Language and Psychosis: Seeking the Poetry of Malfunction in the Spirit of Silvano Arieti

Like many psychiatrists of my generation, I was introduced in 1961 during medical school to the processes of psychosis through Silvano Arieti. As I wrote in 1983,

the writings of Silvano Arieti whetted our interest and inspired our imagination. He culled from the European and American literature the best attempts at the time to describe the processes of schizophrenic thought, and refined those descriptions into a brilliant and accessible phenomenology of his own. But he did not stop there. This phenomenology only served as a good enough basis for his own gift of graceful presentation of the spirit and stuff of schizophrenia so that it came alive for his readers. Arieti showed us the psychodynamic and defensive basis of what the schizophrenic person was doing with languages and images; moreover, he did this with the respect and love for their efforts of a fine art or literary or social critic. [Arieti ci ha mostrato la base psicodinamica e difensiva di quallo che la persona schizofrenica ha fatto con le lingue e le immagini; inoltre, ha fatto questo con il rispetto e 1'amore per le loro sforzi di un bravo critico letterario o sociale.] No one took more pains to show the common humanity of this syndrome of feeling less-than-human; no one has invited so touchingly the rest of humankind to understand our schizophrenic brethren, or built more bridges to help us do so.

Arieti's generous encouragement of younger colleagues' interests in schizophrenia was memorable. When I published my first paper about the poetics of schizophrenic language in 1965, I had a letter from him about it. Citation in his subsequent publications meant to me that my efforts were understood and worth pursuing when most psychodynamically and humanistically oriented psychiatrists were all but abandoning the sufferers from schizophrenia. My collaboration with Arieti in a course on the psychotherapy of schizophrenia was an education in priorities, in which the human relationship remained foremost. (pp. 11