Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the light of modern art, literature, and thought (revised edition) (International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry) - Softcover

Sass, Louis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0198779291 ISBN 13: 9780198779292

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2017

Synopsis

The similarities between madness and modernism are striking: defiance of convention, nihilism, extreme relativism, distortions of time, strange transformations of self, and much more.

In this revised edition of a now classic work, Louis Sass, a clinical psychologist, offers a radically new vision of schizophrenia, comparing it with the works of such artists and writers as Kafka, Beckett, and Duchamp, and considering the ideas of philosophers including Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. Here is a highly original portrait of the world of insanity, along with a provocative commentary on modernist and postmodernist culture.

About this title

About the Author

Louis Sass, Distinguished Professor of Clinical Psychology, Department of Clinical Psychology, GSAPP, Rutgers University, USA

Louis Sass is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Clinical Psychology, Rutgers University (New Jersey, U.S.A.)-where he is also associated with the Program in Comparative Literature and the Center for Cognitive Science. In addition to Madness and Modernism, he is the author of The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber, and the Schizophrenic Mind, and of many articles on schizophrenia, phenomenological psychopathology, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, modernism/postmodernism, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. Sass is a past president of the divisions for psychology and the arts and also for philosophy and psychology of the American Psychological Association. In 2010 he received the Joseph B. Gittler Award from the American Psychological Foundation for "the most scholarly contribution to the philosophical foundations of psychological knowledge."

Review

"A marvelously against-the-grain book... A startling look at the strange connections between the most private workings of our minds and the most public."

--Clifford Geertz, author of The Interpretation of Cultures

"In this fascinating book... Sass sets out in largely uncharted directions... Displaying an impressive command of philosophical, literary and clinical literature on subjects of enormous complexity...[he] arrives at some highly original and profoundly disquieting insights."

--Brigitte Berger, New York Times Book Review

"This marvelous book... provides the richest description of the schizophrenic's inner world since R. D. Laing's deservedly classic The Divided Self... An inspired documentation of the interrelationships of modernism, schizophrenia, and our current cultural life."

--Richard Restak, M.D., Washington Post Book World

"A monumental, exciting, and troubling book, a new landmark in the study of the modern era."

--Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle

"... restores complexity, intentionality and humanity to the schizophrenic mind... the best overview of the field to have appeared in a long time."

--Times Literary Supplement (TLS)

"An intellectual tour de force... A landmark contribution to the understanding of psychosis."

--Sidney Blatt, Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology, Yale University

"... powerful, lucid, and original. Should revolutionize our thinking about the workings of the human mind."

--Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary, London Review of Books

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0198779291
• ISBN 13: 9780198779292
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 556