Madness And Subjectivity: A Cross-cultural Examination Of Psychosis In The West And India (concepts For Critical Psychology)

This crucial new work draws on empirical findings from rural North India in relation to madness and subjectivity, revealing the different structures of subjectivity underlying the narratives of schizophrenia, spirits, ghosts, and deities. Unravelling the loose ends of madness, the author explores the cultural differences in understanding and experiencing madness to examine how modern insanity is treated as a clinical disorder, but historically it represents how we form knowledge and understand self-knowledge. The author begins by theoretically investigating how the schizophrenic personifies the fractures in modern Western thought to explain why, despite decades of intense contention, the category of schizophrenia is still alive. She then examines the narratives of people in the Himalayan Mountains of rural India to reveal the discursive conditions that animate their stories around what psychology calls psychosis, critiquing the monoculturalism in trauma theory and challenging the ongoing march of the Global Mental Health Movement in the Global South. Examining what a study of madness reveals about two different cultures, and their ways of thinking and being, this is fascinating reading for students interested in mental health, critical psychology, and Indian culture. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Preface 1. Introduction An interrogation of madness The scope of the book Me and my measuring stick Conclusion 2. Inside schizophrenia: a house of mirrors History of madness in Foucault’s Madness and Civilization Mad doctors and medicine Capricious classifications Semantically schizophrenic Invigorated by institutions Mythologies and legends: the split and the stupor Schizophrenia: abuse and anti-psychiatry Schizophrenia: claims and cautions in current theories Conclusion Note 3. The “unalienated” alien: the schizophrenic as a hyper-modern subject Sass on modernity and madness The Order of Things: an introduction The god and the machine: living the doublet The un-grounding of language From blinding clarity to clear blindness Airplanes are birds: hyper-cognition The schizophrenic and the traumatic Schizophrenia and immigration: becoming unalienated through alienation Conclusion 4. Deities and desire: an analysis History of madness: India Hearing voices and seeing things: arural North Indian perspective But what about trauma? The “how”: beyond meaning Visibilities and institutions: inside the haunted temple of Balaji Subject positions: the delinquent, the criminal, and the afflicted Conclusion Note 5. The slip and the sane: an analysis of subjectivity The nomadic and the afflicted: parallels in desiring-production The slippery subject: effects and comparisons Conclusion 6. Case and point: the girl-child’s story The persistence of contradictions In-betweeners: the girl-child’s story Conclusion 7. No country for psychology The schizophrenic and the slippery Personalizing experience with globalized psychiatry Conclusion References Index This book seeks to excavate the differences between the post-colonial rural Indian form of subjectivity and the modern Western permutation of the same to bring forth the epistemic constraints that inform the understanding and experience of madness.