Postmodern cultural theory has expanded the term ‘schizophrenia’ into a philosophical concept beyond its clinical application. For example, Frederick Jameson argues that postmodernism leads to the fragmentation of the subject. A coherent sense of self is a function of language and schizophrenia is a form of ‘linguistic malfunction’. This book tries to answer the question why schizophrenia came to be seen as representative of postmodern subjectivity.

To answer this question, it utilises the aesthetic category of the sublime. The author, who is lecturer in medical humanities at Durham University, admits that the relevance of the sublime to an inquiry into theoretical representations of schizophrenia may not be immediately obvious. Schizophrenia for psychiatry has been at once feared and also a delight to try and comprehend, if that is ever possible. It has been seen as the prototypical psychiatric disorder, to use Mary Boyle’s phrase. Some might argue that bipolar disorder is now the prototypical disorder of psychiatry. But this does not alter the author’s historical narrative. She utilises the notion of the disciplinary sublime to point out that schizophrenia has attracted such disciplinary attention that it has marked the “provisional limits and flash points” of psychiatry, to use Mark Cheetham’s words.

Psychoanalysis distinguishes itself from psychiatry by its attention to the content of schizophrenic symptoms. Daniel Paul Schreber’s self-published autobiography Memoirs of my mental illness is taken by the author as the exemplary psychotic text. This makes sense considering its significance for Freud and Lacan, amongst others. Interpretative accounts of Schreber’s text aim to find the master key to understanding the paranoid narrative. This framing of schizophrenia as sublime text is the author’s second distinct representational mode of the schizophrenic sublime.

The third is the celebration of schizophrenia as an experience of the sublime in anti‑psychiatry and Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. Thomas Szasz’s negation of schizophrenia as the sacred symbol of psychiatry is ‘anti-sublime’. By contrast, Laing in his reference in The politics of experience to schizophrenia as an ecstatic voyage into ‘inner space’ opened up the possibility in Anti-Oedipus for the revolt against the repression of desire. For Deluze and Guattari, the revolutionary and revelatory figure of the schizophrenic is the paradigm to understand subjectivity in the late capitalist era.

Louis Sass’s phenomenological approach to schizophrenia tries to make sense of schizophrenia, and therefore situates it outside the author’s logic of the sublime. Nonetheless she considers it in some detail, usefully discussing how Sass relates modernity rather than postmodernism to schizophrenia.

The fourth mode of schizophrenic sublimity is what the author calls the paradoxical sublime. Schizophrenia is both ‘used and abused’ by postmodern cultural theorists as a heuristic device to explore the experience of postmodernity. For Jameson and Baudrillard, the figure of the ‘the schizophrenic’ is not identified as the revolutionary but the casualty of late capitalist modernity. The figure of ‘the schizophrenic’ is representative of all postmodern subjects. The author goes go to describe what a ‘postmodern schizophrenia’ might look like or feel like utilising Bret Easton Ellis’s novel Glamorama.

I want to do this complex book justice. It is a very bold project to combine clinical and cultural theory so extensively in answering a question that has generally been ignored about why postmodern theory references schizophrenia. My superficial summary of the author’s argument does not describe the depth and richness of her material. The writing of this book was a ten year enterprise for her.

I think she has been largely successful in her aim. Personally, I’m still not completely converted to her centralizing the notion of the sublime. It’s a clever tactic, but I just wonder if the links she makes could still be described without conceptualizing them though the category of the sublime. She may be on to something, but I just wonder if she stretches the notion too much in making the connections she does. Certainly, as she says, although not explicitly stated, Jameson and Baudrillard are in debt to Anti‑Oedipus. If you’re interested in the links between the postmodern notion of ‘schizophrenia’ and cultural theory, read this book. I think this book should be discussed more widely.

© 2012 Duncan Double

Duncan Double is a Consultant Psychiatrist and Honorary Senior Lecturer, Norfolk & Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust and University of East Anglia, UK; blogs at critical psychiatry.