• Unreliability
• Schizophrenia
• Unconscious
• Symmetrization
• McGrath
• Madness
• Language
• Fiction
• Blanco

Literary psychopathography, by way of using a conventional code, renders the extreme unfamiliarity of abnormal pathological psychology accessible to the reader. Moreover, through the application of the literary device of the first-person unreliable narrator, liminal space between the internal subjective and pathological reality (fictionality) and objectively coherent and logical reality is erased.
The elusive schizophrenic form of life essentially entails deviant and limitless communication behaviour, which seems to be induced by the limitless nature of pathological delusional constructs. Moreover, this mental disorder acts upon the dynamic intersection of the different linguistic levels, demonstrating profound and substantial anomalies within the semantic and pragmatic levels of language. Cognitive, philosophical, and linguistic hypotheses concerning the relationship (or lack thereof) between schizophrenia and language nevertheless demonstrate that absence of organic brain damage and cognitive deficits does not diminish or exclude, in any measure, the invaluable role language plays in schizophrenia.
Schizophrenic deviant communication behaviour can be interpreted in terms of being generated by a profoundly symmetrical state of mind, characterized by a dominating unconscious. The principle of symmetry invades the central organising self and dissolves all logic within its reach, consequently manifesting itself through an overactive functioning of Freud’s five symmetrical characteristics of the system Ucs. within schizophrenic thought.
The textual analysis of the language of schizophrenia in Patrick McGrath’s Spider allows, in terms of intentional (controlled) and unintentional (uncontrolled) unreliability, for the identification of the psychological and ontological shifts within Dennis’ narrative, both of which are grounded in his profoundly symmetrical state of mind.