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

About this book

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.