The 'telegraphic schizophrenic manner': Psychosis and a (non)sense of time.
Time Soc May 7, 2020 DOI: 10.1177/0961463x20916109 via PubMed Central
Summary
AI-generated from the abstractA philosophical and literary analysis examines how fictional narratives represent disruptions in mental time travel—the ability to project oneself into past and future. The paper contrasts these depictions with clinical research on episodic memory deficits in people diagnosed with psychosis or schizophrenia. It argues that atypical mental time travel is often pathologized, particularly as a sign of psychosis. By incorporating first-person accounts, the analysis refines a Deleuzean theory of time structured around traumatic events and mathematical cuts. The paper suggests that literary texts can offer insights into how people experiencing psychotic temporal disruptions might re-establish stable selfhood in time.
Study at a glance
| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Citations | 4 |
| Key finding | Literary representations of temporal disruption can help understand and potentially re-establish stable selfhood in people with psychotic experiences. |
Abstract
as stories of deictic temporal crises. It critically examines the texts, exploring their representations of mental time travel (MTT), and places them into dialectic with health sciences research on autonoesis and episodic memory deficits in people with lived experience of mental health disorders, particularly psychosis or 'schizophrenia'. The paper uses this dialectic to interrogate how atypical MTT is diagnostically and clinically rendered as pathological, and indicative of psychosis in particular. Similarly, it mines these fictional representations for the insights they might provide in attempting to understand the phenomenological reality of temporal disruptions for people with lived experience of psychosis. The paper moves on to incorporate first-person accounts from people with lived experience, and uses these to refine a Deleuzean static synthesis of time constructed around the traumatic Event and the Dedekind 'cut'. The paper concludes with some suggestions as to how the literary texts offer possible insights into the experience of people living with 'psychotic' temporal disruptions, and in particular how to re-invest their deictic relations to establish functioning fixity and stability of the self in time.