Madness And Modernism: Insanity In The Light Of Modern Art, Literature, And Thought - Hardcover

Sass, Louis

4.43

197 ratings by Goodreads

9780465043125: Madness And Modernism: Insanity In The Light Of Modern Art, Literature, And Thought

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465043127 ISBN 13: 9780465043125

Publisher: Basic Books, 1992

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A stunning revelation of the eerie likeness between schizophrenic insanity and the sensibility of modern art, literature, and thought, Madness and Modernism presents a vivid and highly original portrait of the world of the madman, along with a provocative commentary on modernist and postmodernist culture. Sass, a clinical psychologist, explores the bizarre experiences of schizophrenia (and related conditions) through a comparison with the works of various artists and writers, including Franz Kafka, Paul Valery, Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Giorgio de Chirico, and Marcel Duchamp, and by considering the ideas of philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.
The similarities between madness and modernism are striking: defiance of authority and convention; an extreme, often dizzying relativism, which can culminate in paralysis; nihilism and all-embracing irony; a tantalizing, uncanny, but always frustrating sense of revelation; obliteration of standard forms of time and narrative; pervasive dehumanization; and disappearance of external reality in favor of the omnipotent ego or, alternatively, dissolution of all sense of selfhood.
This rigorously argued, gracefully written book offers a startlingly new vision of schizophrenia, an illness long recognized as the greatest challenge to psychiatric or psychological understanding. Conventionally seen as a loss of rationality, perhaps involving a return to some infantile or bestial condition, schizophrenia, according to Sass, is better understood as, in a sense, a disease of hyperrationality, with detachment from action, emotions, and the body and entrapment in forms of acute self-consciousness and heightened awareness. Sass refuses to romanticize the schizophrenic as a heroic rebel, mystic, or passionate Wildman, arguing instead that this condition echoes many of the most alienating aspects of modern life. In an epilogue and appendix, he considers whether modern culture might actively contribute to the genesis or shaping of schizophrenic forms of pathology, and he discusses the possible role of abnormalities of the brain.

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About the Author:

Louis A. Sass is Professor of Clinical Psychology at Rutgers University. He is the author of The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber, and the Schizophrenic Mind.

Review:

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)

Wholly fascinating...Madness and Modernism is rooted in a thorough knowledge of the psychological literature, but [Sass] also draws on an extensive acquaintance with 19th and 20th-century art, literature and philosophy...Powerful, lucid and original...Should revolutionise our thinking about the workings of the human mind. (Iain McGilchrist London Review of Books)

[A] brilliant study...An important contribution, not only to our understanding of schizophrenia but also to our comprehension of the nature of mental illness in general. (Contemporary Psychology)

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