Congratulations Sasha Warren on this blog, the brief follow-up interview and, above all, your excellent "Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia and Revolt" probably the most original history of psychiatry book that I have read for some time.
We share an interest in Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and recently, with colleagues, we have published three linked introductory papers on his relevance to psychiatry:
1- Ikkos, G., Stanghellini, G., & Morgan, A. (2024). History, ‘nowtime’ (jetztzeit) and dialectical images: introduction to Walter Benjamin for psychiatry (I). International Review of Psychiatry, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540261.2024.2359468
2-Stanghellini, G. (2024a). The psychiatrist as a ragpicker. Introduction to Walter Benjamin for psychiatrists (II): the dialectics between the fragment and the whole. International Review of Psychiatry, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540261.2024.2354368
3-Morgan, A. (2024). ‘… the most complex and lyrical song of experience’: Walter Benjamin and a dialectical image of madness. Introduction to Walter Benjamin for psychiatry (III). International Review of Psychiatry, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540261.2024.2354375
Close colleagues and I also published simultaneously papers comparing the methods of Emil Kraepelin and Walter Benjamin. and Franco Basalgia and Walter Benjamin in their respective fields:
4-Becker, T., & Hoff, P. (2024). Emil Kraepelin and Walter Benjamin: distant contemporaries, diverse working methods, any resonance? International Review of Psychiatry, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540261.2024.2355994
5- Becker, T., Müller, T., Ikkos, G., & Speerforck, S. (2024). Radical social theorists Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin: can they help understand and power effective mental health reform? International Review of Psychiatry, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540261.2024.2364846
I agree with you that Walter Benjamin's conception of language has an enormous lot to offer psychiatrists. I found the following to be very clear, if also demanding, in the exposition of this theory:
6- Stern, A (2019) The Fall of Language: Benjamin and Wittgenstein on Meaning, Harvard University Press
Finally, my dear friend and collaborator Gio Stanghellini is doing a lot of immediately relevant writing which may interest you and the readers of your blog. For example:
7-Stanghellini, G. The Power of Images and the Logics of Discovery in Psychiatric Care. Brain
So grateful that someone is going this work. It's especially important for women who are often get diagnosed and medicated to silence legitimate grievances.
To quote J. Krishnamurti:
"It is no measure of health to be well adapted to a profoundly sick society."
<<It might be going too far to say that we need to “translate” psychotic language, for this implies too much (that it’s not English or Spanish because it’s psychotic, that “sanity” itself has a language), but the requirements for good translations are in essence the same as those for a productive linguistic encounter for someone in psychosis.>>
Perhaps we can think of it as not "going too far" but as not going far enough. Perhaps *every* communication between any two beings in the universe is always a translation between life-worlds. You have not had my experiences and you do not know precisely what my words mean to me when I express them. Even if you are my spouse or my sibling, even if you know me as well as anyone in the world: still, to an extent, you are always guessing at the precise meaning of my words.
Congratulations Sasha Warren on this blog, the brief follow-up interview and, above all, your excellent "Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia and Revolt" probably the most original history of psychiatry book that I have read for some time.
We share an interest in Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and recently, with colleagues, we have published three linked introductory papers on his relevance to psychiatry:
1- Ikkos, G., Stanghellini, G., & Morgan, A. (2024). History, ‘nowtime’ (jetztzeit) and dialectical images: introduction to Walter Benjamin for psychiatry (I). International Review of Psychiatry, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540261.2024.2359468
2-Stanghellini, G. (2024a). The psychiatrist as a ragpicker. Introduction to Walter Benjamin for psychiatrists (II): the dialectics between the fragment and the whole. International Review of Psychiatry, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540261.2024.2354368
3-Morgan, A. (2024). ‘… the most complex and lyrical song of experience’: Walter Benjamin and a dialectical image of madness. Introduction to Walter Benjamin for psychiatry (III). International Review of Psychiatry, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540261.2024.2354375
Close colleagues and I also published simultaneously papers comparing the methods of Emil Kraepelin and Walter Benjamin. and Franco Basalgia and Walter Benjamin in their respective fields:
4-Becker, T., & Hoff, P. (2024). Emil Kraepelin and Walter Benjamin: distant contemporaries, diverse working methods, any resonance? International Review of Psychiatry, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540261.2024.2355994
5- Becker, T., Müller, T., Ikkos, G., & Speerforck, S. (2024). Radical social theorists Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin: can they help understand and power effective mental health reform? International Review of Psychiatry, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540261.2024.2364846
I agree with you that Walter Benjamin's conception of language has an enormous lot to offer psychiatrists. I found the following to be very clear, if also demanding, in the exposition of this theory:
6- Stern, A (2019) The Fall of Language: Benjamin and Wittgenstein on Meaning, Harvard University Press
Finally, my dear friend and collaborator Gio Stanghellini is doing a lot of immediately relevant writing which may interest you and the readers of your blog. For example:
7-Stanghellini, G. The Power of Images and the Logics of Discovery in Psychiatric Care. Brain
355 Sci. 2023, 13, 13. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci13010013
8- Stanghellini, G. Logics of Discovery II: Lessons from Poetry—Parataxis as a Method That
357 Can Complement the Narrative Compulsion in Vogue in Contemporary Mental Health
358 Care. Brain Sci. 2023, 13, 1368. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci13101368
I hope we can touch base some time!
George Ikkos
So grateful that someone is going this work. It's especially important for women who are often get diagnosed and medicated to silence legitimate grievances.
To quote J. Krishnamurti:
"It is no measure of health to be well adapted to a profoundly sick society."
<<It might be going too far to say that we need to “translate” psychotic language, for this implies too much (that it’s not English or Spanish because it’s psychotic, that “sanity” itself has a language), but the requirements for good translations are in essence the same as those for a productive linguistic encounter for someone in psychosis.>>
Perhaps we can think of it as not "going too far" but as not going far enough. Perhaps *every* communication between any two beings in the universe is always a translation between life-worlds. You have not had my experiences and you do not know precisely what my words mean to me when I express them. Even if you are my spouse or my sibling, even if you know me as well as anyone in the world: still, to an extent, you are always guessing at the precise meaning of my words.