Cogwheel Souls: Q&A with Sofia Jeppsson on Madness, Fantasy, and Philosophy
“Nothing but cogs and wheels and springs”
Sofia Jeppsson is an associate professor of philosophy at Umeå University. She started her career writing mostly about free will and moral responsibility. In later years, she has focused on the philosophy of psychiatry and philosophy of madness. She has frequently drawn on her own experiences of psychosis in her writings. She is the author of the 2025 Swedish fantasy novel “Kugghjulssjälar” (“Cogwheel Souls”).
Awais: I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but I assign your 2022 article, “My Strategies for Dealing With Radical Psychotic Doubt: A Schizo-Something Philosopher’s Tale” (Schizophrenia Bulletin), as a reading in the philosophy of psychiatry elective I offer trainees in my program. I love it for several reasons: it captures the kinds of doubt that can characterize psychotic states and also shows how philosophical attitudes can offer ways of navigating them. Your discussion of antipsychotics is especially nuanced, and many trainees have never encountered accounts by “schizo-something” individuals who are doing well off medications—so it opens up that realm too. It’s also a great example of the autobiography-as-philosophy format that many philosophers of madness seem drawn to. What do you think autobiography contributes to the philosophy of madness?
Sofia: No, you haven’t said this before—but I’m happy to hear it! Very glad that the paper is so helpful.
Regarding philosophy of madness and autobiography, it’s a complicated topic. As you know, Zsuzsanna Chappell and I wrote a chapter about philosophy of madness for a forthcoming Oxford Research Encyclopedia. Describing what philosophy of madness is, and how it relates to and differs from other philosophical fields—most notably, philosophy of psychiatry—was a somewhat daunting task, given how new and evolving philosophy of madness is. Eventually, we settled on one wider and one narrower definition. In the wide sense, it’s philosophy that centers madpeople’s experiences; in the narrow sense, it is also about madness and done by openly mad philosophers. Wide or narrow, centering our experiences is crucial, and an important difference between philosophy of madness on the one hand and a certain kind of philosophy of psychiatry on the other—there is, of course, plenty of overlap, no neat dividing line.
We also list a bunch of more specific differences—tendencies, not necessary and sufficient conditions. For instance, sane philosophers who take a look at madness from the outside often assume that diagnostic groups are relatively homogenous, so that it makes sense to ask blanket questions such as “can people with diagnosis X be morally responsible for their actions?” or “is there a special phenomenology to so-called inserted thoughts?” They often assume, as well, that madpeople’s experiences can’t be too different from the sane philosopher’s—if the latter finds some purported experience hard to imagine, it probably didn’t happen. And they work from the assumption that madness must be uniformly bad, never a mixed or even positive experience.
Drawing on one’s own experiences can make for powerful counterarguments against overgeneralizing claims. If a sane philosopher says that all Xs are Ys, the fact that I’m an X but not a Y suffices to prove that wrong. I personally add, in many of my partially autobiographical papers, that I’m likely not unique. Even if I’m unusual, I’m probably not the only X who isn’t Y in the whole wide world.
In addition, autobiography can help show others what it is like, as far as that is possible. There might be experiential gaps between mentally different people that are too wide to bridge, but autobiography may help us go some distance towards the goal of greater understanding between different groups of people, in a way that more detached and general descriptions don’t.
Awais: The immediate occasion for this Q&A is your debut novel, Cogwheel Souls (Kugghjulssjälar in Swedish), a “dark techno fantasy” that has been published to national critical acclaim in Sweden. It hasn’t yet appeared in English, and in fact, you are currently looking for agents and publishers in the English-speaking world. I had the pleasure of reading an English draft, and I thought it was brilliant—easily one of the best novels I’ve read this year. I love the way you blend philosophy and fantasy, and it’s clear that your experiences with psychosis have shaped the novel in important ways. Could you introduce the book in your own words? What is it about?
Sofia: The novel takes place in an alternate world based on my psychotic experiences. For anyone familiar with my more autobiographical philosophical texts, murderous demons are a given. However, in the world of the novel, everyone knows about them, and society has been shaped by the necessity of protecting people against them.
Psychosis is such an isolating experience. I’m lucky enough to have an amazing husband who understands me much better than most, but he can’t actually share my experiences. And most people have no idea. Other madpeople can more easily understand some aspects of it, but even so—I’m gonna do a mash-up of Leo Tolstoy and Karl Jaspers here. All sane people are alike; every madperson is mad in their own way.
I have met exactly one other madperson with very similar problems to my own—he was persecuted by evil dragons, but it turned out they functioned much the same as my demons do, and we were like, wow, this is amazing! Guess the dragons and demons come from the same place, they might even be variants of the same species—for five hot minutes we had a bit of a folie à deux going on there, but it was an academic event and then the talks started.
Anyway. Back to my book.
It was such an amazing exercise in imagination to build an entire fantasy world based on my psychotic experiences and have all the characters of the novel share that world. Lovisa, the main character, is heavily based on me when I was young. Like me, she faces demons who threaten her through the TV screen, through mirrors and phones. Unlike me, she can call her professor at uni and talk about how to deal with them. Because she studies for a professor who fights them too, at a university where there’s an entire faculty of magic.
But then, as I was working on the book, I realized that I also wanted to dig into the isolation theme. So, first of all, Lovisa comes from a religious background, where people talked about God, angels, demons, Hell, etc. However, in a world where all of this is common knowledge, global knowledge, studied by researchers from different countries, cultures and religions—there must be a gap between religion and secular science. So, the scientific name isn’t demons, but hostiles. Not Hell, but Reality 2. When it comes to God, or eternal life after death, there’s as little evidence in this fantasy world as in the real one—that is, none. Thus, Lovisa’s religious background already creates a bit of a gap between her and non-religious academia. As the story goes on, and her situation becomes progressively more dangerous and it looks like she’s gonna die, she eventually goes mad by in-universe standards.
She retains some level of “insight” throughout, which in my experience is very common. She believes in her own experiences, but she understands that she can no longer tell others about them, because others will obviously think that she sounds insane.
Finally, I wanted to investigate this mad isolation, but also how madness can have positive sides as well. Adopting a grandiose self-image like Lovisa does later in the book, when she thinks of herself as a saint or an angel, can help you power through experiences that would otherwise be too horrible and break you.
Awais: What drew you to the fantasy genre as a medium, and how does it offer a different way of expressing or processing your experiences of madness compared to autobiography?
Sofia: Well… the book has a fun origin story, actually.
When I got my current job in 2018 and moved up north, my life changed for the better in many ways. Much better life circumstances meant much better mental health, which allowed me to get off meds (thankfully, since I got less and less of a positive effect from them and more and more nasty side effects). And that, in turn, made me more energetic and creative. In addition, moving house means going through tons of old stuff. During that process, I found an old notebook I had been writing and drawing in when I was in psych way back in 2003. I flipped through it and thought: damn, this is like fantasy world building! I could make fantasy out of this, with my old demon enemies as antagonists.
Then, it was a really long process learning to write fiction, because as it turns out, writing a novel is hard, and not something you’re automatically capable of doing just because you’ve done a philosophy dissertation and a bunch of academic papers.
So … I wrote a fantasy book because my psych notebook seemed like fantasy world building when I read it again decades later. But I could go further back in time and offer a tentative explanation as to why the notebook was so fantasyish.
I think I had my first big psychotic break when I was only ten years old. I was so off into a world of my own, a largely terrifying but occasionally terrific world. Much of the time, I really didn’t understand what was happening around me. I’d be in school with no idea what I was even doing there. People around me noticed that I became very difficult to interact with, very quiet and isolated and never remembered what anyone said, my parents noticed I hardly slept at all, but I didn’t get to psych or anything. It was a rural, working-class environment in the nineteen eighties, I think psych for kids wasn’t really on the radar. So, I just dealt with everything as best I could. Being a ten-year-old child, I had zero psychiatric theory or vocabulary to fall back on. However, I had read lots and lots of fantasy novels. I understood my experiences within some sort of fantasy-horror framework… and I think that created a sort of looping effect. Like Ian Hacking talks about, but for a single individual rather than a whole society. My fantasy framework shaped my subsequent psychotic experiences into a more fantasy-like form, which shaped how I later analyzed them, and so on.
Writing a fantasy novel thus felt like a pretty natural choice. I also want to emphasize that both fantasy and philosophy papers with snippets of autobiography inserted differ from a more traditional autobiography, or mental illness patography. Both fantasy and philosophy create a certain distance between my actual life and what I write, which I need. A traditional autobiography would feel much too personal.
There’s also this expectation of what such a book is supposed to look like … I think it would be difficult to depart from the norm here. Might be more difficult to write a unique and radically different patography than a unique and radically different fantasy novel… I would probably have been tempted to write a neater character arch for myself than what’s true to life. To talk as if I always have all this so-called insight and totally know what’s real or not. To write a neat little ending where I replace my meds with philosophy and it works just as well. Then, if I have to go back on them at some point, it would have been weird and embarrassing in addition to everything else.
Life isn’t neat, like a story. This really struck me when I read The Divine Madness of Philip K Dick recently—on your recommendation, Awais. It really was a fascinating read. But it’s disappointing that the more benign, hopeful and constructive version of madness that PKD experienced later in life couldn’t last to the very end. He had to go and be anxious and depressed again before he died. Narratively unsatisfying, but that’s life for you. For my own part, I was in a pretty bad state in December 2024 and around New Year’s. Really quite bad. For a while, I was certain that I’d have to go back on Haldol—hope that it would work again after the long abstention—and maybe even do a stint in psych again. In the end, I didn’t have to. But it could have happened. It might happen in the future. I always put in these caveats in my philosophy writings, but I think it would be harder to keep emphasizing that if I had an entire autobiographical book out with a neat and happy ending.
So, there are some interesting differences between traditional autobiography on the one hand and both philosophy and fantasy on the other. But fantasy writing also has some special perks that I don’t get from philosophy.
I consciously use philosophical theory to help calm myself and scaffold my wavering sense of what’s real. But working on the novel, I think, had a different—but just as important—therapeutic effect. The antagonist Skinmask in all its iterations is very much based on a figure that’s been terrorizing me for much of my life. But somehow, the process of turning Skinmask into a character in a novel tamed my fears. Slowly and gradually, but it did. Perhaps it was editing in particular. You go through the same scenes over and over, trying to optimize the prose, and eventually, the text loses any emotional impact it originally had.
Some time ago, I dreamt that I shared a flat with Skinmask. The demon was a very annoying roommate, because it would throw parties with all its demon friends and not clean up after. I was berating it in the dream, saying Skinmask, look! There are empty beer cans everywhere! I refuse to clean this up, that’s your job!
It was very annoying in the dream, but not scary at all. When I woke up, I was amazed. I thought, damn, I really worked through some issues while writing!
Saint Alberta, on the other hand, is based on a benevolent voice in my head and some visions I had on the border between sleep and wakefulness. She first appeared a couple of years ago, when my mental health was much better already. The whole thing was less dramatic than with Skinmask, but I feel like writing her into the novel as a helping, benevolent figure also helped me make friends with and accept larger parts of my psyche.
Awais: Lovisa, the protagonist, repeats a striking mantra throughout the novel:
“My body is not me. My body is nothing but flesh. Nothing but cogs and wheels and springs. My body is a vehicle that I drive. My body is a tool, but my body is not me.”
Now the world in which the story is set, there is such a thing as soul (something that can contract and shrink, and which enables protectors to fight hostiles). I’m curious about the relevance of this kind of dualism to our world. Even if we don’t posit a separate substance, there’s still a sense in which the self isn’t reducible to the flesh. I can imagine this mantra offering comfort to people, especially those whose bodies are in decline from illness or injury. What is your relationship to this mantra?
Sofia: This mantra is actually something I regularly use as a sleeping aid. I’ve had horrible insomnia since I was little, and have been on sleeping pills for much of my adult life. Now I’m doing without, and my sleep is gradually improving to the point that I often simply fall asleep at night—just like that! But when I have trouble sleeping, I use the mantra. I may feel tense, and my pulse too high, but I tell myself that my body isn’t me and withdraw from it until I don’t feel it anymore. And then I do the same thing with my brain, which may be filled with ruminations and stressful thoughts. This is more difficult, but can be done. Eventually, I feel like a very small soul, which has left all its problems behind, and then I fall asleep.
I also used this a lot when I was feeling worse recently, in December and around New Year. I became terrified of other people, but I was also afraid that if I avoided everyone else the fear would grow and grow. So, I still went to work—I got nothing done during this time, but I was around other people—and handled the fear by telling myself that my body isn’t me, only my soul is me. Those other people only see my body, can only interact with my body, but I am safe and protected deep inside the skull part of my flesh vehicle. It was extremely helpful to think this way.
In general, I tend to experience myself in a pretty dualistic manner. Maybe because I’ve got this schizo-something thing going on, I don’t know… there are a bunch of research papers on this, by Thomas Fuchs, Giovanni Stanghellini, and others, talking about how schizophrenic people tend to experience themselves in a much more dualistic manner than others, as if they’re little souls or spirits inside bodies rather than being bodily creatures. I also, personally, find the otherwise so popular term “bodymind” wrong for my own case—I’m a mind in a body! Not a single, unified bodymind!
I think there’s been a kind of anti-Cartesian, anti-dualist trend going on for a while now in the psych sciences, probably for good reasons. At the same time, it’s always important not to replace one hegemony with another. People are different. People have very different phenomenologies. It’s important to take that into account and accept our differences instead of trying to push everyone into the same mold.
Awais: One of the characters, Elvira, is said to have written a paper on how the identities and self-images of protectors are affected. It’s one of those fictional papers I’d genuinely love to read, and I imagine a version of it already exists in your mind. What do you imagine that paper argues?
Sofia: I must disappoint you there, because I only have a vague idea of what that paper is about. But here goes: When I’m being all dualistic about myself, I’m being odd and unusual. But Lovisa and her fellow protectors have this mantra and the corresponding ideology constantly pushed on them. They must learn to dissociate hard, or else they can’t do what they do.
There’s a real risk of taking things too far, here. Become too flippant about the idea of hurting your body. Even if you don’t think of your body as you but as a vehicle you drive, that vehicle remains absolutely essential for staying alive, and for every action you take while you’re alive. You should care about it, even if that care is instrumental. But any level of care, even instrumental, might make it harder to do what the protectors do – so the body gets dismissed as unimportant. And next thing you know, you’re grabbing a steak knife and chopping off your own finger as a party trick! Or encourage others to do so as if it’s no big deal. You might be extra reckless with booze and drugs, because who cares if they hurt your liver? It’s only flesh. Who cares if they hurt your brain? The brain is also flesh.
Elvira’s imaginary paper was called “far from the body, close to death” and that’s the thing—the protectors have a dangerous job. They’re closer to death than most people, merely by virtue of their profession. Dismissing the body as unimportant both helps them to do what they need to do to stay alive a little longer, and may hasten their death if they don’t even bother to take care of that flesh vehicle well enough.
Awais: What future projects, philosophical and literary, are on the horizon for you?
I have already written a draft for a sequel to Cogwheel Souls! It’s with an editor now. Now, you might think I’m an exceptionally fast writer, but the world-building and basic plots for both Cogwheel Souls and a couple of sequels have been sitting in my hard drive for a few years already. I started turning the sequel into a proper script as soon as I had mailed Cogwheel Souls to publishers last year.
The sequel is pretty free-standing, though. It takes place 170 years after Cogwheel Souls and features brand-new characters.
In philosophy, there are a few things I’ve been working on for a while but haven’t had the time to turn into proper papers. I’ve had a lot of teaching this year, but will get more research time next year.
First, it’s a paper on holding people morally and merely causally responsible. The mainstream philosophical view is that there’s a really important difference between holding people morally responsible for something bad, blaming them, and merely pointing out that they caused the badness without any blame. It’s considered very important to distinguish between morally responsible agents and those who can’t be held responsible, in part because blame has a sting to it, and those who don’t deserve it must be spared the sting. So far mainstream philosophy. But it’s based on faulty psychological assumptions. It does, in fact, sting hard to be told that you caused some terrible thing, even if other people are quick to add that you couldn’t help it so you’re not to blame. I conclude that we should be as careful with mere causal responsibility attributions as with their moral counterparts, and don’t throw them around with insufficient evidence. All of this is especially relevant in some psychiatric contexts.
Second, I’m working on a metaphysics project where I will defend a new form of Kantian transcendentalism … Because I’m beginning to feel dissatisfied with skepticism. It’s no longer the mental health scaffold that it used to be. I think I need more Kantian metaphysics.
I was asked by a student once whether it’s not odd to do philosophy as therapy, rather than as a search for the truth. But it’s not like I’m over here, therapizing myself, whereas all the other philosophers are over there, with their perfectly dispassionate search for truth. In reality, people do philosophy—or other kinds of research and scholarly writing—for all kinds of reasons. Surely, it’s more likely that my need for therapy will result in philosophically interesting papers than people’s need to get more publications on their CV for job reasons or funding reasons. (Note: I’m not ragging on people for being concerned about their CVs and job and funding prospects—I’ve been there! I’m just saying the pressure to publish or perish can have a negative impact.)
I want to write something on romanticization of mental illness, too. People often talk about how bad it is to romanticize serious health conditions, but often without defining what they mean by “romanticize”. Some of the behaviors under that umbrella term might be problematic, others perfectly fine, and a third group could be prima facie problematic, but you can’t tell people to stop unless you’ve got something better to offer.
Finally, I have this planned paper on animal ethics. Christine Korsgaard is a present-day Kantian who argues that non-human animals should also be considered ends-in-themselves, and I think she’s right. According to traditional Kantianism, however, we only have a duty not to mistreat animals in such a way that we’re hurting our own characters. Most people think traditional Kantianism is consistent with the status quo of, e.g., meat-consumption. But modern slaughter-houses are horrible. I have talked about this with a veterinarian who worked for a while in a slaughter-house for pigs… The best animal welfare solutions compatible with continuing modern mass production are woefully inadequate; pigs are beaten and beaten and forced into a gas chamber where they fight for their lives till they finally go unconscious. This environment hurts the people who work there too; they have worse mental health than otherwise comparable blue-collar workers.
So, that’s a lot in the pipeline. We’ll see how much time it will take. Eventually, everything will be out there! Just wait and see.
Awais: Thank you, Sofia!
This post is part of a series featuring interviews and discussions intended to foster a re-examination of philosophical and scientific debates in the psy-sciences. See prior interviews here.
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I've dipped a toe into a few recent(ish) fantasy novels lately and I would love to read this! I really hope you find an English publisher. Forthcoming articles sound fascinating too, I need to get some sort of email alert for your papers when they come out but otherwise I rely on Awais' substack alerting system now 😃