Madness and Modernism provides a phenomenological study of schizophrenic disorders, criticizing some standard conceptions of these disorders. Sass argues that many aspects of this group of disorders can actually involve more sophisticated (albeit dysfunctional) forms of mind and experience.

"Our literature is replete with complaints about the chaotic state of the systematics of psychoses and every psychiatrist knows that it is impossible to come to any common understanding on the basis of the old diagnostic labels. ... Thus, not even the masters of science can make themselves understood on the basis of the old concepts and with many patients the number of diagnoses made equals the number of institutions they have been too. ... Errors are the greatest obstacles to (...) the progress of science; to correct such errors is of more practical value than to achieve new knowledge. We have here eliminated chaos of terms behind which useful concepts of disease were mistakenly sought; we have eliminated a veritable forest of boundary posts, not one of which indicated any natural line of demarcation. ... By the term „dementia praecox“ or „schizophrenia“ we designate a group of psychoses whose course is at times chronic, at times marked by intermittent attacks, and which can stop or retrograde at any stage, but does not permit a full restitutio ad integrum. The disease is characterized by a specific type of alteration of thinking, feeling, and relation to the external world which appears nowhere else in this particular fashion." Eugen Bleuler. Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias. Translated by Joseph Zinkin. International Universities Press, New York, 1950. (shrink)

This scarce antiquarian book is included in our special Legacy Reprint Series.

Deconstruction is no game of mirrors, revealing the text as a play of surface against surface. Its more radical philosophical effort is to get behind the mirror and question the very nature of reflection. The Tain of the Mirror explores that gritty surface without which no reflection would be possible.

This paper offers a phenomenological or hermeneutic reading—employing Heidegger's notion of the 'ontological difference'—of certain central aspects of schizophrenic experience. The main focus is on signs and symptoms that have traditionally been taken to indicate either 'poor reality-testing' or else 'poverty of content of speech' (defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III-R as: “speech that is adequate in amount but conveys little information because of vagueness, empty repetitions, or use of stereotyped or obscure phrases"). I argue (...) that, at least in some cases, the tendency to attribute these signs of illness to the schizophrenic patient results from a failure to recognize that such patients—as part of a quasi-solipsistic orientation and alienation from more normal, pragmatic concerns—may be grappling with issues of what Heidegger would call an ontological rather than an ontic type, issues concerned not with entities but with Being (i.e. not with objects in the world but with the overall status of the world itself). An application of the Heideggerian concept of the ontological difference has the potential to alter one's sense of the lived-worlds of such patients, of what they may be attempting to communicate, and of why communication with them so often breaks down. (shrink)

This book contains the unfinished manuscript and working notes of the book Merleau-Ponty was writing when he died.

In this stunning reappraisal of the celebrated case of Daniel Paul Schreber, Lothane takes the reader on a richly documented tour of all the ingredients that made Schreber's illness a unique psychiatric event. Building outward from a close examination of Schreber's troubled relationship to his two psychiatrists, Flechsig and Weber, Lothane elaborates the personal, familial, and cultural contexts of Schreber's illness. Incorporating extensive new archival and bibliographic research, and providing extensive accounts of the personalities and theories of Schreber's two psychiatrists, (...) Paul Flechsig and Guido Weber, Zvi Lothane offers a stunning reappraisal of the Schreber case that overturns virtually all previous opinion. Lothane examines both the man and his milieu in a way that allows the reader fresh access not only to the tragedy of Schreber's illness but also to his heroic, if doomed, attempts to come to terms with his condition through writing. In the process, he persuasively demonstrates that important issues of both psychiatric diagnosis and psychoanalytic interpretation have heretofore been compromised by a failure to pay sufficient attention to Schreber's interpersonal, cultural, and historical contexts. (shrink)

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In the formative years of psychiatry Freud, Bleuler, and Jaspers all studied Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness as a model of psychotic thought. Sass provides a nuanced interpretation of Schreber's Memoirs in the context of Wittgenstein's analysis of philosophical solipsism. A dauntless critic of the illusions of philosophy, Wittgenstein likened the speculative excesses of traditional metaphysics to mental illness. Sass observes that many of the "intellectual diseases" that Wittgenstein discerned - diseases involving detachment from social existence and (...) practical concerns, and exaggerated processes of abstraction and self-consciousness - have striking affinities with the symptoms of schizophrenia. Like the philosophical solipsist, the schizophrenic may define his or her own consciousness as the center of the universe - and may experience his or her delusional world as a product of that same consciousness. (shrink)

Looks at how social customs have changed from medieval times to the present and speculates on the social needs manners fulfill.

Like the latter, it unites into one and the same function the possibility of giving things a sign, of representing one thing by another, and the possibility of causing a sign to shift in relation to what it designates. The four functions that define the ...

In 1910, Karl Jaspers wrote a seminal essay on morbid jealousy in which he laid the foundation for the psychopathological phenomenology that through his work and the work of Hans Gruhle and Kurt Schneider, among others, would become the ...

The "Cartesian Meditations" translation is based primarily on the printed text, edited by Professor S. Strasser and published in the first volume of Husserliana ...