Richard Gipps
My background is in Philosophy (BA/MA Oxon; PhD: a critique of cognitivism and cognitive approaches to schizophrenia, University of Warwick) and Clinical Psychology (doctorate from Canterbury Christ Church University).
The psychological practice I offer is clinical - during the last ten years I've offered a broadly psychoanalytical psychotherapy to adults in Oxford, UK, for the NHS, for the University of Oxford, and privately (http://richardgipps.co.uk).
Sometimes I tweet (@DrGipps), write on my blog (http://clinicalphilosophy.blogspot.com), and help manage the website (http://www.inpponline.com) for the International Network of Philosophy and Psychiatry.
I'm an Associate Member of the Philosophy Faculty (www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/people/richard-gipps#tab-413896), and a Research Fellow at Blackfriars Hall (www.bfriars.ox.ac.uk/people/8680/), both of the University of Oxford, and convene the Oxford Wittgenstein Reading Group.
I'm currently reserving 3 days a week for clinical work (therapy and supervision), do a little lecturing/tutoring in philosophy and psychology for Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, and am at work on a book 'Love's Possibility: Loneliness and Dignity in Human Life'). My first single-authored book "On Madness" was published by Bloomsbury in October 2022 (https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/on-madness-9781350192546/). I've also co-edited "The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis" and "The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry".
The psychological practice I offer is clinical - during the last ten years I've offered a broadly psychoanalytical psychotherapy to adults in Oxford, UK, for the NHS, for the University of Oxford, and privately (http://richardgipps.co.uk).
Sometimes I tweet (@DrGipps), write on my blog (http://clinicalphilosophy.blogspot.com), and help manage the website (http://www.inpponline.com) for the International Network of Philosophy and Psychiatry.
I'm an Associate Member of the Philosophy Faculty (www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/people/richard-gipps#tab-413896), and a Research Fellow at Blackfriars Hall (www.bfriars.ox.ac.uk/people/8680/), both of the University of Oxford, and convene the Oxford Wittgenstein Reading Group.
I'm currently reserving 3 days a week for clinical work (therapy and supervision), do a little lecturing/tutoring in philosophy and psychology for Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, and am at work on a book 'Love's Possibility: Loneliness and Dignity in Human Life'). My first single-authored book "On Madness" was published by Bloomsbury in October 2022 (https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/on-madness-9781350192546/). I've also co-edited "The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis" and "The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry".
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Books by Richard Gipps
Bringing together patient memoir, psychopathological observation and philosophical thought, Gipps offers a profound alternative. On the one hand he shows how, by appreciating just why we can't locate rational order within psychotic thought, we can better understand what it is to suffer delusion and psychosis. On the other, he recovers for us the value of such expressive, motivational and symbolic forms of understanding as only become available once we've been turned away at reason's door. In such ways Gipps not only solves the psychopathological problem of delusion, but also shows us how to bear a truer witness to the psychotic subject in their brokenness, pain and despair.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Mental Illness
2. Delusion's Rational Irretrievability
3. Reality Contact
4. A World of One's Own
5. The Divided Self
6. Self and Other
7. Hallucination
8. Disordered Thought
9. Psychotic Symbolization
10. The Politics of Insanity Ascription
Notes
References
Index
The attached file is just the book cover, supplied for illustrative purposes only - you won't miraculously get a free copy of the book by downloading it!
The attached file is just the book cover, supplied for illustrative purposes only - you won't miraculously get a free copy of the book by downloading it!
Papers & Chapters by Richard Gipps
NB A copy of this paper can be found at the link given - the journal is open access.
Gipps, R.G.T. (2022) ‘I’ve got anxiety’. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467- 9752.12658
An English translation of Chapter 2 of the first (1927) edition has been made available by Cutting and Shepherd in their The Clinical Roots of the Schizophrenia Concept (1987 CUP), more recently reprinted in chapter 16 of Broome et al. (2013) The Maudsley Reader in Phenomenological Psychiatry. His Lived Time has also been translated (1970, Northwestern University Press; a chapter from it is also in the Broome et al volume); as has 'A contribution to the study of autism: The interrogative attitude' (co-written with Targowla) (Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 2001, 8, 4, 271-8). But what is striking that, whilst Minkowski's book on schizophrenia is surely the most profound single volume on the topic, only 1 of its 6 chapters has previously been translated, and that from an edition which he considerably revised.
Minkowski truly had a great gift for bringing complex phenomenological thought to bear on psychopathological phenomena in a way which was humane, genuinely illuminating, and conceptually clear. The vast majority of today's writing on schizophrenia and psychosis is pitiful by comparison.
NB: this translation is neither authorised nor authoritative! My French is but poor. If you'd like to help improve the translation please let me know! This pertains especially to the parts where, being unsure of the best translation, I've included the French in square brackets. I've left untranslated Minkowski's core terminology of 'élan vital', 'élan personnel' and 'trouble générateur'. For the time being I've followed the translator of Lived Time in rendering 'devenir ambiant' as 'ambiant becoming' (but it seems to me that something like 'environmental flux' might work better).
The chapter concerns autism - in the original sense of the term as coined by Bleuler before the first world war, i.e. as a fundamental organiser of schizophrenic psychopathology. In fact Minkowski makes it far more central to our understanding of schizophrenic psychopathology than Bleuler ever did. He also revised Bleuler's conception, and something of his (Minkowski's) own earlier conception, of autism as having to do with interiorisation and immersion in fantasy, instead offering us a concept which equally includes the organisation both of the more world-engaging, and the more simply deficient, aspects of schizophrenic psychopathology.
Summary Cognitive therapy for depression is common practice in today’s National Health Service, yet it does not work well. Aaron Beck developed it after becoming disillusioned with the psychoanalytic theory and therapy he espoused and practised. But Beck’s understanding of psychoanalysis appears to have been seriously flawed. Understood rightly, the psychoanalytic approach offers a cogent theory and therapy for depression which, unlike the cognitive approach, takes us to its emotional- motivational roots. A clinically successful therapy can afford to eschew theory and rest on its pragmatic laurels. This is not the case for cognitive therapy. The time is right to re-examine the psychoanalytic theory and treatment of depression.
The question of the intelligibility of delusion has recently been addressed from within empirical psychology, analytical philosophy, and existential phenomenology. The different presuppositions, aims and paradigms for understanding deployed by these several approaches have not always been clearly distinguished.
Recent findings
Psychological theories of delusion approach the delusional subject as a sense-maker labouring under various intelligible strains in their social world and in their emotional and cognitive constitution. Philosophically minded psychopathologists continue to urge that delusion reflects a deeper disturbance of mindedness that renders questionable the application of approaches which seek everyday forms of intelligibility.
Summary
Analytical philosophers have most clearly articulated the ways in which delusions cannot, whilst phenomenologists have best articulated the ways in which delusions can, be understood. As we become clearer about the diverse forms our understanding can take, and the different conditions in which such diverse forms may – and may not – each be deployed, a more nuanced answer to the question of the intelligibility of delusion becomes possible.
Bringing together patient memoir, psychopathological observation and philosophical thought, Gipps offers a profound alternative. On the one hand he shows how, by appreciating just why we can't locate rational order within psychotic thought, we can better understand what it is to suffer delusion and psychosis. On the other, he recovers for us the value of such expressive, motivational and symbolic forms of understanding as only become available once we've been turned away at reason's door. In such ways Gipps not only solves the psychopathological problem of delusion, but also shows us how to bear a truer witness to the psychotic subject in their brokenness, pain and despair.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Mental Illness
2. Delusion's Rational Irretrievability
3. Reality Contact
4. A World of One's Own
5. The Divided Self
6. Self and Other
7. Hallucination
8. Disordered Thought
9. Psychotic Symbolization
10. The Politics of Insanity Ascription
Notes
References
Index
The attached file is just the book cover, supplied for illustrative purposes only - you won't miraculously get a free copy of the book by downloading it!
The attached file is just the book cover, supplied for illustrative purposes only - you won't miraculously get a free copy of the book by downloading it!
NB A copy of this paper can be found at the link given - the journal is open access.
Gipps, R.G.T. (2022) ‘I’ve got anxiety’. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467- 9752.12658
An English translation of Chapter 2 of the first (1927) edition has been made available by Cutting and Shepherd in their The Clinical Roots of the Schizophrenia Concept (1987 CUP), more recently reprinted in chapter 16 of Broome et al. (2013) The Maudsley Reader in Phenomenological Psychiatry. His Lived Time has also been translated (1970, Northwestern University Press; a chapter from it is also in the Broome et al volume); as has 'A contribution to the study of autism: The interrogative attitude' (co-written with Targowla) (Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 2001, 8, 4, 271-8). But what is striking that, whilst Minkowski's book on schizophrenia is surely the most profound single volume on the topic, only 1 of its 6 chapters has previously been translated, and that from an edition which he considerably revised.
Minkowski truly had a great gift for bringing complex phenomenological thought to bear on psychopathological phenomena in a way which was humane, genuinely illuminating, and conceptually clear. The vast majority of today's writing on schizophrenia and psychosis is pitiful by comparison.
NB: this translation is neither authorised nor authoritative! My French is but poor. If you'd like to help improve the translation please let me know! This pertains especially to the parts where, being unsure of the best translation, I've included the French in square brackets. I've left untranslated Minkowski's core terminology of 'élan vital', 'élan personnel' and 'trouble générateur'. For the time being I've followed the translator of Lived Time in rendering 'devenir ambiant' as 'ambiant becoming' (but it seems to me that something like 'environmental flux' might work better).
The chapter concerns autism - in the original sense of the term as coined by Bleuler before the first world war, i.e. as a fundamental organiser of schizophrenic psychopathology. In fact Minkowski makes it far more central to our understanding of schizophrenic psychopathology than Bleuler ever did. He also revised Bleuler's conception, and something of his (Minkowski's) own earlier conception, of autism as having to do with interiorisation and immersion in fantasy, instead offering us a concept which equally includes the organisation both of the more world-engaging, and the more simply deficient, aspects of schizophrenic psychopathology.
Summary Cognitive therapy for depression is common practice in today’s National Health Service, yet it does not work well. Aaron Beck developed it after becoming disillusioned with the psychoanalytic theory and therapy he espoused and practised. But Beck’s understanding of psychoanalysis appears to have been seriously flawed. Understood rightly, the psychoanalytic approach offers a cogent theory and therapy for depression which, unlike the cognitive approach, takes us to its emotional- motivational roots. A clinically successful therapy can afford to eschew theory and rest on its pragmatic laurels. This is not the case for cognitive therapy. The time is right to re-examine the psychoanalytic theory and treatment of depression.
The question of the intelligibility of delusion has recently been addressed from within empirical psychology, analytical philosophy, and existential phenomenology. The different presuppositions, aims and paradigms for understanding deployed by these several approaches have not always been clearly distinguished.
Recent findings
Psychological theories of delusion approach the delusional subject as a sense-maker labouring under various intelligible strains in their social world and in their emotional and cognitive constitution. Philosophically minded psychopathologists continue to urge that delusion reflects a deeper disturbance of mindedness that renders questionable the application of approaches which seek everyday forms of intelligibility.
Summary
Analytical philosophers have most clearly articulated the ways in which delusions cannot, whilst phenomenologists have best articulated the ways in which delusions can, be understood. As we become clearer about the diverse forms our understanding can take, and the different conditions in which such diverse forms may – and may not – each be deployed, a more nuanced answer to the question of the intelligibility of delusion becomes possible.
Asked if they believe in the human soul, many will say ’no’. And yet these same people talk of it far more than they may realise, and intuitively reckon its state, integrity, agency and vitality to have a central import. Whether you're talking about a peer having sold her soul, a piece of music being soulless, an oration as having soul, of your supervisor being a lost soul or alternatively as possessing greatness of soul, of thesis-writing being soul-destroying, or of being the life and soul of the JCR, we intuitively accord soul matters a prime place in our lives. In this talk I’ll survey a range of such ‘soul idioms’ to consider what it is that we really mean by ’soul’.
Based on http://clinicalphilosophy.blogspot.com/2023/07/soul.html
The madman is sometimes said to 'live in another world’, or to 'live in unreality’, or at other times to be ‘detached from reality’. Such phrases have for some given rise to the question: who gets to say whose world is the true one, or what counts as real? Might all this not just be a power play on the part of those self-appointed clinical policemen of the real: the psychiatrists and the psychologists? Maybe the madman’s world is no less a world, and no less valid, than that of those who like to style themselves ’sane’?
To settle these questions the psychiatrist may be tempted by answers Dr Gipps styles ‘Realist' and ‘Idealist'. The Realist aims to show how general schemes of psychiatric judgement are valid in virtue of how they accurately capture the nature of psychological or neurological reality. The Idealist aims to show how they’re instead validated by the ways that certain groups of people actually do judge. Whilst undoubtedly tempting, neither approach can succeed. (In the talk Richard will show why.) Instead of answering, we do better to dissolve, the question of the general validity of insanity ascription. And we do that by showing how and why the demand for a justification of psychiatric judgement is valid only in the particular but not in the general case. Accepting this, however, doesn’t let the clinician off the hook. Or: it lets them off the philosophical hook only to dangle them on the more important one on which all clinical judgement hangs. For now they must step up with humble boldness as mouthpieces of the fearsome judgement of insanity that's required of them, rather than passing the buck of responsibility onto the textbook, onto the psychologist or neurologist, or onto the consensus of their peers.
Who gets to call whom mad? And with what right? (“They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.”; Nathaniel Lee, 1653-1692)
The psychosis sufferer is sometimes said to ‘live in another world’ or ‘in unreality’, or to be ‘detached from reality’. Such idioms have encouraged the question: who gets to say whose world is the true one, or what counts as real? Might all this not be a power play on the part of those self-appointed policemen of the real: psychiatrists? Maybe the madman’s world is no less a world, and no less valid, than that of those who care to style themselves ‘sane’? In his presentation Richard untethers the psychiatrist from such philosophical hooks – but in the process dangles her ever more tightly on a clinical one. On the clinical hook, that is, of being a responsible authority who can’t devolve her responsibility to the textbook or diagnostic manual, to the psychologist or the neurologist.
To access the interview, click on the Link ('Full Text')
Mental Health, Education and the Humanities conference
Institute of Education, London / Warwick University
7th November 2022
Available on Youtube - see the link
Institute of Applied Psychology, Faculty of Management and Social Communication, Jagiellonian University, 25 Oct 2022
For a conference on Loneliness in Philosophy and Psychology, July 2021, https://www.lonelinessphilpsych.org.
Text posted on my blog - see the link.
Revised version given November 2022 to the Portuguese Society of Psychiatry (SPPSM) XVI National Congress
Revised version - Loneliness and Lovability - given August 2024 at the World Congress of Philosophy, Rome.
To be “philosophical” or “stoical” is to remain calm and able to think in the face of adversity. But how have the philosophers suggested we achieve this? And how can their deliberations be drawn on in the consulting room without therapy degrading into intellectual discussion? In this talk Richard will discuss the relation of six virtues – the cultivation of healthy pride (dignity), the development of ego strength (inner courage), amor fati (acquiescence to fate), the will to power (determination), receptivity to grace (the cultivation of gratitude), and seeing life sub specie aeternitatis (the bigger picture) – to the “philosophical” life. Of particular importance for therapeutic practice is the distinction between i) embodying and modelling and ii) merely talking about such virtues.
Revised for a talk to Phenolab, on 1st March 2022
Notes for the talk are at https://clinicalphilosophy.blogspot.com/2020/06/contra-ipseity.html
And at https://clinicalphilosophy.blogspot.com/2022/03/contra-ipseity.html
Abstract here: https://phenolab.blogspot.com/2022/02/dr-richard-gipps-university-of-oxford.html
See also chapter 5 of my book 'On Madness'.
https://316am.site123.me/articles/philosophy-and-psychoanalysis?c=end-times-series
The talk is available online at https://www.britishwittgensteinsociety.org/twenty-third-british-wittgenstein-society-lecture
Introduction:
Today I shall pursue a reading of Wittgenstein’s wranglings with that of his inner interlocutors we call the ‘private linguist’.
The claim on the table is that the private linguist represents a ‘narcissistic’ strain in Wittgenstein’s mind, and that his battle against this part of himself is of a piece with his struggle against pride and with his wish to be a decent human being.
What I’m offering is both an ethically and a psychoanalytically inflected reading of Wittgenstein, one informed more by today’s psychoanalysis than by the Freudianism of Wittgenstein’s day, and one intended to find a wider application in our diagnostics, aetiologies and treatments of certain philosophical problems.
My intent is not just to bring to bear psychoanalytically-informed perspectives on Wittgenstein’s so-called ‘private language arguments’; it’s also to have philosophy here return the favour to psychology, by helping to sharpen our reflective understanding of what it means to suffer ‘narcissism’.
Important I say now that: I’m using the term ‘narcissism’ as something of a psychoanalytic term of art and will give content to it as we go through the talk – rather than rely on its everyday connotations (self-admiration).
She who is lonely struggles not with the mere fact of her solitude, but rather from disbelief in her lovableness – a disbelief which rears its dread-ful head when she’s alone or when alienated-amongst-others. Significant mental illness reflects an inability to tolerate such loneliness – so that it instead becomes an ‘unthought known’, something silently indwelt rather than consciously suffered and tended to. Psychotherapy – and much religious practice for that matter – works to identify and displace inner voices of un-love, and to install instead the sense of love’s possibility. When this goes well a patient gains or regains the ability to suffer his feelings, and ultimately to experience ease, gratitude and joy in amongst his life’s miseries. This presentation illustrates these themes through extracts from autobiographies of normal/neurotic, borderline and psychotic people, extracts treating of the dawning realization of love’s possibility.
The notion of the Expert by Experience has hovered between something bogus and infantilising on the one hand, and something precious and dignified on the other. In this talk I ask what the true expertise of such experts consist in. The idea of expertise in virtue of privileged access to the qualities of one’s subjective experience is challenged. In its place is offered the capacity to bring articulate thought to bear on experience in such a way as results in wise and dignified discourse and action.
Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology
Johns Hopkins University Press
Volume 31, Number 3, September 2024
pp. 257-260
A response to Tasia Scrutton (2024), Psychopathology AND Religious Experience? Toward a Both–And View, PPP, 31, 3, 243-256.
Subjective disturbances in bodily experience in psychosis are often reported in the psychiatric literature, but have rarely been considered in detail. In what follows extant theories of subjective disturbances in bodily experience in psychosis are first considered in the Literature Review. Lacunae of i) qualitative depth, ii) methodological guidance, and under-theorisation - especially of the relation between iii) bodily experience and delusions on the one hand, and iv) bodily experience and intersubjectivity on the other - are discussed. The first three lacunae are addressed in the accompanying Journal Paper, where it is proposed that the concept of lost 'self-identity' can either phenomenologically organise many disturbances of bodily being, or can explain psychotic retreates into devitalised and delusional worlds. The Critical Appraisal considers the merits and demerits of the research, and develops theory regarding the relationship between lost self-identity and disturbances of intersubjectivity.
This term's seminars focus on madness and psychotic experience (1-4) although we shall end by looking at two (of the more psychotic) phenomena of everyday life - dreams and transference (5-6).
Questions to be considered include: In what sense, if any, are delusions and dreams meaningful? In what sense are they not? What does it mean to 'live in a world of your own?' When do psychologists overstep the bounds of sense in their ambitions to make sense of psychosis? Are delusions attempts to make sense of unusual experiences? What does talk of 'mental illness' amount to? Is the idea of 'mental illness' a metaphor, literal illness, or something else? What does it mean to talk of the 'symbolism' of dreams and delusions? And what, actually, is transference?
1. What is mental illness?
2. A world of one's own?
3. Delusional reason?
4. Symbolic landscapes of psychotic thought
5. Interpretation of dreams
6. Sailing the seas of transference
What is the dynamic unconscious of psychoanalysis? What vision does psychoanalysis offer of the inner life? When does psychoanalytic reason stumble, and when is it traduced by its critics? How do our intimate self-experiences relate to the theoretical constructions of psychoanalysis? What is the goal and process of psychoanalytic psychotherapy? What contribution can psychoanalysis make to the intellectual life?
Reflective enquiry on unconscious life naturally moves between the first-personal, the psychological, and the philosophical. We made a start on this in Michaelmas Term 2017 by considering: the nature of the unconscious, what it is to come to know oneself, and what it is for self-knowledge to be transformational. Seminars consisted of a presentation followed by a discussion, and will presuppose prior reading of the text for the week. They’ll be pitched at academics, graduate students and psychotherapists with an interest in depth psychology and critical reflection.
Week 1 (12 Oct): Sigmund Freud – Parapraxes pp.3136ff(Lectures 2-4 of Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis)
Week 3 (26 Oct): Sigmund Freud – The Unconscious pp.2989ff (in Standard Edition vol 14 / Penguin Freud Library vol 11)
Week 4 (2 Nov): Christopher Bollas – Articulations of the Unconscious (ch 2 of Bollas’s The Freudian Moment)
Week 5 (9 Nov): Jonathan Lear – Interpreting the Unconscious (ch 1 of Lear’s Freud.) [in Rm 4]
Week 6 (16 Nov): Thomas Fuchs – Body Memory and the Unconscious
Week 7 (23 Nov): David Finkelstein – On the Distinction Between Conscious and Unconscious States of Mind