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Objects of Psychiatrty. Between thing-making, reification & personhood Zurich, June 8 – 11, 2016. International Conference organised by the interdisciplinary research project: “Schizophrenia”: Reception, seman-tic shift, and criticism of a concept in the 20th century. University of Zurich, Psychiatric Hospital Zurich University.
Schizophrenia has been one of psychiatry's most contested diagnostic categories. It has also served as a metaphor for cultural theorists to interpret modern and postmodern understandings of the self. These radical, compelling, and puzzling appropriations of clinical accounts of schizophrenia have been dismissed by many as illegitimate, insensitive and inappropriate. Until now, no attempt has been made to analyse them systematically, nor has their significance for our broader understanding of this most 'ununderstandable' of experiences been addressed. The Sublime Object of Psychiatry analyses representations of schizophrenia across a wide range of disciplines and discourses: biological and phenomenological psychiatry, psychoanalysis, critical psychology, antipsychiatry, and postmodern philosophy. Part one looks at the foundational clinical accounts of schizophrenia, concentrating on the work of Emil Kraepelin, Eugen Bleuler, Karl Jaspers, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Part two examines how these accounts were critiqued, adapted, and mobilised in the 'cultural theory' of R D Laing, Thomas Szasz, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Louis Sass, Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard. Using the aesthetic concept of the sublime as an organising framework, the book seeks to explain how a clinical diagnostic category came to be transformed into a potent metaphor in cultural theory, and how, in that transformation, schizophrenia came to be associated with the everyday experience of modern and postmodern life. Susan Sontag once wrote: 'Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance'. The Sublime Object of Psychiatry does not provide an answer to the question 'What is schizophrenia?', but instead brings clinical and cultural theory into dialogue in order to explain how schizophrenia became 'awash in significance'.
The British Journal of Psychiatry
Schizophrenia: the sacred symbol of psychiatry1976 •
Let us try to project ourselves back into the places and minds of physicians and psychiatrists in, say, 1900. When they spoke of disease, what did they mean? They meant, typically, something like syphilis. ‘Know syphilis in all its manifestations and relations,’ declared Sir William Osler (1849–1919), ‘and all things clinical will be added unto you.’ (1). Obviously, this is no longer true. Indeed, how many cases of syphilis do modern medical students see between the time they enroll in school and the time they graduate? In the United States,…
The conceptual history of schizophrenia is marked by considerable dissent about its nosological status, and the question of whether it represents a distinct disease entity remains hotly debated. Another recurring feature in the conceptual history of schizophrenia is the reference to concepts of self and person. This paper brings in connection these two debates by interrogating the nosological function of “self” and “person” by means of a fictitious dialogue between Eugen Bleuler, the inventor of schizophrenia, and his contemporary Arthur Kronfeld. Introducing their respective accounts of schizophrenia with a special focus on how concepts of self and person figure therein, our analysis suggests that these concepts are primarily employed in an attempt to guarantee the nosological unity of schizophrenia: mediated by the concept of a core disturbance, alterations of the self or the person thus become the essential core of schizophrenia. Yet, rather than providing an easy solution to the nosological problem of the unity of schizophrenia, the concepts of self and person and their assumed disturbances are themselves fraught with debates about unity. We discuss these conceptual challenges in light of present-day nosological debates and the currently abounding research on the self.
Reconceiving Schizophrenia. Edited by Man Cheung Chung, K. W. M. (Bill) Fulford, and George Graham
Schizophrenia: A Phenomenological-Anthropological Approach2007 •
We shall approach schizophrenia from the point of view of phenomenological anthropological psychiatry. We shall first provide a brief introduction to the phenomenological-anthropological point of view. This introduction will provide the context for explicating the basic phenomenological concepts that we will borrow from Edmund Husserl (1973, 1983) and apply to schizophrenia, namely, intentionality, synthesis, and constitution. We shall then address schizophrenic experience as a whole, insisting that the transformation of human experience that it involves affects even the most basic ontological constituents of the world, namely, space, time, causality, and the nature of objects. It will be necessary at that juncture to distinguish between an early stage of schizophrenia and a later one. We shall then be prepared to focus on the peculiar nature of schizophrenic hallucinations, first through an anthropological description of them and subsequently through a phenomenological one. We conclude by briefly addressing one final puzzle: if schizophrenic hallucinations exhibit the characteristics we attribute to them, why do the people who encounter them experience them with such certainty?
Journal of The International Association of Transdisciplinary Psychology
Psychiatry against itself: Radicals, rebels, reformers & revolutionaries. A philosophical archaeology.2015 •
Psychiatry against itself: Radicals, rebels, reformers & revolutionaries. A philosophical archaeology Journal of The International Association of Transdisciplinary Psychology, December 2015, 4(1): 1-18. Abstract This essay inverts the logic of antipsychiatry to describe various movements critical of the profession as psychiatry against itself. Like Alain Badiou’s contrast of philosophers with anti-philosophers, anti-psychiatrists compel the established tradition of psychiatry to confront fresh problems with new perspectives to renew psychiatric thought. The dual themes that emerge from this study are: tradition vs. innovation and negation vs. affirmation. This thesis is threefold: (1) What is intriguing about the psychiatrists associated with the anti-psychiatry movement and what unites them is negation. In each case, their work proceeds by a key critical negation, to the point that the defining characteristic of antipsychiatric psychiatrists is precisely negation. (2) Each negation and how it was practised made each anti-psychiatrist, depending on his temperament and circumstances, into a rebel, a radical, a reformer or a revolutionary antipsychiatrist. (3) Each anti-psychiatrist wielded an instrument for change that I have coined Badiou’s sickle. Based on a key critical negation, each anti-psychiatrist resisted the suturing of psychiatry to a given subdiscipline, regional practice, or dominant ideology by separating it gently or more forcefully with Badiou’s scalpel, scissors, shears, scythe or sickle to liberate psychiatry as a general theory and practice and return it to its originary task. Four key 20th century Western psychiatrists who were critical of their field are examined through their basic attitudes and contributions to the redefinition of psychiatry. Scotsman Ronald David Laing (1927-1989) was a radical psychiatrist-psychoanalyst, returning psychiatry to its clinical roots, with his trenchant critiques of Ludwig Binswanger’s existential analysis and psychiatric practice generally, calling for social phenomenology, negating the mystification of mental illness by placing the suffering of the self in social, family, and political context. The French Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was both a subversive psychoanalyst and a psychiatric rebel, affirming the centrality of Freud in his construction of psychoanalysis while rebelling against both the psychoanalytic and psychiatric establishment, negating the institutionalization of psychoanalytic practice, whether in the academy or in psychoanalytic institutes. Italian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia (1924-1980) was a reformer who instigated psychiatric deinstitutionalization around the world with his key text, L’Istituzione negata, “The Institution Negated” (1968) and by joining the Radical Party in the Italian Parliament that reformed Italy’s mental health legislation. As a psychiatrist, philosopher and revolutionary, Martinican Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) negated nothing less than the claim of European psychiatry to universalism in his radical critiques of the psychology of colonization and identity formation, offering a more humane psychology on which to found psychiatry in a revolutionary program for a new society. Fanon’s critiques were far more trenchant than other anti-psychiatrists, with far-reaching impacts on critical theory, post-colonial studies and Marxist political theory, yet his project remained unfulfilled when he died all-too-young, bequeathing us psychiatry’s unfinished revolution. Two other critical thinkers are examined to complete this study. One is Hungarian-American Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) whom I characterize as a reactionary psychiatrist in the guise of a progressive who negated the reality of psychiatric disorders. Szasz trivialized mental and relational suffering as mere “problems in living,” arguing against the majority of psychiatric disorders having biomedical origins, thus promoting the medical model in its most reductive form. In contrast with the other antipsychiatrists, Szasz’s negation was destructive, leading the way to greater stigmatization of mental illness and diminished resources and services. Finally, the work of French psychologist and philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) overshadows the entire discourse of anti-psychiatry, just as he informs and impels us to reorder medical perceptions and psychiatric thought, upending the very “order of things.” Foucault’s negation was the most disturbing to psychiatric thought because he questioned the very basis for imagining madness and reason/unreason.
The Crisis of Present-Day Psychiatry: Regaining the Personal
The Crisis of Present-Day Psychiatry: Regaining the Personal1999 •
(The following is the second of two articles adapted by the authors from lectures given at the University of Zurich upon their receiving the 1998 Dr. Magrit Egnér-Stiftung prize-Ed.) Present-day psychiatry has fallen into crisis because of the severe limitations of its conception of the person and, as a result, its conception of the patient. It objectifies the patient in a number of ways: 1) It lacks a conception of normality and consequently perceives most aspects of the patient's life in pathological terms; 2) It reduces the patient's problems to a list of pathological symptoms; 3) It tends to conceive of these symptoms as having primarily biological causes; and 4) Its methods of treatment are pharmacological and behavioral. Because of this reductionism, psychiatry fails to distinguish between healthy and pathological features of human life. It fails to view the pathological aspects of patients' lives within the larger context of their personalities and sociocultural milieus. It fails to consider adequately the psychological and social factors that cause and maintain each patient's problems. Finally, it fails to employ treatments that address whole people living daily in their sociocultural worlds. Yet this reductionism does alert us to important components of human life. To express our point as generally as possible: it alerts us to the anthropological fact that human beings are, in many respects, objects. Although the reductionist conception of the patient does, because of its limitations, signal the loss of the personal, our attempt to regain the personal must incorporate the object-like components of human existence that reductionism pinpoints. Because human beings are, in certain respects, objects, a full conception of people must not disregard this object-like-ness but must rather situate it within the broader philosophical context in which it rightfully belongs.
Archaeological and Ethnographic Evidence of Domination in Indigenous Latin America
Amphibious and Aquatic Warfare in Mesoamerica Conquest by Water and Land2023 •
Mahmut İslamoğlu Armağanı
UYGURLARDA FALCILIK GELENEĞİ VE ÇAĞATAYCA YAZILMIŞ BİR FAL KİTABI ÜZERİNE2024 •
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The human testis-determining factor SRY localizes in midbrain dopamine neurons and regulates multiple components of catecholamine synthesis and metabolism2012 •
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Influence of a Central Tryptophan and of Cholesterol on the Properties of Defined Transmembrane Helical Peptides2014 •
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