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The Idea of Psychotic Lyrics: Or, What Kind of World is a Psychotic World?

Writer's picture: Andrew FieldAndrew Field


What is the relationship between language and psychosis? It's a fraught question, and perhaps the question itself is not true to the relationship, as there are many relationships between language and psychosis, and not just one under the umbrella term "the." That said, psychosis is a total experience, meaning that, especially when one is also suffering with anosognosia, or lack of insight, then every single aspect of the psychotic person's being is under sway by the psychosis. Psychosis is not a thought or mood disorder so much as a self disorder, or what has also been called by Louis Sass and others an "ipseity disturbance." Self disorder captures the way in which the experience of psychosis is not a view added on to the same self's repertoire of perspectives, but the full-on experienced perspective, the being of the person. From the ground up, psychosis is an every-which-way disease, where the world as experienced is psychotic.


Being psychosis is so total, it would suggest that language is also a part of psychosis, and it definitely is. How? I would go so far as to say that not only language is a part of psychosis, but discourse is, as used by Heidegger to mean "the fundamental way in which patterns of meaning are manifested to us." (50, Polt) This quote is from a rather startlingly good and incisive introduction to Heidegger by Richard Polt, who goes on to write,


[Discourse] is the ontological precondition for language, and it naturally leads to language: "to significations, words accrue." (Heidegger, 204/61) As an entity with discourse, I am capable of noticing how the world is articulated - that is, how it involves articulations, joints, that differentiate and unite it in patterns of meaning. (50, Polt)


Discourse is prior to language, more primordial, and gives rise to language. This makes sense; but because discourse is ontological, and psychosis is an ontological disease, language too becomes psychotic. What does this look like, and what are some implications of this argument?


Let me share the lyrics of a song I wrote when psychotic. I'm just going to place them here, and then we'll look at them more closely. Here are the lyrics to a song called "Me and You."


At once the feeling rose

That the never-ending aqueducts were round

Besides the grain from the sundry works

It was beehives in the gray-brown-blue-green store


Here a can of cod fish oil

Here a bag of peat

Smell of wind coming off the fresh wood of the isle

And some dried kiwis for the dogs that came to eat


Landscapes wander in

And interiors wander out

A monologue about something really big

A dialogue about some rainbow trout


Did it matter what the man said that one time

When the ship sailed away in a cloak of green

How the skeletons in that one Mickey Mouse movie

Danced away their tales in mists of steam


I never imagined a day

I never thought something so close could lay

And if the woods gave back a light

The sound of everything was alright with me


So even when it’s dark out

When the rain sails away in curlicues

And the lights go out like honey disappearing

In the dark that blows away our sneaking cues


Just to hear you breathing

Is thanks enough for everything that ever was

Just to know you’re smiling

Is the greatest gift a man could ever want


And one day when you’re in heaven

And I’m finding for that ever-lasting kiss

I know you’ll be with me every moment

In a kiss that was a sound I couldn’t express


Like a story told a long time ago

In a voice I always knew but had to work to find

In a face like every key on the piano

But with a chord that was somehow mine


I never imagined a day

I never thought something so close could lay

And if the goods gave back a light

The sound of everything was alright with me


This first thing to notice about these lyrics, I suppose, is what is called their "alterity," their otherness. They don't make conventional sense; in fact, they resist conventional sense. But discourse is ontological, meaning primordial, inescapable, so what is happening here? What is the meaning of these lyrics? How do we interpret them?


Well, what do we mean by "meaning"? Meaning comes from interpretation, according to Heidegger, which comes from understanding. Polt writes, "Thanks to our projection of possibilities, we understand things. When we pursue a possibility intensively and use it to reveal beings further, we are interpreting. Interpretations can give rise to assertions." (Polt 69, his italics) Again, language, in the form of assertions and propositions, come from interpretation, the ability to see something as something, which comes from understanding, which Polt translates Vorstehen (the intended root of Verstehen, which is the German word for understanding that Heidegger uses) meaning "skilled management." Here is Polt expanding on this point, and using the great example of gardening to illustrate his point:


What we can do is pursue an available possibility, using it to unfold our understanding into a developed interpretation. Again, Heidegger focuses on practical life, since this is the most ordinary kind of existence. In everyday life, we may interpret something by improving it. For example, I spend an afternoon gardening. My backyard garden fits into the possibility of gardening as a possibility that I understand, and this is why I am able to treat the garden as a garden. I now work with my prior understanding; I approach the garden with certain expectations and goals and set about improving it. I notice that there are weeds in the garden, and I treat them as weeds: I uproot them. I treat some vegetables as ripe by harvesting them. I treat some plants as needing water by irrigating them. On the basis of my prior understanding of gardening, I am interpreting the components of the garden as items to be dealt with in various ways. The entirety of these as-es "constitutes the interpretation" (Heidegger, 189/149). (Polt, 70-71),


"The entirety of these as-es 'constitutes the interpretation' - in other words, we are pointed towards things by the way in which we interpret those things, and what points us is the slant at or by or through or from which we see things, the "as." We don't just see a pill bottle as an orange things with a white sticker - we see it as a pill bottle. This is because understanding is skilled management, which means that our way of being-in-the-world is practical and absorbed before it is theoretical. It is something to use, to understand, before it is something to stare at. To understand something is to "[project] possibilities in regards to a situation in order to interpret it." (Polt, 71) Or, as Blattner puts it, "We make an entity intelligible to us as what it is (a coffee mug, a hammer, a novel, an instructor) by interpreting it in terms of some possibility of its being." (Blattner, 95)


Because we can project possibilities in regards to a situation - because we can make something accessible to us - that thing has meaning. What is meaning? Polt defines it this way: "Meaning is the context that gives us access to the thing." We need to take one more step, and then we can return to the lyrics.


We can start by asking a question. What is the world? Because the world of the psychotic is different from the world of a person in possession of their sanity. It has a different meaning. (Think about the lyrics above.) Of course the world of a person possessed of their sanity is different from another person possessed of their sanity, but what I want to suggest is that the psychotic person's world is ontologically different, an argument that Louis Sass makes in "Heidegger, schizophrenia, and the ontological difference." This is to say that people in possession of their sanity, while moving in different worlds, also exist in the share public world. Someone who is psychotic does not exist in the shared public world, in a very real and troubling sense. So where do they exist? What kind of world do they move in? What kind of world is madness or psychosis?


Let's go back to our question. What is the world? Let's say it in a Heideggerian way: what is the worldhood of the world? Polt: "our understanding discloses references," defined as "a possibility that we can project and that lets us encounter an entity as something or other." (Polt, 54, 72) What is the world?


If the world is a totality of references, then the world is a totality of possibilities - a complex of options with which we are familiar, and which allows us to approach beings in a competent way. (Polt, 72)


"The world turns out to be a totality of references or a context of references" (Polt, 52). "The totality of references, the totality of involvements and the totality of signifying are just subtly different perspectives on a single phenomenon, worldhood." (Polt, 54) Fine: but if the world is a totality of references - meaning possibilities that our understanding (skilled management) discloses, allowing us to interpret, to see things as things - then that would mean that the world of a psychotic is a totality of references. But what are these references? And furthermore, a psychotic person is not competent in the shared public world. (I think this gets at the heart of the fallacy involved in Justin Garson's Madness: A Philosophical Exploration, which seems to suggest that madness is a form of competent coping and problem-solving, which is right if he means within the totality of references in the mad world, but totally wrong if he means within the totality of references in the shared public world.)


What I want to suggest is that the lyrics above move within the totality of references of the psychotic person's world, but because the psychotic person lives in an ontologically different world, then the context of the lyrics, their meaning, is very hard to get at. We don't move within that world; psychosis is, in Jasper's term, "ununderstandable." Jaspers is right - if we read the lyrics, one of the prominent aspects of them is their impenetrability. We just can't get around them, into them. We might listen to the song and like it - perhaps the melody is something that appeals to us, or perhaps we like our lyrics impenetrable, or something else. But the fact is - and I think this is undeniable - that aside from some glimmers of sense, we cannot get into these lyrics, because their world of meaning, their context, is ontologically different.


What does it mean to live in that world? Let me return to Justin Garson's Madness: A Philosophical Exploration, and then we will end. I think we could say that Jaspers and Garson have quite different, even opposite, understanding of psychosis. Psychosis is ununderstandable for Jaspers, and therefore Jaspers preserves - crucially - the alterity of psychosis, the ontological difference, as Sass does (and Richard Gipps as well). This is not the case with Garson. Here he is, at the end of his first chapter in Madness:


madness is not always a disease to be cured but a force of disruption to be reckoned with. We must view madness in its destabilizing and transformative tendency; in the final analysis we do not “view” madness at all, as if we stand in a subject-object relation to it, as if we contemplate this thing, this phenomenon, from a safe distance; we must be taken up into the air by madness and deposited onto a new soil, a land of beautiful and terrifying foliage, of wonderful animals and spirits, a land both strange and familiar, as familiar and as perplexing as one’s very hand. In the end, madness is not a specific mode of existence of the person but the default state of humankind, ground zero of the conscious mind.


(Garson, 12)


Garson's interpretation is dangerous because he finds madness too familiar. He does not preserve the ontological difference, and therefore in a strange way does to madness what madness does to the public shared world: that is, project upon it what is not there. We could say that Garson does not observe the distinction between the totality of references of the psychotic person, and the totality of references of the sane person; and because he does not observe this distinction, he romanticizes and idealizes madness, making it into something that it positively is not. And this is dangerous ("wonderful animals and spirits"?), because madness to be seen has to be seen as what it is, which is unfortunately as a dysfunction, by which I mean a loss of contact with reality. It is not wonderful, but can lead to much harm in oneself and one's community, including suicide. If we do observe this distinction, and therefore the ontological diffference, I think we philosophize more responsibly, and then can begin describing features of things like psychotic lyrics with more insight and reliability.


Richard Polt, Heidegger: an introduction, 1999.

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, 2008.

William Blattner, Heidegger's Being and Time, Second Edition, 2024.

Justin Garson, Madness: A Philosophical Exploration, 2022.

Richard Gipps, On Madness: Understanding the Psychotic Mind, 2022.

Karl Jaspers, General Psychopathology, Volume 1, translated by J. Hoenig and Marian W. Hamilton, 1997.

Louis Sass, "Heidegger, schizophrenia, and the ontological difference," Philosophical Psychology 5 (2): 109-132, 1992.


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