The experience of psychosis is permeated by fear and confusion, radiating through the perceived world of suffering persons, infiltrating relationships with themselves and others. These feelings give to ordinary things an aura of strangeness and, to use Tellenbach's (1983) words, transform the “atmospheric quality” of the world. In the narratives of psychotic people, expressions of distress entwine and interlace to form the texture of a shifting world of agony. These aspects of the psychotic person's world cannot be neglected when considering the role of culture in psychosis; from such a frame emerge the questions and responses posed in this chapter.

An investigation of psychotic experience forces us to confront difficult ethical questions: How do we speak about others' suffering without redoubling the lived violence by an interpretive violence anchored in the position of the “well-informed” researcher? How do we find a language that may constitute or preserve the frightening dimension of that experience without succumbing to its fascination or objectifying it? Can we ever be justified in soliciting narratives and asking questions of people who are so deeply immersed in a world of suffering? The first two questions raise epistemological and methodological issues that will be explored in this chapter.