Schizoidia: The Lexicon

Abstract

To understand the history of any concept we must necessarily interface with the words through which the concept was articulated. Twentieth-century schizophrenia, for all its perceived objectivity, was first and foremost linguistically encoded. Yet it needs to be understood that twentieth-century schizophrenia had a peculiar relationship with words. For most of the twentieth century, an absence of clear biological markers meant that language played a dominant role in schizophrenia conceptualisation. This almost certainly gave rise to certain excesses of vocabulary and a variety of problems that would probably not have existed otherwise.