Meaning-Adjacence in Recovery

Meaning-adjacence is a concept intended to account for the fact that when a person is psychotic, their experiences are intensely meaningful for and to them, but from the perspective of other people these experiences are often baffling. (In recovery, when a person is able again to take the second- and third-person perspective, their own psychosis can feel equally baffling to them.) How do we explain this gap between the first-person and the second- and third-person? I think meaning-adjacence can help here. When someone is psychotic, they are experiencing private experiences that have significance, that are intelligible within that person's world, that are by no means meaning-deficient. But at the same time, those private experiences do not have a straightforwardly shareable linguistic meaning. Sometimes I wonder if psychosis in the context of meaning can be shared at all. Of course, psychosis can be expressed. "I am psychotic." "I am hearing voices." But can it be communicated, can it be shared?

The concept of meaning-adjacence suggests that shared meaning is of course possible, but psychosis as an experience of meaning-adjacence is often not. This means that someone has an experience that is intensely meaningful to them but cannot be completely captured by the shared system. We cannot translate "I am the reincarnation of Aristotle and in touch with a cosmic shaman" into a proposition that captures what this meant to me. So how do we account for the relationship between the experience of meaning and the proposition?

I think that meaning, to be meaning, in a Lacanian and Wittgensteinian sense, must be public. And yet there are experiences - religious, psychotic, aesthetic, in ordinary life - where meaning has not congealed into determinateness, where it is a kind of sense, a feeling of significance, and that is what I want to talk about here. The feeling of meaning, without being meaning itself, is what I aim to get at. That's a good working definition for meaning-adjacence - the feeling of meaning, before it has been incorporated into the structures of meaning itself.

When we then speak of meaning-adjacence in the context of recovery, we are not so much speaking about the inability to translate private experience into public meaning, as we are the attempt on the half of public meaning to understand those private experiences, even if those private experiences will never be made totally publicly meaningful. Recovery is, in many ways, the resuscitation of self, its recovery; for the historical self, the autobiographical self, is distorted when psychotic. But if we do consider meaning-adjacence as an important concept for recovery, then we can better understand how people recover.

People recover from psychosis by finding their niche in the world again. Finding this niche means finding community. But finding community, lasting community. means that the person recovering must learn again how to differentiate between public meaning and private psychotic experience. In a way, a psychotic has to learn sociality again, and slowly begin to be able to see from the second and third-person, as well as the first, for, in psychosis, or psychosis with anosognosia, they could only see from the first-person perspective. How does someone relearn how to see from the second- and third-person? Through relationships. It is in relationship that one is able to differentiate between the meaning-adjacent and the meaningful.

Phenomenologically, then, recovery from psychosis is not unlike regaining a sense again. For to see only from the first-person, and not be able to see the other, suggests a form of ontological blindness, a form of world-blindness. At the same time, someone who is psychotic with anosognosia loses the ability to reason. And this is a blindness in a different sense, although perhaps similar as well, as the ability to reason is bound up with sociality, intersubjectivity. Someone who is psychotic has a strange Descartian compass for seeing and understanding the world. It is strange and Descartian, because implicit in psychosis is the idea that private meaning is possible - the heart of the idea of madness, arguably - since the person who is psychotic is making decisions based on their hallucinations and delusions. So when a person begins to recover, they need to somehow distance themselves from the idea that private meaning is possible (although private experience of course is not), and this means, tacitly or explicitly, revising or redescribing that proposition somehow.