On Madness Understanding the Psychotic Mind

Breaking away from standard approaches to psychotic thought, philosopher and clinical psychologist Richard G. T. Gipps reclaims the idea that there is something fundamentally incomprehensible about delusion.Carefully acknowledging the ways in which psychosis can be made intelligible, Gipps reveals the limitations of a rationally-intelligible response to disturbing existential thought. Without ever losing sight of the fact that we are talking about the suffering of real people, he introduces psychotic thought as an unmooring from the world that causes reason’s practical footing to falter. Thoughtfully combining first-person memoirs and clinical material, Gipps pinpoints the ways thought and experience can involve a loss of reason and indeed of one’s mind.This understanding of psychotic thought as the total collapse of reality allows us to better grasp what it means to suffer delusion, hallucination and self-disturbances. Gipps encourages us to stay within this rational irretrievability and finally offer true recognition to the psychotic subject in their suffering. This striking and urgent book widens our appreciation of what it is to understand the thought of another person, giving us a more human psychiatry.