Memoirs as Mirrors of Experiential Knowledge: Renegotiating Affect in Narrative-Deontology Approaches to Schizophrenia Self-Stories

The main goal of this article is to re-evaluate the significance of affect — pre-cognitive and non-semantically coded intensities — in Arthur Frank's narrative-deontology approach to patients' narratives. To do so, it analyses passages from three twenty-first-century US schizophrenia memoirs — Elyn Saks' The Center Cannot Hold (2007), Kristina Morgan's Mind Without a Home (2013), and Esmé Wang's The Collected Schizophrenias (2019) — while focusing on how vague emotions, nonverbal communications, and silence are described and imaginatively attached to rhetorical figures. Schizophrenia is chosen as an illuminating case study due to gaps in knowledge about this illness and debates on patients' emotional expressiveness. The memoir genre, for its part, this article shows, provides a special access to the experiential and affective knowledge conveyed by patients, knowledge that is presented as crucial in understanding schizophrenia and making the ethical choices in situations of diagnosis and treatment that will be to the best benefit of patients.