The sublime object of psychiatry : schizophrenia in clinical and cultural theory /

The sublime object of psychiatry : schizophrenia in clinical and cultural theory /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:Woods, Angela.
Imprint:Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2011.
Description:viii, 262 p. ; 24 cm.
Language:English
Series:International perspectives in philosophy and psychiatry
International perspectives in philosophy and psychiatry.
Subject:
Schizophrenia -- Etiology.
Schizophrenia -- Social aspects.
Schizophrenia -- Etiology.
Schizophrenia -- Social aspects.
Format: Print Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/8531117
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ISBN:9780199583959 (pbk.)
0199583951 (pbk.)
Notes:Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
Summary:"Schizophrenia has been one of psychiatry's most contested diagnostic categories. It has also served as a metaphor for cultural theorists to interpret modern and postmodern understandings of the self. These radical, compelling, and puzzling appropriations of clinical accounts of schizophrenia have been dismissed by many as illegitimate, insensitive and inappropriate. Until now, no attempt has been made to analyse them systematically, nor has their significance for our broader understanding of this most 'ununderstandable' of experiences been addressed. The Sublime Object of Psychiatry is the first book to study representations of schizophrenia across a wide range of disciplines and discourses: biological and phenomenological psychiatry, psychoanalysis, critical psychology, antipsychiatry, and postmodern philosophy. In part one, Woods offers a fresh analysis of the foundational clinical accounts of schizophrenia, concentrating on the work of Emil Kraepelin, Eugen Bleuler, Karl Jaspers, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. In the second part of the book, she examines how these accounts were critiqued, adapted, and mobilised in the 'cultural theory' of R D Laing, Thomas Szasz, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Louis Sass, Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard. Using the aesthetic concept of the sublime as an organising framework, Woods explains how a clinical diagnostic category came to be transformed into a potent metaphor in cultural theory, and how, in that transformation, schizophrenia came to be associated with the everyday experience of modern and postmodern life. Susan Sontag once wrote: 'Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance'. The Sublime Object of Psychiatry does not provide an answer to the question 'What is schizophrenia?', but instead brings clinical and cultural theory into dialogue in order to explain how schizophrenia became 'awash in significance'"--
Table of Contents:
  • Introduction
  • Part 1. Clinical theory
  • 1. Psychiatry on schizophrenia: clinical pictures of a sublime object
  • Cats, mice, and modern psychiatry
  • Madness and Civilization: insanity and scientificity
  • Approaching a disciplinary sublime
  • Schizophrenia and sublimity
  • Clinical psychiatry and dementia praecox
  • From dementia praecox to schizophrenia
  • Schizophrenia today
  • 2. Schizophrenia: the sublime text of psychoanalysis
  • The schizophrenic symptom and its secret
  • Tackling dementia praecox: Jung and Abraham
  • Freud on Schreber
  • Reading Schreber
  • A sublime Schreber
  • Lacan: the sublime structure of psychosis
  • Schizophrenia and the problem of the father
  • Part 2. Cultural theory
  • 3. Antipsychiatry: schizophrenic experience and the sublime
  • A brief overview of antipsychiatry
  • Thomas Szasz and anti-sublime schizophrenia
  • Between two sublimes: schizophrenia and The Divided Self
  • Schizophrenia as sublime experience
  • 4. Anti-Oedipus and the politics of the schizophrenic sublime
  • Introducing schizophrenia and capitalism
  • Sidelining and sanitizing schizophrenia
  • Deleuze, Guattari, Schreber
  • A politics of the sublime
  • 5. Schizophrenia, modernity, postmodernity
  • Dementia, regression, Dionysus: three tropes of madness
  • Schizophrenia and hyperreflexivity
  • Schizophrenia, modernism, and modernity
  • The question of postmodernity
  • 6. Postmodern schizophrenia
  • Introducing the figure of 'the postmodern schizophrenic'
  • Schizophrenia and 'The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism'
  • Beyond Jameson
  • The postmodern stimmung
  • 7. Glamorama, postmodernity, and the schizophrenic sublime
  • The town crier of postmodern consciousness
  • A postmodern Schreber?
  • Glamorama and the schizophrenic sublime
  • Conclusion
  • References
  • Author Index
  • Subject Index
Purchased by the Francis H. Dowley Endowed Library Fund bookplate
The John Crerar Library bookplate

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