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.