Abstract
This is a study of the generation of identity, in life and in fiction; how it is defined and determined and by what agency. Exploring the relationship between creative processes and the condition named schizophrenia, the research pays particular attention to the role of language: its acquisition and its part in positioning and embedding those threatened by, or caught within, the web of this psychosis. With determination of the self at its core, the writing of a magical realist novel is used to interrogate the processes a child undergoes in negotiating life when the odds of developing the condition, and losing the self, appear inevitable.A personal story of familial schizophrenia, it supposes the same locations and emotional journey, many of the same attitudes and relationships, as well as recording the author’s own hard-fought solutions. It is, however, a fictional work crafted from the mind of one who had the potential to develop the psychosis the artefact itself considers.
Written forms of language are significant to the study on a number of levels: given names as indicators of a person’s potential, and influencing the development of personality; power-based language, with medical records determining a person’s status and future; literature, in conveying information not available elsewhere; letters and journals, as a means to maintain a personal voice; the novel itself, The Eldritch Girls, showing how voices can be lost to the void through the destructive power of authority and how story, created and experienced, can bear witness and, in spinning alternative realities brought to us through the magical realist worlds of myth, folklore and archetype, can also become the salvation. All are explored within this exegesis as is the craft of authorship. The artefact, a bildungsroman, is devised to show how the main character Abra’s self is constructed through language, and language-related experience. Also, how a lack of the same, undeveloped, withheld, repressed or eroded, undermines notions of self.
The creative process and how the artefact relates to philosophy, anthropological studies, psychology and other literature is revealed as the exegesis progresses. Beginning with the researcher’s own history as background and moving through a survey of historical and contemporary perceptions of madness, as represented in fact and in fiction, the study maintains a focus on the, often pejorative, theories of psychology. These are theories pertinent not only in the world of psychiatry but that of story, where portraying the ‘human condition’ remains the ultimate literary quest.
The main chapters of the commentary are broken into sections, to facilitate the sweep of this cross disciplinary PhD in praxis. Where words and phrases are italicized, beyond the titles of publications, they reference specific terms taken from the world of psychoanalysis to distinguish them from their lay usage. The word ‘self’ is, however, italicized throughout, taken to always mean personal identity, essence and, inclusive of soul – being largely indistinguishable between its several forms. For expediency, these terms are sometimes in brackets after a description, to signal the connection of the experience to the condition. A glossary is provided. (Appendix, a.)
| Date of Award | 11 Jan 2023 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Alison Habens (Supervisor), Rosamund Anne Claire Paice (Supervisor) & Esther Sonnet (Supervisor) |