ABSTRACT
Many people lost in psychosis experience things that cannot be symbolised, spoken, or received by others. Contrary to many clinical psychologists and psychiatrists, the author considers language in psychosis not as language deficit, or dysfunction, or a brain-based and driven phenomenon. For a long time, clinicians have remarked on the strange language of psychosis, particularly schizophrenia, characterising speech as "gibberish" or "word salad". In psychosis, the subject takes the position of witness to a ghastly other in social isolation. The author shows that the psychotic bears enigmatic traces of questions and experiences beyond a shared language, beyond what can be known or spoken in any social link. He looks at a very different first encounter with an alien and enigmatic other. The author offers a brief glimpse into the bare beginnings of psychosis, that is psychosis as an experienced, vivid, very real imposed Other that is ghostly, ghastly, and enigmatic.
