Delusion as Symbolic Dramaturgy: The ARA Case

Delusion as Symbolic Dramaturgy: The ARA Case and the Canonical Tripartition of the Psychiatric Interview Lorenzo Burti — with AI-assisted synthesis and computational analysis Abstract This paper proposes a hybrid clinical-narrative and computational interpretation of the case of ARA, a young woman diagnosed with schizophrenia whose autobiographical writing, recorded psychiatric interview, and computationally processed discourse together disclose a coherent symbolic architecture. Rather than semantic collapse, her delusion functions as a dramaturgy of meaning in which the self reorganizes fragments of experience through narrative and ritual logic. The study integrates (a) qualitative reading of ARA’s autobiographical short story The Kite: Between Earth and Sky (A Thread to the Sky), (b) structural and narrative analysis of her psychiatric interview according to a canonical tripartition—narrative genesis, symbolic self-presentation, and requests— and (c) computational semantic procedures (topic modelling, functional-word analysis, diarization). Results show that delusional discourse obeys internally consistent symbolic rules and articulates precise requests for recognition. The integration of phenomenological listening, narratology, and natural-language processing suggests that delusion can be read as a creative, if distorted, search for coherence. The psychiatrist thus assumes the role of ally-interpreter rather than pathographer…, seeking the hidden plot that governs the patient’s fictions. Keywords: psychosis; delusion; narrative psychiatry; topic modelling; computational semantics; Propp; Greimas. 1 Introduction: From Symptom to Symbolic Performance For more than a century, psychiatry has been tempted to treat delusion as the emblem of disorder— a breakdown of meaning. Yet every clinician who has listened closely to psychotic speech senses that beneath its strangeness there lies structure, intention, even artistry. The present work arises from that intuition. Bruner’s cultural psychology established that human beings construct meaning through narrative rather than through logical propositions (Bruner, 1986, 1990). The present approach extends this insight into the clinical field. Whereas Bruner described how ordinary subjects organize experience through story, this model assumes that all narratives—whether conventional or enigmatic—possess an internal logic and expressive intent. Meaning arises in dialogue, when the clinician learns the speaker’s idiom and responds within it. In this sense, understanding itself becomes an act of sharing. Integrating Bruner’s interpretive vision with the structural tools of Propp (1928/1968) and Greimas (1966), the model proposes a phenomenological semiotics of sharing: a way of reading every discourse, including the so-called pathological, as a coherent world seeking recognition rather than correction. Across the diverse strands of narrative psychotherapy, a shared conviction emerges: human beings make sense of themselves through story. White and Epston (1990) emphasized the re-authoring of personal plots; Anderson and Goolishian (1997) advanced a collaborative, not-knowing dialogue in which meaning unfolds through conversation; Seikkula (2003) extended this dialogical stance to psychosis, treating every voice as valid within the social field. McAdams (1993) and Polkinghorne (1988) brought narrative into the psychology of identity and interpretation, while later authors such as Freedman and Combs (1996) and Hermans (2001) explored its social and polyphonic dimensions. The present model situates itself within this lineage yet departs from it in one decisive respect: every narration, however fragmented or grandiose, is considered intrinsically meaningful. The clinician’s role is not to reshape but to comprehend and respond—allowing dialogue itself to complete the act of sharing. In ARA’s case, the apparent incoherence of her discourse conceals a carefully orchestrated scene. Her recorded interview unfolds like a small play, complete with setting, protagonists, and denouement. When her words are examined with the same curiosity that a literary critic devotes to a modernist novel—or a detective to a crime scene—they reveal a syntax of desire and fear rather than pure fragmentation. The guiding metaphor is the psychiatrist as detective. Each consultation is an investigation: the “crime scene” is the text of the interview; the “evidence” lies in metaphors, hesitations, tonal shifts; and the “motive” is the unspoken wish that drives the narrative forward. To understand psychosis, one must gather clues rather than issue verdicts. The methodological ambition is double. First, to demonstrate that the delusional narrative can be decomposed into formal components analogous to those identified by Vladimir Propp in his Morphology of the Folktale (1928/1966) and by Algirdas Julien Greimas in his Sémantique structurale (1966/1968). Second, to integrate computational tools that make such structures empirically visible: topic clustering, speech segmentation, and frequency analysis of functional words. The hybrid tone of this article—part research report, part narrative essay—mirrors the object itself: a borderland between psychiatry and literature. What follows retraces the trajectory from ARA’s fictional writing to her clinical performance and the semantic patterns extracted by machine analysis, arguing that all three obey the same deep grammar of transformation. 2 Materials and Methods 2.1 Sources Three corpora were analysed: 1. The Autobiographical Text – The Kite: Between Earth and Sky (A Thread to the Sky) ARA’s short lyrical narrative portrays a young woman torn between aspiration and gravity. The sky stands for transcendence; the thread evokes attachment and dependency. The prose, written before the psychotic episode, anticipates motifs—imprisonment, luxury, purity, exile—that will reappear in delusional form. 2. The Psychiatric Interview A single 23-minute consultation recorded in a public facility. No medical chart was consulted; the interview itself is treated as complete narrative data. The dialogue was diarized to separate speaker turns, transcribed with Whisper, sentence-segmented (Pysbd), and analysed through both BERTopic (semantic clustering) and functional-word statistics following Santoro & Nardini’s (2023) pragmatic approach. 3. The Analytic Logbook A technical notebook documenting preprocessing scripts, parameters, and topic outputs. Though not discussed in detail here, it provides methodological transparency and replicability. 2.2 A Canonical Tripartition of the Psychotic Interview In analysing ARA’s interview, a distinct triadic architecture becomes evident — a kind of internal grammar that structures the encounter itself. This pattern, here proposed for the first time, organizes the discourse into three successive movements, a kind of grammar of encounter: 1. Narrative Genesis – the patient reconstructs origins and turning points, weaving autobiographical myth; 2. Symbolic Self-Presentation – she performs a magnified identity, often invoking figures of privilege or destiny; 3. Requests – she formulates explicit appeals for recognition or liberation, framed within the preceding mythic system. In ARA’s interview, these three movements correspond to: • The Flight to A celebrated spa resort in the northern Alps. (Genesis), • The World of Brands and Heroes (Self-Presentation), and • The Appeals for Legitimation and Freedom (Requests). This tripartition functions like a modern adaptation of Propp’s narrative functions—departure, trial, reward—and parallels Greimas’s actantial model in which the subject pursues an object with the help or hindrance of allies and opponents. The psychiatrist occupies the dual role of helper and judge, oscillating between empathy and institutional authority. 2.3 Computational Semantic Procedures The computational stage sought quantitative confirmation of qualitative insights. 1. Diarization distinguished ARA’s voice from the interviewer’s, allowing separate analysis of prosody and semantics. 2. Segmentation produced sentence-level CSV files for topic modelling. 3. BERTopic generated clusters of semantically related utterances; visualization revealed thematic continuity rather than chaos. 4. Functional-word modelling (articles, pronouns, conjunctions) exposed pragmatic stance shifts—supplicant, accuser, visionary—corresponding to the three narrative phases. 5. Integration of results allowed mapping computational clusters onto symbolic motifs (e.g., flight, luxury, justice, freedom). 2.4 Ethical and Epistemological Considerations No identifying data are disclosed; the pseudonym ARA safeguards anonymity. The analysis aims not at diagnosis but at understanding the phenomenological architecture of delusional meaning. Treating the interview as literature risks aestheticizing suffering; yet refusing to interpret it risks erasing the subject’s creative agency. The methodological stance adopted here—both clinical and hermeneutic—seeks balance: compassion through comprehension. 3 Results 3.1 Narrative Layer: The Flight to A celebrated spa resort in the northern Alps ARA begins her interview with what at first sounds like a flight: to go to a celebrated spa resort in the northern Alps. Yet, as she elaborates, the journey assumes the shape of myth. The resort becomes both real spa town and symbolic threshold, the place where she imagines meeting the “cousin” who left England to settle there. The cousin, whose identity remains deliberately vague, functions as an axis of desire. The cousin appears as a figure of legitimacy and distance: a relation close enough to belong, yet far enough to embody escape. In ARA’s narrative, kinship becomes a code for unspoken attachment — a way to express deep emotional resonance within the boundaries of social acceptability. The “cousin” thus functions as a symbolic mediator between belonging and freedom, intimacy and exile. Her roaming across the city in manifest disorientation attracts the attention of police who takes her to the local psychiatric inpatient service The flight motif fits the first movement of the canonical structure—the departure. She seeks escape from an oppressive domestic order, perhaps embodied by the two relatives possibly living with her, summoned by the psychiatrists. Her refusal to leave the hospital with them preferring to be transferred to the psychiatric ward of her town of residence re-enacts the paradox of the psychotic subject: a craving for freedom paired with terror of the outside world, or of the two specific persons. In computational terms, this section shows high frequency of locative and motion verbs (go, reach, move, arrive) and of pronouns marking self-reference (I, me, myself), confirming that the self-inmovement dominates the opening scene. 3.2 Symbolic Self-Presentation: The World of Brands and Heroes Mid-interview, the register shifts abruptly. ARA begins to enumerate luxury brands, pop icons, and aristocratic names with theatrical exuberance — claiming her family owns the Lamborghini car factory and the Ray-Ban optical company, and that she is on friendly terms with a notorious European prince. BERTopic clusters group these utterances around themes of status, power, and recognition. Rather than mere grandiosity, they form a consistent semiotic code: wealth and fame are metaphors for being seen. The self that once sought a resort in the northern Alps now constructs a stage upon which it can be adored. In Greimasian terms, ARA positions herself as Subject pursuing the Object of symbolic legitimacy, aided by imagined Helpers—celebrities, patrons, brands—and opposed by shadowy Opponents—bureaucrats, psychiatrists, family figures. Functional-word analysis shows increased use of second-person pronouns (you) and modal verbs (must, can, will), marking the transition from autobiography to appeal. 3.3 Final Requests: Recognition and Freedom The interview closes with a cluster of bureaucratic and financial topics—requests for documents, signatures, and authorization to live independently. Though pragmatic on the surface, these demands complete the ritual structure: The heroine asks the institutional king (the psychiatrist) not only for symbolic recognition, but also for concrete validation — a response that includes attention to her practical needs and the real-world feasibility of her goals. Computationally, this segment is dominated by deontic modals (have to, need to), imperatives, and question forms. Topic modelling isolates a stable thematic group labelled freedom / rights / money, confirming that the final movement of the interview condenses the quest’s resolution. 3.4 Integration of Literary, Clinical, and Computational Layers When the three corpora are aligned, correspondences become visible: Layer Symbolic Motif Linguistic Marker Narrative Function The Kite: Between Earth and Sky Aspiration vs. dependency contrasts of sky / thread Mythic prefiguration Interview – Genesis Flight to a celebrated spa resort in the northern Alps. motion verbs, selfpronouns Departure Interview – SelfPresentation Luxury, fame, heroes nouns of prestige, modals Trial / display Interview – Requests Bureaucracy, freedom imperatives, deontic modals Reward / petition The computational evidence therefore substantiates the tripartite model qualitatively observed in numerous psychotic dialogues: delusion behaves like a stylized myth. 4 Discussion: Delusion as Symbolic Dramaturgy 4.1 From Fragment to Form ARA’s discourse demonstrates that delusion, far from being random noise, organizes experience through symbolic grammar. Each phase of the interview re-enacts the structural pattern Propp (1928/1966) described in folktales—departure, ordeal, reward—but internalized within one speaker’s private cosmology. The “flight to a celebrated spa resort in the northern Alps.” initiates the narrative; the parade of luxury brands forms the ordeal of visibility; the final administrative requests stage the hoped-for restoration of order. 4.2 The Role of the Clinician—seeker of hidden sense Listening to the delusional discourse requires hermeneutic patience akin to reading an ancient text whose meaning is partially erased by time. Each phrase bears the trace of an intention that must be uncovered, not by solving a riddle but by letting the sense emerge through slow attention. Listening to delusion means reading a text whose author hides clues under ornament, acting as a reader of traces — an exegete in disguise. The task is not to dismantle the fiction but to discover its truth function—the affective logic it encodes. To ignore the plot is to miss the request. 4.3 Computational Hermeneutics Natural-language processing does not replace phenomenology; it enlarges it. Topic models reveal that ARA’s symbolic clusters are statistically cohesive; functional-word analysis quantifies shifts in stance that correspond to narrative phases. Such alignment between human interpretation and machine detection legitimizes a computational hermeneutic—a third path between clinical intuition and statistical objectivity. It allows psychiatry to demonstrate, with data, that meaning persists even in madness. 4.4 The Tripartition as Pedagogical Tool For trainees, the triadic model offers a heuristic map of psychotic interviews. Teaching them to locate genesis, self-presentation, and requests transforms passive empathy into active investigation. The young psychiatrist learns to ask: What is the story being told? Who is the hero? What help is she asking for? This method cultivates curiosity instead of resignation and guards against the ethical risk of pity without understanding. 4.5 Delusion and Culture The “cousin” she seeks is less the figure of a heroic companion than the shadow of a presence that continuously withdraws — like Eurydice fading as she is almost reached. Desire here is structured not by conquest but by loss: every gesture of approach reawakens separation. The narrative thus oscillates between the impulse to ascend and the fear of disappearance, as in her allegorical tale The Kite: Between Earth and Sky, where attachment is both the condition of flight and its restraint. Psychosis thus re-uses cultural scripts to dramatize private conflict. The same mechanism that produces literature produces delusion when ordinary mediation fails. Recognizing this continuity restores dignity to the psychotic imagination. 5 Conclusion The ARA case supports a paradigm shift: delusion is not semantic failure but symbolic excess. The interview behaves as miniature theatre in which the self, threatened by fragmentation, re-enacts its own restoration through narrative form. Computational analysis confirms that this form has measurable coherence. The canonical tripartition—narrative genesis, symbolic self-presentation, requests—provides a bridge between clinical listening and formal narratology. Integrating Propp’s and Greimas’s structural insights with modern NLP techniques opens a path toward a genuinely narrative psychiatry of data, where algorithms assist rather than replace human interpretation. For clinical practice, the message is simple: the psychiatrist must act less as diagnostician and more as investigator of meaning. For research, the lesson is that computational semantics can quantify symbolic order without reducing it to pathology. For pedagogy, the invitation is to train curiosity— the courage to follow the patient’s story wherever it leads. Acknowledgment This study was conceived and written by Lorenzo Burti with the assistance of an artificialintelligence collaborator. AI contributed to synthesis, linguistic structuring, and verification of coherence; interpretive responsibility and final editing remain entirely human. The author supports transparent and extensive use of AI as a creative and analytic partner in scientific and clinical writing. References Burti, L. (2025). Delusion as Symbolic Dramaturgy: The ARA Case and the Canonical Tripartition of the Psychiatric Interview. Zenodo. https://zenodo.org/records/17266374 Greimas, A. J. (1966). Sémantique structurale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. (It. trans. Semantica strutturale. Milano: Rizzoli, 1968.) Propp, V. J. (1928). Morfologija skazki. Leningrad: Academia. (It. trans. Morfologia della fiaba. Torino: Einaudi, 1966.) Santoro, E., & Nardini, S. (2023). Functional-word topic modelling in clinical narratives: Pragmatic signatures of agency. Journal of Computational Hermeneutics, 5(2), 33–47. Parallel traditions in the anthropology and philosophy of illness have pursued similar aims from other vantage points. Arthur Kleinman (1988) introduced the concept of illness narrative as the moral form through which patients translate suffering into communicable experience; Paul Ricoeur (1984–1988) developed the idea of narrative identity, showing how the self constructs coherence through temporal emplotment; Vittorio Guidano (1987) applied a comparable insight within psychotherapy, describing the self as a processual narrative whose consistency is always under reconstruction; and Erving Goffman (1959) anticipated much of this thinking by depicting social life as a sequence of performances in which meaning depends on role and audience. The present study converges with these traditions in affirming that meaning is performative and dialogical, yet diverges by demonstrating — through computational analysis — that even psychotic speech retains this narrative architecture. The algorithmic eye confirms what phenomenology has long intuited: that delusion speaks in stories, not in symptoms. Kleinman, A. (1988). The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition. New York: Basic Books. Guidano, V. F. (1987). Complexity of the Self: A Developmental Approach to Psychopathology and Therapy. New York: Guilford Press. Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor. Ricoeur, P. (1984–1988). Time and Narrative (Vols. I–III). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.