“The words crawled like spiders” : a cognitive approach to memoirs and graphic novels about psychosis

Summary

People who experience psychosis communicate their altered worldview through memoirs and graphic novels using rhetorical language, not meaningless 'word salad.' Combining cognitive linguistics and phenomenology, the author analyzes three memoirs and three graphic novels to show how psychotic viewpoint construction blends literal and figurative elements into 'figurative scenes' that draw on all senses, including vestibular motion. Comics extend these strategies through medium-specific conventions like eye-replacements and page layout. The mental space approach characterizes alternativity relations between psychotic and sane viewpoints that are often represented simultaneously. This cognitive-phenomenological approach is argued to be the most effective way to analyze creative psychotic discourse in terms of inner experience.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This thesis combines cognitive linguistic and phenomenological approaches to investigate how people communicate the experience of psychosis through memoirs and graphic novels. I start from an understanding of psychotic language as rhetorical, in the sense that it is used to express one’s viewpoint on the world and to change the cognitive states of others; it is not merely ‘word salad’. Recruiting a phenomenological approach to empathy towards psychiatric illnesses from Ratcliffe (2012), I show how cognitive linguistic concepts can be adapted to account for psychotic experiential viewpoint construction. In the first chapter, I examine three memoirs (The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Wang, The Quiet Room: A Journey out of the Torment of Madness by Lori Schiller and Amanda Bennett, and The Center Cannot Hold by Elyn Saks). Here, I show how psychotic viewpoint construction relies on both literal and figurative elements blending to form ‘figurative scenes.’ I also show how these scenes rely on source material from all the senses, not just the ‘big five’ but also others like vestibular motion (see Winter 2019). In the second chapter, I examine three graphic novels (Look Straight Ahead by Elaine Will, Swallow Me Whole by Nate Powell, and Crazy like a Fox by Christi Furnas) to show how they extend these strategies using the conventions available to the comics medium, such as eye-replacements, speech and thought bubbles, and page layout. Throughout both chapters, I use the mental space approach to characterize alternativity relations between psychotic and sane viewpoints on the world, which are often represented simultaneously (e.g. within a single clause, or panel). The maintenance of these alternativity relations is achieved by using elements like gaze direction and binoculars to anchor viewpoint to the experiencer. Overall, I argue that this phenomenological and cognitive approach is the most effective way to analyze creative psychotic discourse in terms of inner experience.