I Know I said that ...

... another blog to manage would be taking on too much but I got to thinking about what we would call it and then anomalophrenia just launched itself at the blank patch in my head. I knew it would be futile to resist  the allure of such a seductive portmanteau.

Which got me thinking about dear old deviant Lewis Carroll and Humpty Dumpty. You see I've been reading Looking Glass to my children as a bedtime story. I'd kind of forgotten just how weird the thing is, much more so than Wonderland.

The thing about Carroll's Humpty and the psychologies we've been examining is the way the relationship to language is so important.

I can't remember the way things go exactly but in chapter VI Alice meets Humpty who makes a number of rather bizarre conversational gambits. For example, he asks Alice how old she had said she was and when she replies he tells her she is wrong because so far she had not mentioned her age at all. Earlier in their conversation, Alice had asked why Humpty sits out on a wall all alone, he replies because there isn't anyone with him and that Alice's questions are too easy to answer. This kind of competitive approach to conversation is something that seems highly reminiscent of schizophrenic discourse. You might occasionally see this being described as a sort of playfulness but this doesn't really do the thing justice. Yes, there is certainly an element of game playing in the speech of the schizophrenic, but this is in the sense of operating within rules that specify how scores are to be kept and what the winning conditions are rather than delighting in exploratory or creative play.

The other, perhaps more famous feature of how Humpty positions himself in relation to the language he speaks is to do with control. This got me thinking about the material we have looked at on anomalistic experience and supernatural beliefs. Humpty tells Alice that when he uses a word it means precisely what he chooses it to mean - no more and no less. In some ways this is even more schizophrenic than the business of turning discourse into a competition. However, setting this aside Humpty also alludes to an experience we might all share. The language we use to express our desires and intentions and identify ourselves - the way we convey our sense of who and what we are is communal and so not exclusively under our control. In a way Humpty's sense of language as something that he might take absolute control over is consistent with the some of the ways people with anomalistic experiences use narratives of the supernatural to recapture a sense of things being ordered, predictable and controlled.