Unfitting Stories: Narrative Approaches to Disease, Disability, and Trauma

Space, Temporality, and Subjectivity in a Narrative of Psychotic Experience

The life histories of people who find themselves in need of psychiatric care are often marked not only by difficult living conditions and violence but also by limitations that stem from an inner world troubled by psychotic experience. This experience of psychosis has a direct effect on their experience of self: their personal sense of emotional and cognitive integration , their relationships with others, their connection to their bodies, and their perception of reality. It destabilizes the everyday signposts of body, identity, society, and culture, and thereby compromises the fundamental parameters of the subject. The terms developed to describe this experience, and the practices designed to help psychosis sufferers face it, have many pitfalls. Whether one uses terms such as “madness,” “mental illness,” or “mental health problem” or diagnoses such as “psychosis” or “schizophrenia,” these words all belong to and reflect the theories and practices of the historical and socio-cultural context upon which they are based. Such terms—and the practices that go along with them—come from attempts to understand, make sense of, cope with, and master experiences that come up against suffering , the unknown, and the strange. However, these terms are also a source of pain, exclusion, reclusion, incomprehension, and various forms of violence, and shut out the voices of the people most directly concerned (Rodriguez 2000). This paper will delve deeply into the process of listening to psychosis with a phenomenological ear (Binswager 1971; Blankenburg 1991; Corin 1990; 1998), a process that takes into consideration the complex web of links between people, society, and culture through the mediation of 139 lourdes rodriguez del barrio Space, Temporality, and Subjectivity in a Narrative of Psychotic Experience language. By analyzing the life history of a psychosis sufferer, whom I will call “Francis,” I will study the modes of speech used to create a personal discourse and recreate the psychotic experience within the social and cultural context that forms, provokes, reinforces, or allows that experience to be reconfigured after the fact, always from Francis’s point of view. The Life History and the Socio-cultural World In this context, the life history becomes the fundamental mediator for understanding and accounting for the processes of “subjectivation” (Rodriguez 2000). The notion of subjectivity refers to a person who is able to think of himself as an effective being whose actions have an impact on the rest of the world. In contemporary hermeneutic, phenomenological , and critical circles, the personal narrative is considered an indispensable form of mediation among the dynamics that allow for self-constitution (Ricoeur 1985, 1990; Foucault 1994; Habermas 1995). It allows the subject to emerge, imagine potential avenues, and choose from among the weave of various elements that make up his experience (desires, events, circles , etc.). The text of Francis’s history illustrates a clash between two types of discourse that differ in the emphasis they place on temporality and on the flow of action. The first type is narrative discourse, in the sense that the events and actions in his account are articulated according to when they occurred. Despite a multiplicity of densely interwoven scenes, a single linear account can be established by reorganizing the events chronologically and identifying the evolution of one or several initial events toward a final situation . This timeline—or fabula—is an essential part of any narrative (Eco 1996). The text of Francis’s account, which organizes events and actions according to their temporal positions, would seem to be in conflict with another form of discourse in which the articulate element is “space.” In general, the description of places within an account moves the action ahead or specifies its context. However, in Francis’s account, these descriptions shape the discourse itself, as though the important thing was both to describe the spaces he associates with “impressions,” states, and moods and to establish the borders of these spaces (or between different spaces), rather than simply relating a personal history through a chronological series of events and experiences. Using broad strokes, I will use the “conflict ” between these two forms of discourse to reveal the content of Francis ’s account. In the first section, I will try to reconstruct the fabula and 140 representing the subject the narrative’s temporal “rhythm.” Next, I will deal with the impressions that emerge from a semantic analysis of the text’s articulated meanings but that defy narrative logic. Finally, I will show how these two readings of the...