ROGERS Prelims_Kogan 1st proofs test8"?0B 01/04/2016 09:49 Page i CHAPTER TITLE I INCANDESCENT ALPHABETS ROGERS Prelims_Kogan 1st proofs test8"?0B 01/04/2016 09:49 Page ii ROGERS Prelims_Kogan 1st proofs test8"?0B 01/04/2016 09:49 Page iii INCANDESCENT ALPHABETS Psychosis and the Enigma of Language Annie G. Rogers ROGERS Prelims_Kogan 1st proofs test8"?0B 01/04/2016 09:49 Page iv 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 ROGERS Prelims_Kogan 1st proofs test8"?0B 01/04/2016 09:49 Page v 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 v ROGERS Prelims_Kogan 1st proofs test8"?0B 01/04/2016 09:49 Page vi 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 ROGERS Prelims_Kogan 1st proofs test8"?0B 01/04/2016 09:49 Page vii 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 vii ROGERS Prelims_Kogan 1st proofs test8"?0B 01/04/2016 09:49 Page viii 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 Sinthome at 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 Hos pital 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, Switzer land, 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. ROGERS Prelims_Kogan 1st proofs test8"?0B 01/04/2016 09:49 Page ix 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, Massa chusetts. 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. ix ROGERS Prelims_Kogan 1st proofs test8"?0B 01/04/2016 09:49 Page x For Dr Roy Mendelsohn ROGERS Prelims_Kogan 1st proofs test8"?0B 01/04/2016 09:49 Page xi Note to readers I have written this book for anyone interested in psychosis. This includes those who know that experience from the inside, as well as their families and friends. I have written for colleagues, especially psychoanalysts, but also for anyone who wants to accompany another person through psychosis. I write of my own experience, what I know and its limits. It is mostly what I do not know that I trust, the drift of wondering and wandering. I hope you will read with your own ques- tions and the book will call forth more questions, and you will soak yourself through in a rain of sounds and images, leaping from unknown to unknown. As a writer, I gather and repeat phrases, and each time it is to say something a little different, so that the same phrase in Chapter Two says something other in Chapter Four, and gathers new resonances in Chapter Seven. Summoned by those repeating phrases—I kept them in my pocket all through the writing—they map the territory I have wandered. It is utterly foreign to what I intended. The whole project was impossible from start to finish. This year of writing thrust me into a fast moving river: art images, first person accounts, scientific articles, poetry, novels, psychoanalysis—trying out varied forms of writing and voices (including a play comprising voices) that might carry what xi ROGERS Prelims_Kogan 1st proofs test8"?0B 25/04/2016 13:20 Page xii xii NOTE TO READERS I call “incandescent alphabets”—to readers who do not read along the same lines. Whether dismayed or sparkling with fresh ideas as you read, this book has one arc: to open psychosis as a human experience with language, its gifts born out of terror and enigma. Annie Rogers ROGERS Book_Kogan 1st proofs test8"?0B 01/04/2016 09:48 Page 1 CHAPTER TITLE 1 CHAPTER ONE Encounters with a ghastly, enigmatic Other t is a crisp, cool morning in Stockbridge, and with cup of tea on my desk, I enter another time, another space, another realm of I experience: psychosis, as it has been lived through first person accounts, books, letters, art, and interviews. Intrigued by the inventive language of psychosis, I think of how alphabets were first made by humans, drawn by hand, and then subjected to new forms through printing practices. I consider the paraphernalia of printers: composing sticks, in which one inserted letters as “sorts”. “I am out of sorts” meant that I have run out of letters needed for the line I was compos- ing. And I think of how language changes when one is “out of sorts” in psychosis; it might become difficult to follow one’s own thoughts. Of necessity, the psychotic makes new words, and his language carries the sheer inventiveness of his quest to speak, to say what is happen- ing to him. I am at Austen Riggs, a private psychiatric hospital in the Berkshires, in Western Massachusetts, as the Erikson Scholar. This position affords me time to write, an office at the corner of the psycho- analytic library, an apartment, and a stipend. Austen Riggs is one of the very few hospitals left where psychoanalysis is the primary means of treatment, where patients do not live on locked wards, but wander 1 ROGERS Book_Kogan 1st proofs test8"?0B 01/04/2016 09:48 Page 2 2 INCANDESCENT ALPHABETS a beautiful campus with wide lawns, trees, flowers.