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A research paper recently published in the academic journal World Psychiatry (Corcoran et al) makes the argument that, “[u]sing computer-based natural language processing analyses,” psychiatrists can more accurately diagnosis people at risk of developing a psychotic illness before they fully meet criteria for such a diagnosis. In addition, the paper argues that such an analysis will consequently validate the need for therapeutic intervention before the psychosis has fully manifested itself, as defined by diagnostic criteria in the DSM-5.
This is an obviously interesting thesis, one that might not seem at all irrelevant to psychoanalysis. For example, Jacques Lacan has always emphasized in his work on psychosis the differences between psychotic and neurotic speech (Lacan, 1993). At the very least, this research argument would seem to be a fertile place to investigate the relationship between speech and psychosis from a different angle.
One striking element of this study, however, is that it does not concern itself with the meaning of the language disturbances it focuses on, only briefly referencing, in the Discussion, “abnormal task-related activation in language circuits” as characteristic of disturbances in psychotic speech, making these disturbances sound completely irrelevant to subjective experience. Besides which, we are left to decide what makes a “task-related activation in language circuits” - whatever that is - “abnormal.”
Several years earlier, the journalist Rachel Aviv did a study of one of the clinics associated with this project (Aviv, 2010), mentioning the lead author of this paper by name (“Cheryl Corcoran, a compassionate, soft-spoken psychiatrist who has studied schizophrenia for her entire career …”) and interviewing several of the clinic's patients, all of whom were being seen because they were felt to be at risk for developing a major psychotic illness. One patient Aviv discusses at considerable length.
This patient, “Anna,” developed a delusion, “s