Language for Those Who Have Nothing

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvii

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2. Introduction

   Pages 1-19

3. The Chronotope

   Pages 21-31

4. I Need to Know Where I Stand

   Pages 33-46

5. The Ringmaster and Laughter in the Care Chronotope

   Pages 47-71

6. Dialogues of the Classical and Grotesque Body

   Pages 73-95

7. Encounters with the Grotesque

   Pages 97-112

8. Madness and the Grotesque Chronotope

   Pages 113-121

9. The Practitioner Patients

   Pages 123-141

10. The Pseudopatients

    Pages 143-180

11. The Pseudopatient

    Pages 181-210

12. Consummation

    Pages 211-216

13. Back Matter

    Pages 227-242

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The aim of Language for those who have Nothing is to think psychiatry through the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin. Using the concepts of Dialogism and Polyphony, the Carnival and the Chronotope, a novel means of navigating the clinical landscape is developed.
Bakhtin offers language as a social phenomenon and one that is fully embodied. Utterances are shown to be alive and enfleshed and their meanings realised in the context of given social dimensions. The organisation of this book corresponds with carnival practices of taking the high down to the low before replenishing its meaning anew. Thus early discussions of official language and the chronotope become exposed to descending levels of analysis and emphasis.
Patients and practitioners are shown to occupy an entirely different spatio-temporal topography. These chronotopes have powerful borders and it is necessary to use the Carnival powers of cunning and deception in order to enter and to leave them. The book provides an overview of practitioners who have attempted such transgression and the author records his own unnerving experience as a pseudopatient. By exploring the context of psychiatry's unofficial voices: its terminology, jokes, parodies, and everyday narratives, the clinical landscape is shown to rely heavily on unofficial dialogues in order to safeguard an official identity.

• Encounter
• Organisation
• identity
• language
• psychiatry

Policies and ethics