Incandescent Alphabets: Psychosis and the Enigma of Language

225 Pages·2016·7.29 MB·English

by  Annie G. Rogers

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CHAPTERTITLE I
INCANDESCENT ALPHABETS
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INCANDESCENT
ALPHABETS
Psychosis and the
Enigma of Language
Annie G. Rogers
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First published in 2016 by
Karnac Books Ltd
118 Finchley Road, London NW3 5HT
Copyright © 2016 to Annie G. Rogers.
The right of Annie G. Rogers to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with §§77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78220 347 6
Edited, designed and produced by The Studio Publishing Services Ltd
www.publishingservicesuk.co.uk
email: [email protected]
Printed in Great Britain
www.karnacbooks.com
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CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND PERMISSIONS vii
ABOUT THE AUTHOR ix
NOTE TO READERS xi
CHAPTER ONE
Encounters with a ghastly, enigmatic Other 1
CHAPTER TWO
Psychosis: what is it, this strangeness? 23
CHAPTER THREE
Hallucinated bodies: art and its alphabets in psychosis 45
CHAPTER FOUR
Infinite code: clocks, calendars, numbers, music, scripts 73
CHAPTER FIVE
After the disaster: six sketches and a short play 103
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vi CONTENTS
CHAPTER SIX
Beyond psychosis: returning, remaining traces 127
CHAPTER SEVEN
Psychosis and the address: new alphabets and 151
the enigmatic Other
CHAPTER EIGHT
Psychoanalysis remade: a way through psychosis 179
REFERENCES 205
INDEX 211
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND PERMISSIONS
I would like to thank the Austen-Riggs Center and the Erikson Scholar
Program for the writing residency that allowed me to formulate the first
five chapters of this book. I am particularly grateful to Jane Tillman,
Director of the Erikson Institute, for her warm welcome and support,
as well as John Muller, who met with me in the first stages of writing,
read my work, and listened keenly. Mark Mulherrin, artist and teacher,
was the perfect companion in my early exploration of images made by
psychotic patients. I had not worked with images in any book previ-
ously. I am grateful to Suzi Naiberg, Kristopher Spring, Sura Levine,
and Rachel Beckwith, Arts Librarian at Hampshire College, for their
help as I began to navigate image archives and the permissions process.
Readers are gold. I had four: John Muller, who was with me
steadily in the early months of writing, Derek Pyle, a former student
who read every page of my manuscript carefully and intelligently,
Margie Hutter, who read Chapter Two as a sister of a psychotic
sibling, and Eve Watson, a Dublin analyst who read Chapter Eight
and showed me exactly what was at stake when I floundered with the
ending of this book.
There are too many clinicians to thank for work on psychosis that
inspired this book, but I do want to single out Willy Apollon, Danielle
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viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND PERMISSIONS
Bergeron, and Lucie Cantin at the Freudian School of Quebec for their
original, successful work with psychotic young adults, as well as Raul
Moncayo and Magdalena Romanowitz, my wonderfully articulate co-
facilitators in a year-long Seminar of the Lacanian School of Psycho-
analysis focusing on Lacan’s Joyce, the Sinthomeat Hampshire College
in 2014–2015. I am deeply grateful to Barri Belnap and Charles Turk
for conversations with me about clinical practice with psychotic
patients.
Family members are the guardians of any writer’s courage with
their sustained support; I am grateful to my spouse, Ide B. O’Carroll,
for listening to me unfold this project and my puzzles about it
throughout my writing, and to Mary M. Rogers, my sister, without
whom I would be in no position to write about psychosis. Finally, I am
grateful for the careful shepherding of this book by Karnac editors,
Rod Tweedy and the production team at The Studio.
Permissions
I am grateful to all those who gave me permission to use images by
artists in this book: The Prinzhorn Collection at University Hosp ital
Heidelberg, The Artist Rights Society of New York City, The Rodin
Museum in Paris, The Creative Growth Arts Center in San Francisco,
California, The Adolf Wölfli Foundation in Bern, Switzerl and,
Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland, The Henry Boxer
Gallery, London, and Christian Berst Art Brut. I particularly want to
thank John Devlin for his art. His work, and the work of all the artists
in this book, underlines how little we truly know of the human experi-
ence of psychosis.
Cover illustration: John Devlin, Untitled no. 162, 1988. Courtesy of
John Devlin and Christian Berst Art Brut.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Annie G. Rogers, PhD, is Professor of Psychoanalysis and Clinical
Psychology at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and
Co-Director of its Psychoanalytic Studies Program. She is Analyst
Mem ber and Faculty at the Lacanian School of San Francisco and
Associate Member of the Association for Psychoanalysis & Psycho-
therapy in Ireland. Dr Rogers has a psychoanalytic practice in
Amherst, Massac husetts. A recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship at
Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard
University, a Whiting Fellowship at Hampshire College, and an
Erikson Scholar at Austen Riggs, she is the author of A Shining
Affliction (Penguin Viking, 1995) and The Unsayable (Random House,
2006), in addition to numerous scholarly articles, short fiction, and
poetry.
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