Overview

Can we reach the psychotic subject in their delusion? Psychopathological theorists often try to find a way to characterise this subject’s inner predicament so that their opaque utterances and actions will now rationally hang together. In this pathbreaking work, philosopher and clinical psychologist Richard G. T. Gipps demonstrates how such efforts at rational retrieval actually result in us setting our face against the psychotic subject in their distress. 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.

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9781350192546

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'What is it for a mind to become ill?' In On Madness, Richard Gipps takes us on a richly textured philosophical and psychological journey showing, in a Wittgensteinian spirit, how delusion, as other psychopathological concepts, have their meaning only 'in the stream of life'. A work of philosophical psychopathology which, in resisting the temptation of definition remains firmly grounded in understanding. * Daniele Moyal-Sharrock, President of the British Wittgenstein Society, Professor of Philosophy, University of Hertfordshire, UK *

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Richard G. T. Gipps is a Chartered Clinical Psychologist and Associate of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, UK. He is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry (2013) and The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (2019).

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