"Mother is not holding competely respect"

making social sense of schizophrenic writing

Keith Doubt

Maureen Leonard

Laura Muhlenbruck

Sherry Teerlinck

Dana Vinyard

pp. 89-106

in: Human Studies 18 (1), 1995.

Abstract

This paper provides a phenomenological account of the writing of a young woman diagnosed with schizophrenia. The method of interpretation is to put ourselves in the place of the author drawing upon a combination of sympathy, reason, common-sense, experience, and "an intersubjective world, common to us all" (Schutz, 1945: 536). The result is the recognition of the person as also capable of putting herself in the place of others so as to understand their behavior. This "role-taking success" identifies the limits of the current sociological understanding of insanity's significance in social interaction as an instance of "role-taking failure" (Rosenberg, 1992).The very appearance of a piece of writing often permits one to recognize the presence of schizophrenia. The use of space may be quite bizarre. The varying margins betray the writer's changing mood. The letter may start at the bottom or side of the paper or very close to the top ....Capital letters and all letters are employed without any apparent rules, the former even in the middle of a word. (Bleuler, 1950: 159)What we want to understand is not something hidden behind the text, but something disclosed in front of it. (Ricoeur, 1971: 557)Why do we need an art of guessing? Why do we have to "construe" the meaning? Not only — as I tried to say a few years ago — because language is metaphorical and because the double meaning of metaphorical language requires an art of deciphering which tends to unfold the several layers of meaning.... [But also] because [a text] is not a mere sequence of sentences, all on an equal footing and separately understandable. A text is a whole, a totality. (Ricoeur, 1971: 548)

Cited authors

Schütz Alfred