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 is the first book to study representations of schizophrenia across a
wide range of disciplines and discourses: biological and phenomenological psychiatry, psychoanalysis, critical psychology, antipsychiatry, and postmodern philosophy.Susan Sontag once wrote: 'Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance'. Whilst this book does not provide an answer to the question 'What is schizophrenia?', it does bring clinical and cultural theory into dialogue in order to explain how
schizophrenia became 'awash in significance'.
Product code: 9780199583959