Conflict and classification

The dialogues of the mid-Victorian novelist, Anthony Trollope, are particularly permeable to modern psycholinguistic terminology as used by the Palo Alto school, especially by Paul Watzlawick in Pragmatics of Human Communication . We have classified Trollope novels into pleasant and unpleasant, using Barchester Towers and He Knew He was Right as respective examples of normogenic personal and social conflict, and schizophrenia-induced hubris. We have cast seven dialogues in graphic form: first according to the semiotic system by Carlos E. Sluzki and Janet Beavin, and then in the more comprehensive form of Klaus Muderbach's Interaction Notation. The question is posed whether a semiotic notation can show differentiation between psychotic and normogenic behavior, with reflections on how to define each.