Listening for Meaning: Language, Dialogue, and Understanding- 1:30-2pm Get Me: Interpreting and Responding to Psychotic Speech Patterns - Erin Soros, PhD
- 2-2:30pm Being Heard in Psychosis: Recognition and Dialogue in Open Dialogue - Ross Ellenhorn, MSW, PhD
Get Me: Interpreting and Responding to Psychotic Speech Patterns - Erin Soros, PhD
Have you heard the ricochet of psychotic speech—patterns that move with equal parts jubilance and terror? Have you ever found yourself speaking in these forms? This presentation guides audience members through a close reading of several samples of my own psychotic speech. Drawing on interpretive approaches from literary studies, psychoanalysis, and continental philosophy, I demonstrate at a granular level how repetition, assonance, homonyms, condensation, and other modes of linguistic play and associative freefall can still communicate meaning, even as they also push meaning toward crisis.Participants will leave with a set of tools for hearing and interpreting mad speech patterns with greater nuance. The talk will also offer suggestions for attuned, ethical ways to respond to people who express themselves through language that falters, fragments, or gives way.
Being Heard in Psychosis: Recognition and Dialogue in Open Dialogue - Ross Ellenhorn, MSW, PhD
This dialogue will center on learning Open Dialogue, but will take such learning deeper, and give it richer meaning, by investigating what it means to be in dialogue—the kinds of truths that emerge from it, the noetic quality of it, the experiences it engenders, how it is often associated with a connection to the divine, and its close-to-synonymous relationship with play. After all, if we consider psychosis an acute experience of estrangement, whether that estrangement is endogenous or caused by stigma, we might also want to consider it a disconnection from dialogue or a blocked-off world of purely inner dialogue and want to find new forms of dialogue that will be especially sensitive to psychotic experience. That’s what this presentation, discussion and shared-learning experience will be all about.
