AN INTRODUCTION TO ABERRANT SALIENCE

Derrida’s Différance: Meaning as Difference and Deferral

Jacques Derrida’s intervention is, among other things, a sustained critique of the fantasy that meaning is ever fully present. In “Différance,” Derrida argues that signification is generated through difference (a sign means what it means by not being other signs) and through deferral (a sign’s meaning is never complete in the instant; it arrives through time, context, and further signs) (Derrida, 1982). Meaning is not a thing hidden behind the sign, waiting to be retrieved. Meaning is a temporal event: a drift of traces and contrasts that never culminates in total closure (Derrida, 1982).

This matters clinically because it describes a structure of experience many therapists already recognize: clients often arrive wanting a final meaning (“What does this say about me?”), while lived experience keeps producing new contexts that unsettle yesterday’s certainty. Gestalt work, at its best, does not simply hand meaning to the client—it helps the client remain in contact with the living field long enough for meaning to emerge.

So the question becomes: what governs the moment when meaning stops deferring and becomes, for the person, real enough to organize action? What converts an open interpretive field into a stabilized figure?

Predictive Processing: How the Brain “Undeferes” Meaning

Predictive-processing accounts offer a mechanistic complement to Derrida’s phenomenology. In this view, perception is not passive reception but active inference: the brain continuously generates predictions about sensory input and updates those predictions by tracking mismatches (prediction errors) (Clark, 2013; Fletcher & Frith, 2009).

A key variable here is precision weighting—the brain’s estimate of reliability. In Bayesian terms, “precision” is the inverse of uncertainty: signals judged precise are amplified; signals judged imprecise are down-weighted. The practical consequence is that precision weighting governs what becomes salient—what rises into figure and what remains ground (Adams et al., 2013; Sterzer et al., 2018).

You can translate Derrida into neurocomputational terms without collapsing one into the other:

  • Différance (deferral) resembles the mind’s ongoing competition among interpretations in conditions of uncertainty.

  • Undeferment resembles the moment a hypothesis gains enough precision to dominate—becoming “real” enough to guide behavior.

  • Difference resembles the system’s discriminations: what this is not, what it contrasts with, what boundaries it implies.

In healthy functioning, this system is adaptive. It keeps interpretation open when evidence is weak and closes it when evidence is strong enough. The result is neither rigidity nor chaos but a dynamic stability—a living figure–ground that can revise itself.

Aberrant Salience: When Precision Becomes Untrustworthy

The schizophrenia literature has long emphasized dopamine dysfunction, but contemporary accounts increasingly specify that what breaks is not merely “dopamine levels” but the brain’s assignment of salience—the weighting of what should matter. Kapur’s aberrant salience hypothesis proposes that dysregulated dopamine transmission causes the feeling of significance to arise inappropriately, prompting the person to search for explanations and potentially generating delusional meaning (Kapur, 2003).

Predictive-processing models converge on a related claim: psychosis may involve disturbed precision weighting—often described as reduced precision of priors and/or altered precision of sensory evidence—leading to maladaptive inference (Fletcher & Frith, 2009; Sterzer et al., 2018).

When this happens, the interpretive field changes character:

1. Noise begins to feel like signal. Small coincidences acquire an affective “charge.”

2. The field becomes “sticky.” Once an explanation forms, it can become rigid, because new evidence is interpreted through a compromised weighting system.

3. Meaning becomes both everywhere and nowhere. Intense significance can attach to trivial events while ordinary life loses motivational pull.

This is the clinical hinge: aberrant salience is a disorder of meaning-formation. It is not only that a person “believes strange things.” It is that the organism’s mechanism for selecting figure from ground—what the world is asking of me, what I should orient to—becomes unreliable.

Howes and Kapur’s “version III” dopamine hypothesis reframes dopamine’s role as a “final common pathway” that can be driven by multiple upstream factors (genetic, developmental, stress-related), while still centering dopamine dysregulation as key for psychotic symptoms (Howes & Kapur, 2009).

Meaning Collapse: Two Failure Modes

A practical model for Gestalt Logos: Meaning Collapse occurs when the system that normally balances openness (deferral) and closure (decision) loses its tuning. The collapse tends to appear in two stereotyped modes—often cycling between them.

1) Fragmentation: Too Many Figures, Not Enough Ground

In fragmentation, the person cannot keep stable ground. Too many stimuli rise into figure with comparable urgency. The world becomes a rapid-fire sequence of “this matters!” without a reliable hierarchy of relevance. In predictive terms, too many prediction errors are treated as high precision; the system over-updates and over-attends (Adams et al., 2013; Sterzer et al., 2018).

Phenomenologically, this resembles a pathological intensification of différance: meaning is perpetually deferred because nothing stabilizes long enough to consolidate. Every new cue reconfigures the field.

2) Monolith: One Figure Colonizes Everything

In monolith, the opposite happens. A single interpretation becomes hyper-precise—so dominant that incoming evidence cannot modify it. The field “locks.” This can resemble a systematized delusion: every event is recruited into one explanatory frame, and alternative meanings are pre-empted (Fletcher & Frith, 2009; Kapur, 2003).

Phenomenologically, this resembles the abolition of différance: deferral is disallowed because the meaning is treated as already present and final.

Meaning Collapse diagram (description):
Draw a triangle with three nodes: Priors / Context, Sensory Input, Precision Weighting.

  • In healthy meaning, precision flexibly weights priors and input, keeping figure–ground dynamic.

  • In fragmentation, precision over-weights noisy input → too many figures.

  • In monolith, precision over-weights one prior → one figure dominates all.
    Add a time axis beneath showing how interpretations either endlessly churn (fragmentation) or freeze (monolith).

Gestalt Therapy Implications: Restoring Figure–Ground Without Forcing Closure

Gestalt therapy is already a discipline of salience: it attends to what becomes figure in awareness, how contact is made, and what the field is asking for in the present moment (Perls et al., 1951).

From the meaning-collapse model, several clinically relevant moves follow:

1. When fragmentation dominates, therapy can thicken ground.

The therapist helps the client slow the field, track one sensation, one thought, one relational cue at a time—reducing premature meaning-assignments and re-establishing shared reality-testing through contact.

2. When monolith dominates, therapy can reopen deferral.

The therapist does not debate the delusion as a proposition so much as explore how it functions in the field: What does it protect? What does it organize? What happens in the body when it loosens? This restores the possibility that meaning can be revised without annihilating coherence.

3. Meaning becomes an experiment, not a verdict.

A Gestalt stance treats interpretations as provisional figures that can be tested in relationship, sensation, and action—update, but not chaotically; stabilize, but not rigidly (Adams et al., 2013; Clark, 2013).

Research Questions

1. Operationalizing “undeferment”: In computational tasks, can we measure the moment an interpretation “locks” (monolith) or fails to lock (fragmentation), and relate it to markers of precision weighting (Adams et al., 2013; Sterzer et al., 2018)?

2. Therapy as precision-training: Can Gestalt experiments be reframed as structured manipulations of salience (figure–ground) that restore adaptive deferral/closure cycles (Perls et al., 1951)?

3. Phenomenology meets computation: Can Derrida’s account of deferral help clinicians describe, with more fidelity, the lived temporality of early psychosis—before content-based delusions harden (Derrida, 1982; Sterzer et al., 2018; Kapur, 2003)?

 

References (APA 7th)

 

Adams, R. A., Stephan, K. E., Brown, H. R., Frith, C. D., & Friston, K. J. (2013). The computational anatomy of psychosis. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 4, Article 47.

Clark, A. (2013). Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(3), 181–204.

Derrida, J. (1982). Différance. In Margins of philosophy (A. Bass, Trans., pp. 3–27). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1968)

Fletcher, P. C., & Frith, C. D. (2009). Perceiving is believing: A Bayesian approach to explaining the positive symptoms of schizophrenia. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(1), 48–58.

Howes, O. D., & Kapur, S. (2009). The dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia: Version III—The final common pathway. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 35(3), 549–562.

Kapur, S. (2003). Psychosis as a state of aberrant salience: A framework linking biology, phenomenology, and pharmacology in schizophrenia. American Journal of Psychiatry, 160(1), 13–23.

Perls, F. S., Hefferline, R. F., & Goodman, P. (1951). Gestalt therapy: Excitement and growth in the human personality. Julian Press.

Sterzer, P., Adams, R. A., Fletcher, P., Frith, C., Lawrie, S. M., Muckli, L., Petrovic, P., Uhlhaas, P. J., Voss, M., & Corlett, P. R. (2018). The predictive coding account of psychosis. Biological Psychiatry, 84(9), 634–643.