Paranoid Knowledge: Psychoanalysis and the Interpretation of Mad Writing

This book inserts Lacanian theory into contemporary debates within the emerging interdisciplinary field of ‘Mad Studies’ via an analysis of psychotic writing. The author questions what psychoanalysis can offer a progressive, emancipatory means for engaging madness. Taking the Memoirs of Daniel Paul Schreber and the Exegesis of Philip K. Dick as the primary sites of investigation, the book examines how the written representations of paranoid psychosis have historically been exploited to further clinical insights and forms of social critique. 

Paranoid Knowledge reveals how Lacan’s theorisations of the sinthome, the universal condition of psychosis and the overdetermined nature of any interpretation provide theoretical alliance to Mad Studies and critical mental health endeavours.  By focusing on the taut interrelation between knowledge production, diagnostic structure and technological development, Bristow demonstrates how an individual’s madness can harness, reformulate or channel broader socio-cultural themes. As such, the author contends that psychosis can be shown to have value beyond mere pathology and may offer us a privileged position to grasp psychosocial processes. This book will offer fresh insights for students and scholars of psychoanalysis, critical psychiatry, literary theory, philosophy, and cultural studies.

Alan Bristow is a psychiatric social worker in London, UK whose interests include the application of critical frameworks to the field of statutory mental health intervention. He is co-editor of The Critical AMHP blog.