The Dark Side of Language

In our chapter, we’ll examine the impact that language has in schizophrenia. We claim that this mental disorder is, in a strong sense, a linguistic experience. Language plays a crucial role in this psychosis. It is directly involved, in that disorganized language is one of the most important features of schizophrenia, but it also indirectly contributes to fuelling delusions, and to the making of another important symptom of schizophrenia: hallucinations. More precisely, schizophrenic patients can become obsessed by language, and, with their fascination for its infinite possibilities of signification, they reveal a different, dangerous nature of language, that usually passes unnoticed, and that we’ll discuss in this chapter. Besides, in schizophrenia, language also changes from the inside. Even the inner speech, the internal dialogue we usually experience in our heads, becomes something different, and it is altered in a specific way; it becomes a voice. What we will try to show is that, in schizophrenia, language can short circuit, and, in doing so, contribute to maintaining the mental disorder itself. In some sense, thus, schizophrenia can be viewed as a language’s virus, that shows the dark side of this remarkable feature of mankind.