THE CITY IS MY MOTHER - NARRATIVES OF SCHIZOPHRENIA AND HOMELESSNESS

Recent narrative analysis in medical anthropology provides keys to bot h the personal meaning of illness and the historical, cultural, and in stitutional shaping of that experience. Yet Western psychiatric thinki ng and practice continue to view schizophrenic discourse as closed to interpretation. Caught in this ''closed text,'' the self would seem ob literated. But using narratives of schizophrenia and homelessness, thi s essay proposes a different understanding of schizophrenic alterity. The openness of the text-as-experience is re-created collectively, fro m outside the subject's narration: the subject's ''self'' is construct ion through the added perspectives of his or her interlocutors in the role of storymakers.