Premium
"The City Is My Mother": Narratives of Schizophrenia and Homelessness
Author(s) -
Lovell Anne M.
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1525/aa.1997.99.2.355
Subject(s) - narrative , subject (documents) , openness to experience , alterity , schizophrenia (object oriented programming) , interpretation (philosophy) , meaning (existential) , self , sociology , psychology , aesthetics , psychoanalysis , gender studies , epistemology , psychotherapist , social psychology , psychiatry , literature , linguistics , art , philosophy , library science , computer science
Recent narrative analysis in medical anthropology provides keys to both the personal meaning of illness and the historical, cultural, and institutional shaping of that experience. Yet Western psychiatric thinking and practice continue to view schizophrenic discourse as closed to interpretation. Caught in this "closed text," the self would seem obliterated. But using narratives of schizophrenia and homelessness, this essay proposes a different understanding of schizophrenic alterity. The openness of the text‐as‐experience is re‐created collectively, from outside the subject's narration: the subject's "self is construction through the added perspectives of his or her interlocutors in the role of storymakers.