Description
This collection offers a diverse range of perspectives that seek to find meaning in madness. Mainstream biomedical approaches tend to interpret experiences commonly labelled "psychotic" as being indicative of a biological illness that can best be ameliorated with prescription drugs. In seeking to counter this perspective, psychosocial outlooks commonly focus on the role of trauma and environmental stress. Although an appreciation for the role of trauma has been critical in expanding the ways in which we view madness, an emphasis of this kind may nevertheless continue to perpetuate a subtle form of reductivism—madness continues to be understood as the product of a deficit. In seeking to move beyond causal-reductivism, this book explores a variety of perspectives on the question of finding inherent meaning in madness and extreme states.
Contributors to this book are distinguished writers and researchers from a variety of international and interdisciplinary perspectives. Topics span the fields of depth psychology and psychoanalysis, creativity, Indigenous and postcolonial approaches, neurodiversity, mad studies, and mysticism and spirituality.
This collection will be of interest to mental health professionals, students and scholars of the humanities and social sciences, and people with lived experience of madness and extreme states. Readers will come away with an appreciation of the more generative aspects of madness, and a recognition that these experiences may be important for both personal and collective healing.
Table of Contents
1. On the Potential Limits of Trauma Theory as an Emancipatory Discourse
Robin S. Brown
2. Encounters with Sioux Medicine Men
Françoise Davoine
3. Transpersonal Enactments and the Teleology of Paranoia
Robin S. Brown & Marie Brown
4. Re-turning the Psykhe: A Creative Experiment in Decolonizing Psychology
Rachel Jane Liebert
5. Divine Madness: Exceedance and Not-Knowing
John Gale
6. Archetypal Dimensions of Expanded States
Tim Read
7. Reconceptualizing John Nash’s Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective
Derek Hook
8. The Touch From Without / The Force From Within
Ronald Schenk
9. Creative Transformations: The Establishment, the Mystic, and the Aesthetic Drive
Marilyn Charles
10. Soul is Crying
Michael Eigen
