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.

Language For Those Who Have Nothing - Mikhail Bakhtin and the Landscape of Psychiatry (Cognition and Language: A Series in Psycholinguistics) PDF

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