Green420
Well-Known Member
Read the preface and first Chapter of David Cooper's Psychiatry and Anti Psychiatry. The purpose of this book is to reverse the trajectory of blame, from being held by the prejudices of society, and being places on schizophrenic patients, to looking at the way the schizophrenic patient is not a fixed idea, but rather never repeats. It's very Deleuzian, it's basically a way of saying that the way we look at schizophrenia is not so much an illness that corresponds to something in the brain, but rather schizophrenia relates to a "dialectical" "totality" which takes on different aspects throughout the person's life. So a person can become a certain way because of the events in their life, and often times we blame the schizophrenic patient for acting in a way which is socially unacceptable, and we see the schizophrenic as fixed, whereas Cooper wants to look at people as a mobile totality, not a straight line. Cooper does indeed use line metaphors in a way that breaks away from them, much like a line of flight in Deleuze and Guattari, reference how true repetition is impossible, also like D & G. I would say this rare paperback spits hot fire, one of the best things I've read all summer.
