The philosophy of psychosis and the psychosis of philosophy: a philosopher draws on his experience of madness. In this book, philosopher and linguist Wouter Kusters examines the philosophy of psychosis—and the psychosis of philosophy. By analyzing the experience of psychosis in philosophical terms, Kusters not only emancipates the experience of the psychotic from medical classification, he also emancipates the philosopher from the narrowness of textbooks and academia, allowing philosophers to engage in real-life praxis, philosophy in vivo. Philosophy and madness—Kusters's preferred, non-medicalized term—coexist, one mirroring the other. Kusters draws on his own experience of madness—two episodes of psychosis, twenty years apart—as well as other first-person narratives of psychosis. Speculating about the maddening effect of certain words and thought, he argues, and demonstrates, that the steady flow of philosophical deliberation may sweep one into a full-blown acute psychotic episode. Indeed, a certain kind of philosophizing may result in confusion, paradoxes, unworldly insights, and circular frozenness reminiscent of madness. Psychosis presents itself to the psychotic as an inescapable truth and reality. Kusters evokes the mad person's philosophical or existential amazement at reality, thinking, time, and space, drawing on classic autobiographical accounts of psychoses by Antonin Artaud, Daniel Schreber, and others, as well as the work of phenomenological psychiatrists and psychologists and such phenomenologists as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He considers the philosophical mystic and the mystical philosopher, tracing the mad undercurrent in the Husserlian philosophy of time; visits the cloud castles of mystical madness, encountering LSD devotees, philosophers, theologians, and nihilists; and, falling to earth, finds anxiety, emptiness, delusions, and hallucinations. Madness and philosophy proceed and converge toward a single vanishing point.

An incredible publishing event: a philosopher draws on his own experience of madness as he takes readers on an unforgettble journey through the philosophy of psychosis and the psychosis of philosophy. In this book, philosopher and linguist Wouter Kusters examines the philosophy of psychosis--and the psychosis of philosophy. By analyzing the experience of psychosis in philosophical terms, Kusters not only emancipates the experience of the psychotic from medical classification, he also emancipates the philosopher from the narrowness of academia, allowing philosphers to engage in real-life praxis, philosophy in vivo. Philosophy and madness--Kusters's preferred, non-medicalized term--coexist, one mirroring the other. Drawing on his own experience of madness--two episodes of psychosis, twenty years apart--Kusters argues that psychosis presents itself to the psychotic as an inescapable truth and reality.

"A groundbreaking, deeply personal, magnum opus on madness and philosophy from a psychotic patient turned philosopher"--

Since the time of Hippocrates, madness has typically been viewed through the lens of disease, dysfunction, and defect. In Madness, philosopher of science Justin Garson presents a radically different paradigm for conceiving of madness and the forms that it takes. In this paradigm, which he calls madness-as-strategy, madness is neither a disease nor a defect, but a designed feature, like the heart or lungs. The book will be essential reading for philosophers of medicine and psychiatry, historians and sociologists of medicine, and mental health service users, survivors, and activists, for its alternative and liberating vision of what it means to be mad.

This book is about the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, more commonly known as the D.S.M. The D.S.M. is published by the American Psychiatric Association and aims to list and describe all mental disorders. Within its pages can be found diagnostic criteria for types of depression, types of schizophrenia, eating disorders, anxiety disorders, phobias, sleeping disorders, and so on. Also included are less familiar, and more controversial, conditions: Mathematics Disorder, Caffeine Intoxication, Nicotine Dependence, Nightmare Disorder. It must be admitted that the D.S.M. is not an exciting read. Its pages follow a standard format: Each disorder has a numerical code. This is followed by a description of the disorder, which includes information regarding prevalence, course, and differential diagnosis. Finally explicit criteria that patients must meet to receive the diagnosis are listed. These generally include lists of the symptoms that must be present, restrictions as to the length of time that the symptoms must have been troublesome, and clauses that state that the symptoms must not be better accounted for by some other condition.

Ferit Güven illuminates the historically constitutive roles of madness and death in philosophy by examining them in the light of contemporary discussions of the intersection of power and knowledge and ethical relations with the other. Historically, as Güven shows, philosophical treatments of madness and death have limited or subdued their disruptive quality. Madness and death are linked to the question of how to conceptualize the unthinkable, but Güven illustrates how this conceptualization results in a reduction to positivity of the very radical negativity these moments represent. Tracing this problematic through Plato, Hegel, Heidegger, and, finally, in the debate on madness between Foucault and Derrida, Güven gestures toward a nonreducible, disruptive form of negativity, articulated in Heidegger's critique of Hegel and Foucault's engagement with Derrida, that might allow for the preservation of real otherness and open the possibility of a true ethics of difference.

Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 - from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and walls were erected between the "insane" and the rest of humanity.