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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