The status of words of neologic effect in delirious construction

Author(s)

Walker Douglas Pincerati

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
• Defense date: 2009-06-26

Examining board members

Claudia Thereza Guimarães de Lemos; Mario Eduardo Costa Pereira; Nina Virginia de Araújo Leite

• Advisor: Claudia Thereza Guimarães de Lemos

Abstract

Psychoanalysis assumes that there is a structural difference between language in neurosis and language in psychosis. This study adopts this thesis and discusses the status of words of neologic effect in psychotic discourse. By considering the data of LC, a subject with psychiatric diagnosis of schizophrenia, we attempted (i) to identify, describe, and analyze the words of neologic effect in such discourse, situating them either as apices or as condensations of "delirious ideas" and signifiers moving in the stream of a delirium; (ii) to compare these words with possible forms in language, thereby deducing the specificity of the neologic effect against what Lexicology calls a neologism; and (iii) to discuss the function of such words in the production of opacity in psychotic discourse and in the delirium architecture. The Lacanian reading of Freud takes delirium as a process of significantization which aims at attenuating anguish and re-establishing the relations of the delirious person, as an inhabitant of language, with reality. We conclude that the word of neologic effect works by condensing in a signifier ideas and signifiers at stake in the delirium. Such words gesture at a special signification for the delirious subject (AU)