"Adaptive" is a better term, but my mind refused to remember it before. If
a certain mode of speech is likely to keep one from job, social life,
domestic life, etc., or to land one in a locked ward, because it's
delivered indescriminately, regardless of circumstances, it's maladaptive.
The diagnostic problem isn't deciding whether a patient is using language
peculiarly for reasons other than the making of poetry, it's determining
the cause--physiological (tumor, stroke), substance-induced,
panic-reaction, or what we now distinguish from these as a psychotic
process--and the course of the symptoms--do they go away of their own
accord--which is in itself diagnostic.
The difference between cicumstantiality, tangentiality, word-salad, etc, as
aesthetic mode and as diagnostic indicator is rarely subtle. And when it's
a symptom of a disease process it's usually accompanied by other
maladaptive behaviors.
All of this sounds rather vague and perhaps fascist, but after you've
interviewed your first dozen or so folks in the throes of psychosis it's
pretty clear. And anyway it's a long time since a marginal judgement got
large numbers of patients in lockup--the cost of care and society's
unwillingness to bear it has resulted in quite the opposite.
There are also the very rare cases of writers who manage to produce
coherent and interesting work while psychotic. John Wieners, who is
undoubtedly psychotic, has produced his best work when the psychosis was
either under control or in a mild state. Hannah Weiner's work has never
particularly interested me, but I'm willing to accept that that may be my
failing, and she seems to have produced the work that folks admire
regardless of her internal weather. There aren't a whole lot of other
examples. Artaud's work is a product of his peculiar mind, but I don't
think his diseased mind, and I don't believe that Virginia Woolf did much
writing during her psychotic episodes.
Mark
At 09:05 PM 8/3/2001 -0400, you wrote:
>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
>
|