Communications of Psychotics

Communicating by members of a social species is both expressive of their social nature and essential to it. The forms, structures and processes of being social evolve through and are entirely dependent upon communicating. Differing widely, psychotic people are aberrant in the forms, content, intent, feeling and meaning of their communications. This paper will attempt to show the origins, development and nature of this differing. The social character of man, its anatomic and physiological substrate present at birth, evolves through and as response to a matrix of social processes. Embedded in his culture, each man lives in a world created by his culture. Varying in their value systems, each culture elaborates greater range of forms for expressing its valued aspects than for its devalued aspects.¹ Thus, one culture may be rich in forms for emotion, another for direct experience, another for man's relationship to nature, another for abstract ideas and intellectual concepts. Each person, fluent in the language of his society, expresses his uniqueness as shaped by his culture.² Language is a formalized arrangement of speech sounds as symbols (words) having rules, patterns and conventions of usage.’ Each culture has customs (conventions) for those feelings and experiences which are desirable, permissable and not permissable. Thus, through direct and indirect communicating, each culture influences the psychic development of each of its members.³ Each person's capacities for speech,