Speech Analysis Of Patients Suffering From Episodes And Traits Characteristic Of Psychosis And Dissociation

Both thematic and structural analysis of patient discourse offer clinical theories into the specificity of psychosis and dissociation. Lacan remarked the presence of 5 insoluble questions at the foundation of psychotic experiences: authority, afterlife, procreation, sexual difference, and the other’s desire. (Moernaut et al., 2018) Phenomenological approaches to dissociative events illustrate the importance of discontinuity, lost temporal or special orientation exemplified in Dora’s second dream: “I had the usual feeling that one has in dreams when one cannot move forward. Then I was at home. I must have been travelling in the meantime, but I know nothing about that.” (Freud, 1905) In order to obtain a clearer picture of the discursive nature of psychotic and dissociative phenomena, we generated thematic lists; in patients suffering from persecutory hallucinatory psychosis, we found themes such as: exclusion, withdrawal, sacrifice and self-harm, boundary permeability and overwhelm, persecution. In the dissociative group, we found more themes of not knowing, uncertainty, forgetfulness, losing oneself, victimhood, negligence, and discontinuity. We also observed differences in the style of discontinuity or thought blocking between the two groups.