Well, if "appropriateness" itself were objective and perfectly clear across
the board, it would be a fine discriminating tool. But, as a way of
distinguishing speech that is/not "circumstantial," say, it just makes the
question circular, doesn't it?
Candice
on 8/3/01 8:06 PM, Mark Weiss at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> I no longer know these things as well as I once did, Candice, but in
> practice the distintion between language as mode and language as symptom is
> pretty easy: choice. Most of us decide when it's appropriate to use one
> kind of language or another. For the behavior to be diagnostically
> significant it has to be persistent with no regard for appropriateness.
>
> Mark
>
>
> At 08:02 PM 8/3/2001 -0400, Candice Ward wrote:
>> Interesting post, Maria--thanks. I've long admired Roy Porter's work and was
>> glad to see it get a plug.
>>
>> Found this part intriguing, although it sounds like a dubious enterprise
>> (and you sound somewhat doubtful about it yourself):
>>
>> <During my research I came across a Tasmanian poet and psychiatrist who
>> believed he could identify elements of what he called "thought disordered"
>> writing (at the time he was working towards a theory which identified
>> particular patterns of grammatical construction in the writing of poetry of
>> psychiatric patients which distinguished "thought disordered" writing from
>> "creative" writing).>
>>
>> Can you elaborate on this and maybe give some examples of the distinguishing
>> "grammatical constructions"? There have been some fascinating reports
>> published over the years to do with schizophrenic language (Mark probably
>> knows this literature far better than I do), and I've always been interested
>> in the question of where the border gets drawn between pathologies of
>> language and usages that are anomalous for other (and not necessarily
>> negative) reasons. Where do you draw the line with "circumstantiality," for
>> example? It's considered symptomatic of "loose thinking" in a number of
>> DSM-identified syndromes, but it's such a subjective judgment call and must
>> often turn on the diagnostic subjectivity to which it "presents." (Maybe one
>> good purpose MFA programs could serve is as required training for shrinks!)
>>
>> One of the saddest "stories of the insane" (reverting to Porter) that I've
>> ever heard is the delusion Lowell experienced during a psychotic episode
>> when he believed he'd written _Lycidas_. Hard not to consider the cure worse
>> than the condition for a poet under those circumstances.
>>
>> Candice
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