The poetics of vulnerability: creative writing among young adults in treatment for psychosis in light of Ricoeur\u2019s and Kristeva\u2019s philosophy of language and subjectivity

Oddgeir Synnes,Hilde Bondevik,Kristin Lie Romm

doi:10.1007/s11019-020-09998-5

Abstract

There is a growing interest in the application of creative writing in the treatment of mental illness. Nonpharmacological approaches have shown that access to poetic, creative language can allow for the verbalisation of illness experiences, as well as for self-expressions that can include other facets of the subject outside of the disease. In particular, creative writing in a safe group context has proven to be of particular importance. In this article, we present a pilot on a creative writing group for young adults in treatment for psychosis. We set the texts and experiences from the writing group in dialogue with Paul Ricoeur’s and Julia Kristeva’s philosophies on poetic language as meaning making and part of subject formation. The focus is on language as materiality and potentiality and on the patient’s inherent linguistic resources as founded in a group dynamic. As a whole, the project seeks to give an increased theoretical and empirical understanding of the potentiality of language and creativity for healing experiences, participation and meaning-making processes among vulnerable people. Furthermore, a practice founded in poetic language might critically address both the general and biomedical understanding of the subject and disease.

Highlights

‘For all miracles are powerless to prevent the expression of ideas in writing; the occasional attempt to paralyze my fingers, though making writing somewhat difficult, does not prevent it, and attempts at disturbing my thoughts are overcome by putting them down in writing during which one has a great deal of time to collect one’s thoughts’
Creative writing in a safe group context allows for peer-to-peer support, and this might be especially important for people with severe mental health challenges
We present a pilot project on a creative writing group for young adults with psychosis; here, we look into written texts and excerpts from interviews with the participants

Summary

Introduction

‘For all miracles are powerless to prevent the expression of ideas in writing; the occasional attempt to paralyze my fingers, though making writing somewhat difficult, does not prevent it, and attempts at disturbing my thoughts are overcome by putting them down in writing during which one has a great deal of time to collect one’s thoughts’. In light of Ricoeur’s and Kristeva’s perspectives, the aim of the article is to investigate the following: How can poetic language be a resource for young adults in treatment for psychosis through participation in a safe and supportive creative writing group?. King et al (2013) outline three different theoretical perspectives to investigate frameworks for creative writing as part of a recovery process: (1) the relationship between the narrative and the emergence of identity, (2) writing as a means to reconstitute a void in the internal symbolic order of the person and (3) creative writing as a form of cognitive remediation These perspectives might be especially valuable for people who suffer from psychosis with self-disturbances and identity problems (Sass et al 2018) and/or cognitive impairment (Karr and Singh 2019). The theories of Ricoeur and Kristeva bring a ‘poetic ethics’ or an ‘ethics of linguistics’ (1984a) to our project: by stressing how the subject is relational and discursively constituted, this highlights the need for an awareness of the potentials that creative language might bring the individual, both as a writer and as a reader/listener

Methodology

Compliance with ethical standards