Mental Illness and Imagination in Philosophy, Literature, and Psychiatry

Abstract

can existential themes, such as anxiety, the will to die, or our simultaneous will to live forever be logically described? does a literary language or philosophical and psychiatric term exist that can express phenomena nonreferential to the external world? In short, does a genre exist that can redefine the relationships between symbol and meaning? drawing upon various theoretical perspectives developed by Michel Foucault, Ludwig Binswanger, gaston Bachelard, and Karl Jaspers, this paper discusses the ability to depict life as we are living it, whether it is a product of mental illness or a matter of normal schizophrenic imaginings. M ental illness and imaginings affect people of all ages, races, religions, and incomes. Mental illness as such is not the result of personal weakness, lack of character, or poor upbringing. Instead, mental illness shows incredible creativity in terms of behavior and thought. nevertheless, it also disrupts a person's thoughts, feelings, mood, ability to relate to others, and the capacity to cope with the ordinary demands of life. The understanding of mental illness as a medical condition includes diagnoses such as major depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder (ocd), panic disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTsd), and borderline personality disorder. In 2012, the american Psychiatric association (aPa) approved a set of updates, revisions, and changes to the reference manual used to diagnose mental disorders. The revision of the manual, called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (dsM), is the first significant update in nearly

Healing and Meaning Making Through Storytelling and Poetry

“…There are, according to Foucault (1954Foucault ( /2001, three specific forms of poetry or first-person narratives that employ a type of language that reflects the meaning of inner worries and existential dichotomies: the epic, the lyric, and tragic poetry (Joranger, 2013(Joranger, , 2018. These forms of poetic narratives manage to express how meanings and feelings are constituted.…”

“…Finally, the axis of tragic narratives is located on the vertical axis of mental ascent and descent. It emphasizes that privileged moment in which your state of mind completes its rise and balances there, wavering imperceptibly, before the descent begins (Joranger, 2013(Joranger, , 2018. To explain what he means, Foucault (1954Foucault ( /2001) refers to a text by German poet and dramatist Friedrich Christian Hebbels (1813-63), entitled A Strange Dream, which describes a nightmarish dream in which Hebbels moves vertically along a rope that God has fastened between heaven and earth.…”

“…In the third volume of his three-volume work Philosophy (Philosophie), Jaspers (1971) outlines an ideographic understanding of first-person narratives in poetry by using what he believes to be the nonreferential and nonreductive narrative of poetry. Jasper expresses the notion that poetry, like the human mind, is not obligated to imitate the external empirical world, such as in medicine and neurology (Joranger, 2013). Comparing to other esthetical expressions, such as architecture and sculpture depending upon the real presence of their empirical elements to provide meaning, poetry moves in visions of possibilities freely drafted in the direction of undefined and infinite worlds (Jaspers, 1971, p. 174).…”

Cleaning Up or Throwing out the Psychological Insight with the Bath Water

“…The productive power of language and concepts shows that the type of language and concepts we use to explain/understand a person's inner feeing and consciousness cannot be fixed or related to a first principle everyone agrees on. If so we lose the sight of oneself and the persons involved (Joranger 2013(Joranger , 2015.…”