Logics of Discovery II: Lessons from Poetry—Parataxis as a Method That Can Complement the Narrative Compulsion in Vogue in Contemporary Mental Health Care

This paper highlights the limitations of narrative logic in mental health care, and in particular of “narrative vigilance”—the tendency to watch over experience via narrativisation, and to tether the concrete particulars of experience to the hypothetical structure of a narrative signification. Narrative logic is grounded in hypotaxis—the syntactic structuring whereby a discourse is characterised by different levels of subordination using linking words that connect, especially in terms of temporal and explanatory consequentiality. I offer an alternative approach based on parataxis—the practice of placing phrases or parts of speech next to each other without subordinating conjunctions. Sentences are juxtaposed without a clear connection; the contrast may generate novel and unexpected combinations between these dissimilar fragments. After distinguishing between parataxis and psychopathological phenomena like disturbances of association, I take inspiration from the work and life of a poet, Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), considered among the greatest. He suffered for half his life from a severe form of mental illness that would perhaps, today, be diagnosed as schizophrenia. In the poems written during his illness, hypotaxis and narrative vigilance seem to blur, and parataxis takes centre stage. The fading of narrative structure in no way coincides with the absence of meaningfulness. Rather, meaningfulness is left to parataxis itself, that is, to the recombining power of words, sentences, and images. Parataxis itself can provide meaningfulness or, at least, provide the soil in which it can germinate. The void of narration opens the door for the fullness of “emergent” connections. In the final part of the paper, with the help of Freud’s ideas on the relationship between “analysis” and “synthesis” in psychoanalytic treatment, some implications are derived about the relevance of parataxis to the logics of discovery in psychotherapeutic care, especially that of persons with severe mental conditions.