Alien Landscapes? : : Interpreting Disordered Minds / / Jonathan Glover.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE Complete Package 2014
• VerfasserIn: Glover, Jonathan,
• Place / Publishing House: Cambridge, MA : : Harvard University Press, , [2014]; ©2014
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (448 p.) :; 27 color illustrations

We have made huge progress in understanding the biology of mental illnesses, but comparatively little in interpreting them at the psychological level. The eminent philosopher Jonathan Glover believes that there is real hope of progress in the human interpretation of disordered minds. The challenge is that the inner worlds of people with psychiatric disorders can seem strange, like alien landscapes, and this strangeness can deter attempts at understanding. Do people with disorders share enough psychology with other people to make interpretation possible? To explore this question, Glover tackles the hard cases-the inner worlds of hospitalized violent criminals, of people with delusions, and of those diagnosed with autism or schizophrenia. Their first-person accounts offer glimpses of inner worlds behind apparently bizarre psychiatric conditions and allow us to begin to learn the "language" used to express psychiatric disturbance. Art by psychiatric patients, or by such complex figures as van Gogh and William Blake, give insight when interpreted from Glover's unique perspective. He also draws on dark chapters in psychiatry's past to show the importance of not medicalizing behavior that merely transgresses social norms. And finally, Glover suggests values, especially those linked with agency and identity, to guide how the boundaries of psychiatry should be drawn. Seamlessly blending philosophy, science, literature, and art, Alien Landscapes? is both a sustained defense of humanistic psychological interpretation and a compelling example of the rich and generous approach to mental life for which it argues.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Prologue: Alien Landscapes? -- Part One: "Antisocial Personality," Values, Psychiatry -- Socratic Questions in Broadmoor -- The Contours of a Moral Landscape -- Childhood and After -- Interpreting This Landscape -- Shakespeare Comes to Broadmoor -- Part Two: On Human Interpretation -- Hopes for the Future of Psychiatry -- "A Skill So Deeply Hidden in the Human Soul" -- Intuitive Interpretation -- Reflective Interpretation -- Part Three: Human Interpretation in Psychiatry -- "A Gulf Which Defies Description" -- Autism and Interpretation -- Interpreting Delusions -- Waking Dreams -- Part Four: The Boundaries of Psychiatry -- The Need for Boundaries -- Personality and Sexuality -- Dysfunction? -- Harm -- What Is Autism? -- Crossing the Medical Boundary? -- Strands in a Good Human Life -- Part Five: Agency, Control, and Responsibility -- Brain, Mind, and Agency -- Psychiatric Conditions and the Framework of Responsibility -- What Is Addiction? -- Unwilling Addiction as Diminished Control -- Character, Personality Disorder, and Responsibility -- Part Six: Identity -- The Sense of Self -- Moral Identity and Moral Injury -- Psychotherapy, Autonomy, and Self-Creation -- Entrapment in Eating Disorders -- Authenticity and Identity in Eating Disorders -- Dementia, Responsibility, and Identity -- Schizophrenia -- Self-Creation, Values, and Psychiatric Disorder -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index