La valoración del joven en el proceso de individuación

Taking the above positions forward, consider the following piece of poetry written by David K. Fury (this is a pseudonym used by a service user who did not undertake an interview but preferred to write poetry as a way of being involved in this research project).

My Left Sausage

I hate the way you look Staring at my face In a certain space

Open the book Of love Pages unopened

On the mend To send Or on the bend Of the love train

Crashes into Something new or old

Bold Lessons of love

From above Fold into each other Sister brother mother

38 Family trees

Tease me Farewell my dust Iron bru and rust

Coach potato Sausage on my left

Broke tomato

(David K. Fury)

Using notes from my research diary, David has a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, has never worked or been part of a long term, intimate relationship. He hears two voices (one female and one male) which normally do not directly speak to him but instead argue with each other. This can make him angry and resentful as he is not part of the interactions and he feels that the voices are ‘parasites’ using him as way to play out their own differences. The voices did not mean anything to him in a personal way in that they are not people he has ever known and had contact with. This is unusual with other participants who took part in this research, who share the same experiences of hearing voices but their voices were people who were known to them.

Of equal importance however, is how would one analyse a prose such as this in terms of the discursive and the non-discursive? From a psychiatric perspective, David’s work can be seen as that of a cognitively deficient service user with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. A “mashing” of words with very little meaning. There is an abundance of literature to support this position of people diagnosed with schizophrenia as lacking cognitive skills such as reasoning and memory ((Blairy et al., 2008; Combs & Gouvier, 2004; Kohler, Gur, Swanson, Petty, & Gur, 1998; Kohler, Bilker, Hagendoorn, Gur, & Gur, 2000). Such research draws from experimental methodologies such as using one-off measures to test recall accuracy correlated with time taken when compared to a ‘normal’ control group (Lyons & Cromby, 2010).

These findings make sense at the level of positioning social representations and relationships as directly connected to cognitive processes by highlighting the ways in which schemas can function as a kind of internalised resource to enable socialisation (or not). However, a weakness of this position is that by placing all the emphasis on cognition in terms of human language and thought processing, we cannot adequately seek to understand the underlying

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emotional states at work (Crang & Thrift, 2000; Cromby, 2011; Philo, Parr & Burns, 2005). In other words, we can sometimes make assumptions about the identity and emotional meanings of others based on the array of sociolinguistic positions emanating from the fields of cognitive and traditional social psychology (Thrift, 2004a).

On first glance, there does not appear to be any sense of structured process in David’s poem but assuming this kind of position assumes that his work is awaiting analysis in an

unproblematic way. But there is a sense of rhythm and movement when we read out the words – this does not appear to be a list of ‘random’ words David has just scribbled on paper as part of an activity at the day centre for example. Instead, there is an element of wit within this poem together with some darker elements of pathos. David’s prose contains a complex mixture of meanings; “Sister brother mother, Family trees, Tease me… Coach potato, Sausage on my left, Broke tomato”, which might not immediately make sense in terms of clarity and coherence but maybe intimate writings such as this are not intended to fully reveal the feelings and emotions by the writer. It is this cryptic sensuality of not really

understanding (in a cognitive sense of reasoning and logic) of what David is seeking to express which makes such a piece of work full of life and movement, mainly because he may have created this to perform this job. To keep the reader guessing which can then draw the reader in to read and read again but those elements of ambiguity still may remain. It is not only emotion and verbal utterances which need to be included within this framework but also the physical body should be explored as a vehicle for analysing affective meanings.

This thesis takes up Thrift’s (2004) translation of affect. Thrift (2004, p. 60) states; “affect as a set of embodied practices that produce visible conduct as an outer lining”. Affect, or components such as emotion, can be become tangible via the means of bodily processes, such as crying or blushing for example. Whilst such emotions may not always be straightforward to analyse because they are not located within the more formalised analysis of speech but instead can act as corporeal markers. Here Thrift (2004) argues that social context needs to be considered whereby the body becomes the vessel from which to analysis affect and spatial production in addition to language. As this work is interested in the ways in which service users continuously re(produce) their own spatial production with a focus on language, emotion and embodiment, this approach is best suited to analyse the research data.