ABSTRACT
If you listen to People are strange, a song by The Doors, you may hear in the lyrics allusion to the experience of being alienated. The Doors do this by creating in their song, images of a stranger in the rain, perhaps rejected, and certainly alone. The singer of this popular song is far away from home, where nobody knows his name. Perhaps the singer is a person with a communication disorder, experiencing the namelessness of aphasia, or the strangeness of stammering. Perhaps this stranger has acquired the communication disorder or maybe he has lived with it for a long time. Either way, this person seems demoralized, alienated, lost, and depressed; and is experiencing a loss of identity: perhaps not knowing who he is anymore. Perhaps his next song will be a song leading him to voice his demoralization and to seek help from one of us. Perhaps one of us will not be a strange face in the rain; and we will be able to help this strange singer to find his way home. The home of who he thought he was; who he had hoped he would become – but for the loss of his connection through communication.
