Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926) was an influential figure in the history of psychiatry as a clinical science. This paper, after briefly presenting his biography, discusses the conceptual foundations of his concept of mental illness and follows this line of thought through to late 20th-century "Neo-Kraepelinianism," including recent criticism, particularly of the nosological dichotomy of endogenous psychoses. Throughout his professional life, Kraepelin put emphasis on establishing psychiatry as a clinical science with a strong empirical background. He preferred pragmatic attitudes and arguments, thus underestimating the philosophical presuppositions of his work. As for nosology, his central hypothesis is the existence and scientific accessibility of "natural disease entities" ("natürliche Krankheitseinheiten") in psychiatry. Notwithstanding contemporary criticism that he commented upon, this concept stayed at the very center of Kraepelin's thinking, and t...

This thesis is an interrogation into the epistemological structures which underpin modernity, the project and claim which has come to significantly shape the contemporary world. Following a line of inquiry which analyses the intersections between knowledge, power, and history, this paper examines how signifiers such as religion and culture have come to designate 'otherness‘ in the context of modernity. The assignment of such terms to beliefs, values, worldviews, and ideologies that are not readily assimilated by the epistemological framework of modernity is problematised as a central obstacle to mediating social and political difficulties in modern contexts. The argument is that the issue of 'what counts for knowledge‘ has been progressively 'closed‘ through particular historical processes in which the shift a societal model based upon Judeo-Christian tenets (broadly defined), to secular modernity, has been rendered invisible. The other has, through these processes, become twice-removed from epistemological validity: in the first instance, as the pagan other in early Christian contexts; in the second instance, as the religious or cultural other within a secular that is falsely claimed to have been liberated from its theological roots. These epistemological marginalisations impact significantly on social life, especially in the areas of social justice, power flows, education, and medicine. The invisibility of the shift from Christianity to secular modernity is also perpetuated by the separation of social life and knowledge production into distinct 'spheres‘, as mirrored by the arrangement of disciplinary spheres established within the modern universities. The conclusion is that a transdisciplinary space is therefore required to engage philosophically and critically with the now internalised Christian bias hidden within what we might call modernity.

This text was shortened for publication by the volume and series editors, James D Faubion and Paul Rabinow. Passages deleted in this process are shown in Arial font.

The thesis positions three modem thinkers working in different areas of the human sciences - William James, Ludwig Binswanger and Oliver Sacks - within a framework of romantic science. Romantic science is a term which is developed explicitly in the work of Sacks and also illuminates the central concerns of James and Binswanger. As such, romantic science provides a useful framework in which to discuss conceptual changes in the medical humanities (a branch of the human sciences directed to patient care) since the late nineteenth century. The introduction explores romantic science, firstly, as a modem tradition of research and inquiry in the human and natural sciences, beginning with the ferment of intellectual activity in late eighteenth-century Germany, and, secondly, as a genre of writing, which fuses discontinuous discourses in an attempt to compensate for the inadequacies of more conventional modes of scientific understanding. My central theoretical interest is to trace significan...

The present research traces the ideas of madness and divine madness, together with their differences and similarities, through the Black Books of Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist Carl G. Jung (1875-1961). The Black Books, which were published in 2020, are the manuscript notebooks in which Jung documented his fantasies between 1913 and 1932, as part of his self-experiment with the collective unconscious. Jung’s Red Book, more well-known and published in 2009, was based on the entries written in the former. Firstly, the thesis elaborates on the character of Jung and how his upbringing and personal life led him to the writing of the Black Books, the Red Book, and how this shaped his later professional work. Secondly, the concept of madness is discussed as a construct in Western History. In the discussion, some of history’s many theories and narratives in which madness has been constructed and conceptualized are presented. This follows a red thread through history in the uncovering of the historical idea of madness and its connection to the divine, one which is weaved intricately through ancient myth, philosophy and medicine, religious lore, the subjective tales of those who lived through it, and the works of those who sought its rationalization and objectivization. The historical contextualization of (divine) madness then forms the framework in which Jung’s understanding of madness and divine madness is explained and presented in his Black Books, Red book, and professional work. This journey takes the reader through Jung’s own “myth” – one filled with moments of struggle, fear, hesitation, but also bliss, insight, and psychological healing. It is through the Black Book fantasies, the Red Book’s commentary, and his professional work that the understanding of Jung’s concept of madness and its divine counterpart becomes visible - an understanding based on the principle of balance, self-discovery, and creative expression. As a last step before the conclusion, it goes deeper on the connection between madness and creativity in Jung’s work, as well as, current academic research. In the conclusion, it is then explained how the idea of ‘madness’ – which has been used in Western history and medicine as a term for the demarcation of a broad scope of so called abnormal mental states (psychopathology) – is challenged by Jung’s work. According to a Jungian understanding, ‘madness’ is argued as only applicable to those mental states in which the experiencer suffers as a result of said mental state to the extent that one’s life is significantly impaired. ‘Divine madness,’ on the other hand, is argued as more akin to genuine religious experience, devoid of personal psychopathology. In addition, the present research presents an understanding in which the potentiality of divine madness lays hidden within pathological madness – a potentiality which can be revealed through the psychological healing on the road towards self-discovery.

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