Incandescent Alphabets

Psychosis and the Enigma of Language

Annie G. Rogers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429914829
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism
• Index: Psychology

This book explores psychosis as knowledge cut off from history, truth that cannot be articulated in any other form. It gives a nuanced picture of delusion as a repair of language itself, following Freud and Lacan in historic and contemporary forms of psychotic art, writing and speech.

CHAPTER ONE
Encounters with a ghastly, enigmatic Other

It is a crisp, cool morning in Stockbridge, and with cup of tea on I my desk, I enter another time, another space, another realm of experience: psychosis, as it has been lived through first person accounts, books, letters, art, and interviews. Intrigued by the inventive language of psychosis, I think of how alphabets were first made by humans, drawn by hand, and then subjected to new forms through printing practices. I consider the paraphernalia of printers: composing sticks, in which one inserted letters as “sorts”. “I am out of sorts” meant that I have run out of letters needed for the line I was composing. And I think of how language changes when one is “out of sorts” in psychosis; it might become difficult to follow one’s own thoughts. Of necessity, the psychotic makes new words, and his language carries the sheer inventiveness of his quest to speak, to say what is happening to him.

I am at Austen Riggs, a private psychiatric hospital in the Berkshires, in Western Massachusetts, as the Erikson Scholar. This position affords me time to write, an office at the corner of the psychoanalytic library, an apartment, and a stipend. Austen Riggs is one of the very few hospitals left where psychoanalysis is the primary means of treatment, where patients do not live on locked wards, but wander a beautiful campus with wide lawns, trees, flowers. There is a working greenhouse and a community garden. When a young man (one of the patients) gives me a tour of the buildings, I learn that he and others participate in governance structures here, and everyone has access to psychoanalytic psychotherapy four days a week. The patients choose activities they have proposed, outlined on a whiteboard in a spacious first floor hallway of the main building called “The Inn” in which they live, work, and take their meals. There is a library with comfy reading chairs, run by patients. We walk into the town and find “The Lavender Door”, a designated space for the arts that is “interpretation free”, as the young man explains. Here, one might learn ceramics, weaving, woodworking, and painting, or engage in theatre productions—all facilitated by professional artists. In short, alongside their personal anguish and struggles, for the patients there is life, a real life to be lived.

In my office, I have collected memoirs written recently and written over a century ago, in the early 1900s. Some of these were composed while the writer was resident in a hospital or asylum, but most were composed later, in retrospect. I also have assembled letters, works of art, texts written into and around intricate drawings, and interview excerpts. Each day I read and immerse myself in wondering about the transformations of language, thought, and experience in psychosis. This is my project: to explore how psychosis changes one’s experience of language, what language is, and how it works.

To make this enquiry, I must enter the experiences of others living in another time—imaginatively, compassionately, and with fresh questions. Entering into subjective experiences of living in psychosis (that in our present day have been attributed solely to genetics and biology gone awry), I hope to discover a logic and a language that carries truths we would otherwise not consider as meaningful or worthy of our time.

Who am I to take on such a project? I must say that I am utterly daunted by its scope and its demands. On a round table behind my desk, there is a scattering of books, notes in pencil on legal pads, printed articles, pens, a notebook open for more organised notes, and art materials, for those moments when I am beyond any comprehension, any words to convey what I am discovering. To enter this project fully, I not only have to read and immerse myself in the experiences of others I have never met, I have also to keep company with my own past. As a young person of sixteen, I was a patient in a private psychiatric hospital where I encountered locked wards. I was treated as mentally incompetent, spoken about as if not present, and medicated (Thorazine and Haldol were the anti-psychotics of the time). I had been a charity case, and the generosity of the hospital ran out when my diagnosis was finalised: schizophrenia. Much of my experience that year remains incoherent and, therefore, nearly impossible to narrate, yet unforgettable.

I lived in psychosis for the greater part of two decades of my youth, and then, following four years with a gifted psychoanalyst who worked with psychotic patients, I was free. I took up a life in the world, became a psychologist, and moved to Cambridge, Massachu setts, where I joined research on girls’ psychological development, and later became a member of the Harvard faculty. This was a long time ago, and in the intervening decades I saw children and adolescents in a private practice, undertook training as a Lacanian psychoanalyst, wrote books, wrote articles, wrote poems, painted and made prints, kept sketchbooks, and wondered, wondered, wondered—how did I escape, when others have not? I married a fiery, intelligent, lovely Irish woman, and built a life in two places, two nations. I sang, danced, travelled, and experienced that great adventure of loving someone deeply, intimately, and over a long time. I moved to Western Massachusetts twelve years ago, to Hampshire College in Amherst, a unique place where young people are responsible for their own questions and learning, and became a professor of psychoanalysis and clinical psychology, then a Dean of the School of Critical Social Inquiry. Yet, for all of that, as I begin my project on psychosis, I am reminded of how fortunate I am to live this life.

Many people lost in psychosis (for a short time or over a very long time) experience things that cannot be symbolised, spoken, or received by others. I hear their efforts to write and to speak, sometimes elo quently, sometimes in words and forms that seem impenetrable, as both meaningful and compelling. What are their experiences? Is it possible to discern in delusion, knowledge in a new form? Is it possible to translate “incoherence” and discover a new language in the making, made of incandescent alphabets? I use this phrase to refer to elements of language that are creatively adopted when one must find a new way in language with respect to a strange world one has entered and cannot exit.

The heart of this book is an enquiry about language and its transformations in psychosis, particularly changes in language that accompany the experience as a subjective encounter with voices. Contrary to many clinical psychologists and psychiatrists, I consider language in psychosis not as language deficit, or dysfunction, or a brain-based and driven phenomenon. Rather, the individual’s relationship to language is uniquely subjective, meaningful, and connected to experiences that have never been named, and lie outside discourse in the family and society.

For a long time, clinicians have remarked on the strange language of psychosis, particularly schizophrenia, characterising speech as “gibberish” or “word salad”. Often clinicians listen to language in psychosis to make a diagnosis of a “thought disorder” or to regulate medication, as though language has lost all subjective meaning. To be sure, a central and well-known characteristic of psychotic language is the use of peculiar words and phrases, sometimes in a context of dis organised, confused speaking (McGhie & Chapman, 1969). Linguists focus on the structural properties of language. They have discovered very particular qualities of psychotic speech, such as failure to find the right word and substitution of another word, distraction by the sound-sense of words, a breakdown of discourse in associative trains, and the speaker’s lack of awareness of strange language use. Yet, many characteristics of speech remain intact, such as the stress pat terns and pronunciation rules of the original language, as well as syntax, even when phrases and sentences are disconnected (Coving ton et al., 2005). In other words, there is nothing ungrammatical in psychotic speech.

I begin my work from the premise that language is central to human subjectivity, and that all of us are subjects in relation to our own and others’ interpretations of our speech and writing. We seek meaning through language, whether or not we have ever experienced psychosis. The psychotic, I will show, bears enigmatic traces of questions and experiences beyond a shared language, beyond what can be known or spoken in any social link. In psychosis, the subject takes the position of witness to a ghastly Other in social isolation.

As an adolescent boy the poet, Tomas Tranströmer (who would become a Nobel Laureate), had an encounter with “dread” that left him as a witness in language, both memoir and poetry, to this experience. In his memoir, “Memories Look at Me” (1995), he writes,

During the winter I was fifteen I was afflicted by a severe form of anxiety. I was trapped by a searchlight that radiated not light but darkness. . . . As I lay down to sleep suddenly the atmosphere in the room was tense with dread. Suddenly my body started shaking, especially my legs. I was a clockwork toy that had been wound up and now rattled and jumped helplessly. The cramps were quite beyond the control of my will. I had never experienced anything like this.

(pp. 43-44)

He describes a time of elemental illness in vivid detail:

The world was a vast hospital. I saw before me human beings deformed in body and in soul. . . . It all happened in silence, yet within the silence voices were endlessly busy. The wallpaper pattern made faces. Now and then the silence would be broken by a ticking in the walls. Produced by what? By whom? By me? . . . I was afraid . . . as in a film where an innocuous apartment interior changes its character entirely when ominous music is heard, I now experienced the outer world quite differently. A few years earlier I had wanted to be an explorer. Now I had pushed my way into an unknown country where I had never wanted to be. I had discovered an evil power. Or rather, the evil power had discovered me. . . . Mother had witnessed the cramps I suffered that evening in late autumn as my crisis began. But after that she had to be held outside it all. Everyone had to be excluded, what was going on was just too terrible to talk about. I was surrounded by ghosts. I was myself a ghost. . . . No prayers, but attempts at exorcism by way of music. It was during that period that I began to hammer at the piano in earnest.

(pp. 44-45)

What had happened to this adolescent boy? And how do we understand his trajectory to becoming a musician, a psychologist, and a poet, an extraordinary, internationally recognised poet? Tranströmer, as far as I know, was never hospitalised. Later, I talk about psychosis as a structure though the work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and the way that writing can serve to prevent living a life in psychosis as an experience that is utterly overwhelming.

What of others, also young, who were diagnosed as “schizophrenic”? I turn now to five writers (Ken Steele, Carol North, Whitney Robinson, Barbara O’Brien, Edith Weisskopf-Joelson) of first person accounts of the initial invasion by an alien, enigmatic Other, and the effects of this initial experience at the beginning of a process that will be far-reaching in its consequences. I chose these five because in these books I found compelling and rich stories, and, importantly, none of the authors had a particular theory or angle he or she wanted to uphold as a filter for the narrative.

Ken Steele began quite suddenly to hear voices when he was unusually young, at age fourteen. He became chronically psychotic for several decades. Here, he writes about his early encounters in The Day the Voices Stopped (Steele & Berman, 2001).

Whenever I was near a television set or radio, the voices grew louder and more intense, and there seemed to be more of them. It was as if they were writing and directing the story of my life, telling me what I could and could not do, leaving little room for improvisation. That evening, the voices won out. As my father quizzed me about what we had seen on TV, I did as the voices directed: I put my hands over my ears and turned my back to him. Dad became enraged. “Go to bed without dinner,” he ordered me, stalking out of the living room. It was a punishment he rarely imposed. Ungrateful boy. Now see what you have done, said my voices. You have disappointed your father one more time. Your parents deserve a better son than you

(p. 6)

Ken hears commands in his voices, which he follows, sometimes dangerously. He experiences these voices, intensified and multiplied by other voices and sounds, as imposed on him in a continuous commentary. Despite the fact that they sound utterly coherent and grammatical (and do not need to be deciphered), they introduce a contradiction. After they tell Ken to block out his father, they taunt him for the consequence. They also seem to be able to say/know things that Ken cannot quite imagine or articulate for himself.

Some time after the voices first visited me, my mother and father told me they were expecting a baby. They had tried for several years, but without success. . . . I did not share their joy. An only child for close to fifteen years, I wasn’t eager to welcome a rival for their attention and affections. If I have to have a sibling, I prayed, let it be a sister. But the voices knew better. They had decided it would be a boy, and on several terrifying occasions, they made it seem as if “he” were speaking to me. I am coming, I’m going to be born, my soon-to-be brother would whisper from inside my mother’s swollen stomach. You have to leave. Soon other voices would join in—in a deafening chorus that dictated ways in which I might manage my leave-taking: Take a radio into the bathtub and electrocute yourself . . . Jump in front of a car on Route 69 . . . Pour charcoal lighter fluid over your body and set yourself afire . . . Hang yourself in the forest. . . . My brother, Joseph Robert Steele, was born on May 10, 1964. The fact that the voices had correctly determined his sex gave them a lot of credibility. He’s here now, they said, laughing maniacally, Joey is the good son . . . he’s the one they wanted.

(pp. 6–7)

Ken’s fears, transmitted by external voices, are borne out in reality; his parents walked out of his life while he was still a teenager. Ken’s voices comment on his experience, yet they come from outside, as alien, invasive, all-knowing presences. He discovers that he can work hard and, to some degree, tune them out, especially at the beginning.

Only two things, reading and writing, could tone the voices down. When I read I entered the world of David Copperfield or Huckleberry Finn; I’d suffer the growing pains of Holden Caulfield or the agonies of Oliver Twist. The voices would then become muffled, like a radio playing in the background. As so I read voraciously. I read everything I could get my hands on, while the voices waited in the wings, ready to surge onto the stage as soon as I turned the last page. . . . Amaz ingly, I graduated from Junior High with honors. By graduation, however, I had separated myself from most of my friends.

(pp. 7-8)

Ken’s capacity to study, to tune out the voices to some extent, allows him go to school and carry on, and, yes, be quite successful at academics. But, he is isolated within a short time. His experiences set him apart from both family and peers. The voices comment on his life, predict his fate, and call out to him to leave his family and to end his life. Throughout his account, these voices remain coherent as they command, direct, and comment. Not all his voices were threatening or demeaning; some offered good company to a young man who was quite alone.

Carol North, who would later become a psychiatrist, began having vivid and terrifying visual perceptions and hearing voices as a six-year-old child, but she manages to navigate the world until she reaches college. The voices do not surprise her. They come and go; some have names and they are familiar. The Other that is terrifying and enigmatic is the Other world, a place that can leak into this world. In her book Welcome, Silence (2002), she recalls an early hospitalisation as a college student:

A nurse breezed into the dayroom on her way down another hallway. “There goes the nurse,” said a voice. A flash of light zoomed across the dayroom, burning out and disappearing into thin air. Had I really seen that? “There goes another comet,” said a voice. Okay, I did see it. This could only mean one thing: further leakage of the Other Worlds into this world. The comet had been a sign. “It’s alright,” Hal reassured me with his sugary voice. “We’re here with you.” Interference Patterns began to materialize in the air. I stared at their colorful swirls. When the voices spoke, the patterns shifted . . . Frightening. I didn’t know if existence in the Other world would be divinely magnificent, beyond human description, like heaven, or whether it would be like the worst imaginable hell. . . . I froze, not wanting to produce further patterns from my bodily movement. I did not want to be responsible for encouraging such change in the world. Live your life as a prayer, I reminded myself. I heard a news announcer on TV parrot my words: “Live your life as a prayer”.

(pp. 101-102)

Visual patterns and voices work in concert in this passage to point to another realm. Carol believes that Other Worlds can leak into the world she knows. She is not able to control what is happening, but thinks she can stop the process by not moving her body. But suddenly her thoughts are no longer private; they can be broadcast to the world, another kind of leakage. What is this strangeness she is now entering? How will she manage it, endure it, and be changed by it?

Whitney...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND PERMISSIONS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• Dedication
• NOTE TO READERS
• CHAPTER ONE Encounters with a ghastly, enigmatic Other
• CHAPTER TWO Psychosis: what is it, this strangeness?
• CHAPTER THREE Hallucinated bodies: art and its alphabets in psychosis
• CHAPTER FOUR Infinite code: clocks, calendars, numbers, music, scripts
• CHAPTER FIVE After the disaster: six sketches and a short play
• CHAPTER SIX Beyond psychosis: returning, remaining traces
• CHAPTER SEVEN Psychosis and the address: new alphabets and the enigmatic Other
• CHAPTER EIGHT Psychoanalysis remade: a way through psychosis
• REFERENCES
• INDEX