Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Psychosis is often understood in one of two ways: as a breakdown of cognitive circuitry, which has nothing to teach us as far as phenomenology is concerned and that can be treated only by focusing on the underlying causal processes that bring it about (reductionism and the ‘madness-as-nonsense’ view), or, alternatively, as a different interpretation of reality, one with nothing distinctly pathological about it (relativism). In this paper, I outline a different approach, drawing largely on Merleau-Ponty’s work, which aims to encompass both the properly unintelligible (pathological) and intelligible (expressive, phenomenologically informative) aspects of psychosis. By applying Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of expression to the problem of psychosis and psychotic language, the latter can be understood as an attempt at expression – a kind of speech without language that is most often incomplete, but that can under specific circumstances be made intelligible to others, often to significant therapeutic benefit. The present paper thus aims to complement and conceptually elucidate recent work in phenomenological psychiatry, which has demonstrated the clinical significance of enabling patients to express various aspects of their psychotic episodes.
Author: Sivić, Adnan
Institution: University of Ljubljana
Language: English
Topic: Mental Health and Psychiatry
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7126292014
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