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Incandescent Alphabets: Psychosis and the Enigma of Language

Author(s) : Annie G. Rogers

Reviews and Endorsements

‘This extraordinary book about psychosis as an encounter and relationship with language draws the reader in through a narrative that shows us how lacking mainstream psychiatric and psychoanalytic diagnostic categories are. Incandescent Alphabets is an amazing conceptual and poetic alternative that makes of the experience of psychosis an illuminated manuscript from which readers learn about the author, the people she works with, and about themselves.’
- Ian Parker, psychoanalyst and author of Psychology after Psychoanalysis: Psychosocial Studies and Beyond

‘This is a wonderfully written book with a wealth of clinical, literary, and artistic first-person accounts of psychosis that lead the author to an exploration of the meaning and structure of psychosis as a significantly human form of subjectivity.’
- Raul Moncayo, psychoanalyst, the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis of the San Francisco Bay Area, and author of The Signifier Pointing at the Moon: Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism

‘This prism-like account of psychosis filters first-hand accounts of psychotic experience through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis and produces one of the most readable and important texts of our generation. Annie Rogers depathologises psychosis by showing that it is not a deficit or a failure but is a different relationship to language, the body and the social world. Her deeply personal and humanising account shows that it is our fears, inexperience and unwillingness to collaborate together that erect barriers to living and working with the myriad vicissitudes and possibilities of psychosis.’
- Eve Watson, PhD, psychoanalyst, Dublin

‘This exciting compendium is an ABC of psychosis, from Artaud to Yessir. Her gallery of portraits includes self-taught or outsider artists as well as recognisable figures like Joyce, Walser, and Woolf. Skilfully blending research, insight, stories, literary and visual arts examples, Rogers offers a compelling, empathetic narrative. This engrossing book, beautifully written, is not only an illuminating read, but also a poetic meditation on the variegated forms taken by madness.’
- Patricia Gherovici, psychoanalyst, author, and co-editor of Lacan on Madness: Madness, Yes You Can’t