Meaning and Political Subjectivity in Psychotic Illness

In what follows I will give an overview of my research on culture and psychosis to illustrate the powerful ways in which contemporary psychoanalytic theory can contribute to anthropological research. I have in mind specifically the French schools of psychoanalysis, in which semiotics and linguistic systems play a central role in the formation of subjective experience.

My research project was constructed around the basic psychoanalytic premise that subjective experience and culture are intrinsically related to each other since they are both constructed in terms of basic chains of associations and systems of meaning.

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From that premise, one could expect to find structural signatures of the common system that orders both cultural processes and subjective experiences all the way from highly private experiences—like mental illness—to collective domains like history and politics. The objective was to search for that relationship through one of the most obviously idiosyncratic private experiences: psychosis.

The challenges a psychotic patient faces are somewhat similar to those of a person awaking to the aftermath of a terrifying earthquake and realizing their survival depends on the daunting task of reconstructing the landscape. It is in this kind of a setting that the significance of the basic building blocks of meaning that French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan termed points de capiton (literally, quilting points) becomes obvious. Think of systems of meaning as complex structures built around basic blocks and then expanded through successive levels of metaphoric and metonymic associations. As you move away from the basic blocks, each new layer is progressively more intricate and less solid. Just as in a city hit by an earthquake, the surviving structures are usually foundational elements. Similarly, a mind that is hit by psychotic illness has certain foundational signifiers that tend to remain intact, and they serve as extremely important points of reference for the patient’s desperate struggle to orient their chaotic experience.

It is the rudimentariness, the solidity, and the certitude with which these points of reference are vested that renders them most resilient to the ravages of psychotic illness. Significantly, the solidity and certitude of these points de capiton s is determined politically and historically—that is to say, collectively. They function as the turning points where private experience is determined and held together by the collective systems, which is why they also produce the fundamental continuity of private experience with collective systems. Psychotic constructions of meaning tend to deviate significantly from common sense, but when it comes to those basic blocks, my case analyses clearly showed that the points of reference are generally the same as those used by the non-psychotic subjects. These points of reference are almost without an exception signifiers associated with great amounts of power, such as God and his prophets or the Devil and his associates, or significant mythical and historical characters.

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For a concrete example, consider the following from a young psychotic woman I will call Emel. A number of salient themes of reference repeatedly surfaced throughout Emel’s narrative, one of which I will introduce here, namely the much revered founder of the Republic of Turkey, Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938). Struggling to locate and identify herself, Emel said at one point:

E: So Atatürk is my grandfather. We are from the same earth
I: You are from the same earth…
E: Yes we are from the same earth… No one has my blood type. Only my father and I have it. [….] I: What kind of blood is that?
E: Turkish blood.

Note the strong identification with Atatürk here. The idea of a pure “Turkish blood” is associated strongly with the legacy of Atatürk, whose phrase “the pure blood in our veins” continues to be used and reproduced widely in Turkish social and political jargon. At another point in the interview, Emel gave a striking metaphor for her illness and the consequent hospitalization: “it’s a spider web,” she said. Then when I asked her what she meant by that, she said: “spider! spider web. That means the opposites. Like East and West!” Unable to hide my confusion, I asked for more explanation:

I: Like East and West? I don’t really understand this East and West thing. Could you explain that for me?
E: It means siblings… It means peace… Peace at home. Peace in the world I was reading Atatürk’s writing, Atatürk’s address to Turkish Youth [a historic talk in which he calls the Turkish youth to respect the ‘pure Turkish Blood’ in their veins]. Do you like Atatürk?
I: I don’t know much about Atatürk.
E: If I gave you a book would you read it? A gift.
I: Thank you. Why don’t you tell me the name of the book?
E: Bütün Dünya [The Whole World] I: The Whole World. What does it say inside?
E: It talks about Atatürk. When he died, when he was born.
How he won the battle of Sakarya. How Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror conquered Istanbul [15th century conquest of Is-

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tanbul by Muslim Turks].
I: I see. History of Turkey, History of Istanbul. So why
don’t you tell me about what Atatürk did.
E: He was born in 1981.
I: 1981, OK.
E: He died in 1983…

Let me call your attention to the years she attributes to Atatürk’s birth and death: 1981 is Emel’s own date of birth, and 1983, two years later, coincides with the time she herself had a serious illness and her parents considered her dead. Identification with Atatürk is a recurring theme in Emel’s interviews.

There are at least two important aspects to this identification: first that Atatürk is a collectively constituted signifier functioning here as a personal reference of identity, and secondly that it functions as a trope of unity, not simply in the collective or national sense of the word, but at an intimately personal, subjective level, as a signifier around or within which Emel attempts to anchor her unhinged sense of selfhood. Atatürk is associated strongly with wholeness here. Notice also the title of her imaginary book The Whole World. Atatürk enters as a figure in whom the opposites come together, and through him, peace is restored. Emel’s world is riddled with binary oppositions, but Atatürk is capable of joining the opposites together.

The idea of an intermediary catalyst that brings the two conflicting worlds together and restores a stable self-identity not only is a prominent theme in Emel’s search for a sense of self, but it also coincides immediately with the history of Turkey and the political figure of Atatürk. Atatürk, whose famous adage she repeats, “peace at home, peace in the world,” becomes a pivotal point de caption for Emel through which she finds a locally legitimized way of deferring her frustrating struggle for self-identity to the larger and more promising domain of the collective apparatus.

Using new psychoanalytic theories for cultural analysis of psychotic content sheds light on an intricate yet easily discernible series of semiotic and psychological structures, constellations of meaning and associative patterns that run across collective processes and private experiences. The possibility of tracing the conti-

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nuity of the private and the collective within the realm of psychotic experience clearly shows that psychotic reality, as exotic, different, and disjointed as it might appear, is “analyzable” insofar as it is formed within the collective system in which the illness unfolds. Analysis clearly shows that what may originally appear as disorganized, incomprehensible, and broken chains of associations, may indeed be read and analyzed to bear sense in levels of meaning not immediately available to consciousness. Needless to say, if it is possible to systematically find patterns of association that coincide with those of the psychotic subject’s local systems of meaning, then it is only reasonable to attribute continuity to the psychotic and the non-psychotic experience, at least insofar as they both are constructed using the same pool of semiotic resources.

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