The ‘telegraphic schizophrenic manner’: Psychosis and a (non)sense of time

Abstract

This paper reads Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time as stories of deictic temporal crises. It critically examines the texts, exploring their representations of mental time travel (MTT), and places them into dialectic with health sciences research on autonoesis and episodic memory deficits in people with lived experience of mental health disorders, particularly psychosis or ‘schizophrenia’. The paper uses this dialectic to interrogate how atypical MTT is diagnostically and clinically rendered as pathological, and indicative of psychosis in particular. Similarly, it mines these fictional representations for the insights they might provide in attempting to understand the phenomenological reality of temporal disruptions for people with lived experience of psychosis. The paper moves on to incorporate first-person accounts from people with lived experience, and uses these to refine a Deleuzean static synthesis of time constructed around the traumatic Event and the Dedekind ‘cut’. The paper concludes with some suggestions as to how the literary texts offer possible insights into the experience of people living with ‘psychotic’ temporal disruptions, and in particular how to re-invest their deictic relations to establish functioning fixity and stability of the self in time.

The Future: Missing Children, Time Travel, and Post-Nuclear Apocalypse in the Dark Series (Netflix)

“…Science-fiction literature may seem an unlikely genre for a serious discussion of psychological ailments, but literary scholars have already devoted much study to such representations of psychological trauma. Time travel in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five sheds light on a possible "temporal phenomenology" of psychosis (Flexer 2020). There is a danger of misattribution as Flexer warns that the extant literature tended to attribute psychiatric labels on the novel's main protagonist Billy Pilgrim-a survivor of the firebombing of Dresden in the final days of World War Two-based on the perception of his behavior in the light of known posttraumatic symptoms (Flexer 2020, p. 449).…”

Out of time: adolescents and those who wait for them

“…We might read this against Michael Flexer’s (2020) description of psychosis as an ‘explosion through which the self can be lost in time’ (p. 457). Flexer’s inter-disciplinary account of the mental health crisis utilises the concept of the Event, coined by philosopher Gilles Deleuze (2004) : The Event…is both timeless…and also a moment of pause or caesura… It serves to both fracture and construct the self, and the temporality constitutive of and by that self.…”

“…Flexer’s inter-disciplinary account of the mental health crisis utilises the concept of the Event, coined by philosopher Gilles Deleuze (2004) : The Event…is both timeless…and also a moment of pause or caesura… It serves to both fracture and construct the self, and the temporality constitutive of and by that self. ( Flexer, 2020 , p. 457) …”

“…The Event…is both timeless…and also a moment of pause or caesura… It serves to both fracture and construct the self, and the temporality constitutive of and by that self. ( Flexer, 2020 , p. 457)…”

Waiting in healthcare: the time to act might be later

“…That such claims have doubled in the past decade reflects our observation that 21st century life is culturally represented as accelerating 4. Although no reviewed studies claimed the time to act was later, we offer nuanced accounts of various forms of healthcare in which sustaining a caring relationship through time is key, including historical perspectives on the appointments system in general practice; the breaking down of time in psychosis5; and balancing sustained mental healthcare for young people against risk management.…”