intervention. The relationship between therapist and patient, largely linguistic or linguistically mediated, is, of course, a primary tool for bringing about change in these domains. With greater understanding of the attitudes these patients may adopt and the challenges they may face in using and understanding language, one may be in a better position to develop sensitive and effective interventions—interventions less likely to be undermined by failure to grasp some of the very issues they are intended to target and treat.
Together with colleagues (Borut Skodlar, Josef Parnas, Nev Jones), we are currently preparing a qualitative interview schedule, the Examination of Anomalous World Experience or EAWE, which is modeled on the well-known EASE: Examination of Anomalous Self Experience (Parnas et al. 2005). The EAWE will contain a major section focusing on the subjective experience of language, both productive and receptive; this should facilitate one form of empirical research on the topic.
See Sass et al. (2011) re the rejection, in most contemporary phenomenology, of “foundationalist” claims.
Even the philosopher Daniel Dennett, a neo-behaviorist, acknowledges in his discussion of (so-called) “heterophenomenology” that descriptions of experience, properly criticized, can “inspire, guide, motivate, illuminate one’s scientific theory” (Dennett 2003, p. 23).
We borrow this phrase from Trow (1997), who used it in a rather different context.
In his early work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein (1922) argued against the possibility of this sort of all-encompassing statement as well.
We would disagree with Lacan’s (1981/1993) claim that this rejection (of the symbolic order, or what he calls the “nom du père”) is a factor for psychosis in general; rather it seems characteristic of schizophrenia in particular.
This is Jared Loughner, the young man who shot several people in Tucson in an attack on a local congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, on January 8, 2011. We are relying on a television report from 60 Minutes which included an interview with several of Loughner’s close friends who describe his behavior and attitudes from before the shooting (Descent into Madness 2011). Loughner was subsequently diagnosed as having schizophrenia and declared unfit to stand trial.
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Sass, L., Pienkos, E. Beyond words: linguistic experience in melancholia, mania, and schizophrenia. Phenom Cogn Sci 14, 475–495 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9340-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9340-0