ABSTRACT
This lyric essay is an extended case study of psychosis and how poetic language can help orient the mind. The author narrates her own experience of psychotic symptoms and of psychiatric segregation and describes a remembered statement offered by a friend – ‘the prairies always see you’ – that helped her structure her relationship with her isolating environment and with absent people. The chapter brings readers into an intimate journey into madness and reveals how lyric language can be a therapeutic offering. Poetry offers a third realm between symptom and sanity, between fantasy and reason, and therefore functions as an instrument to help situate a patient when their mind is in freefall. Jacques Lacan’s theories are used to show how poetic language can establish productive intersubjective reflection. Speaking with and through ‘delusion’, the author translates Lacan’s abstract and hermetic theories into specific, sensuous, and playful vernacular that will be welcoming to readers who are not versed in psychoanalytic discourse; may teach clinicians how to speak to people in psychotic states; and gives laypeople some confidence in the idiosyncratic effectiveness of their own intimate attempts at conversation when they encounter a loved one, colleague, or stranger in mental crisis.
