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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