The functions of language and the understanding of mental disorders

The writings of the endless paranoiac interned in a Italian psychiatric and forensic hospital give us a picture of the facts and circumstances that project them in a hyperbolic narrative dimension. As fallacious, their speech remains shiny and able to attract the attention of the interlocutor until the moment in which the delusional truth isn’t revealed by obstinacy that ends to make it obvious. But, is it only this the expression of madness? And language with which it’s expressed always so clear, tended persuasive, paradoxically suggestive and captivating? In its intrinsic communicative thrust is psychotic linguistic use always so demanding, caring and direct to the presence of the other? The linguistic schizophrenic characteristics seem very different from those related to paranoiac language. Numerous studies on schizophrenic language describe an expressive and cognitive universe that is away from the sense and meaning of paranoiac madness. Language, then, becomes the mirror of interpretation and psychotic experience of objective, subjective and intersubjective reality. In this paper, considering characteristics of schizophrenic schizophasia or glossolalia (schizophrenic language use) and considering paranoiac need to rhetorical language (inherently argumentative and persuasive), we’ll try to bring out some differences (cognitive, linguistic, psychopathological, ontological) between psychosis schizophrenic and paranoiac.