The Indefinability and Unintelligibility of Delusion

Gorski (2012) provides what I found—after reading his paper and then rereading my Jaspers—to be a convincing explication of Jaspers’ contribution to our understanding of the delusionality of delusion. Because I found it convincing, I restrict my comment to matters of exposition and of further thematic development, and include a few questions on such matters for the author. As Gorski reads Jaspers, delusions proper are to be understood as ‘pathologically falsified judgments,’ about which it seems little more can, by way of definition, be said. The ‘merely external’ characteristics of falsity, certainty, and incorrigibility are quickly disposed of by Gorski (as mere ‘accidents’) in a way that will not surprise informed readers. (For shorthand, in what follows I continue to attribute to Gorski what are rather his readings of Jaspers’ opinions and arguments.) Perhaps more surprisingly, however, the ununderstandability of delusion is also interpreted as nondefinitive of the primary experience of delusion itself. Furthermore, such ununderstandability, which definitively characterizes at least the clinician’s epistemic relation to the delusion if not the delusion per se, is itself viewed as an inevitable failure in ‘static’ (phenomenological) understanding rather than in the ‘genetic’ psychological search for meaningful connections.

In what follows, I accept that Gorski is right to say that true delusion arises from a ‘primary phenomenon’ of experience whose ‘specific difference’—its pathological character—cannot be further analyzed. Indeed, I suspect that, far from being a cop out, arriving at the understanding that the delusionality of primary delusion is indefinable is tantamount to genuinely appreciating just how fundamental a disturbance to the mind delusion represents. Whereas belief may take many forms— such as true or false, hasty, convinced, wavering, or long-standing—while remaining true to itself qua belief, delusionality challenges its very standing as belief. At its core, that is, it seems to me that delusion represents not merely an unusual ‘take’ on the world, but something that starts to make us question whether what we have here can genuinely be called a ‘take’ at all. As Jaspers (1963/1913, 363) has it, ‘understanding halts before the reality of . . . psychosis’ just as it also ‘halts before the reality of Existence itself, that which the individual really is in himself.’ Our understanding is of its nature geared up to grasping what shows up within the field of our own or others’ experience, and is therefore not apt for grasping, in a sense-making manner, either the transcendental structure, or psychotic deformations, of that field itself.

Despite delusion’s erosion of its own character as belief (Hamilton 2007), the oft-cited Berrios (1991) is, I believe, wrong to suggest that delusions are merely ‘empty speech acts,’ because that gets their genus quite wrong—they are beliefs arising from primary delusional experiences, beliefs that may be expressed in, but are not identical with, the speech acts used to declare them. Nevertheless, the temptation behind his suggestion is not hard to fathom, and can be brought out in a comparison with a broken bridge. We may have many forms of bridge—road and foot bridges, long and short bridges, wooden and metal and stone bridges—and collapsed bridges. It would be wrong to say that a collapsed bridge is “merely a random pile of stones”—for a collapsed bridge is still a bridge: it is a collapsed bridge. Nevertheless, one can no longer use it to get from one side of the river or road to the other—and in that sense something of its essential status has been profoundly damaged. This may then (albeit wrongly) tempt us to deny that what we have to do with here is a bridge at all. Similarly, we may perhaps say that a delusional belief is one which no longer functions as a belief ought. As I read it, Gorski’s paper provides the beginnings of a framework for clearly understanding how delusions can be understood as broken or ‘pathologically falsified’ beliefs.

A difficulty—perhaps simply a bullet one has to bite—that we are left with if we accept a Gorskian account of delusion...