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In Insanity and Sanctity in Byzantium, Youval Rotman shows how the Hellenistic and Jewish traditions intersected with the emerging Christian tradition and culture, which led to new forms of religious communities under Byzantine rule. He focuses here on figures who displayed extreme forms of behavior in that period: the holy fool, the ascetic, and the martyr. Their sanctification rendered their abnormalities functional in society, and shaped in complex ways the transition from paganism to Christianity.
Youval Rotman, a social historian of the ancient and early medieval Eastern Mediterranean world, taught in the history department at Yale before becoming Associate Professor of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University.
He begins this book with a study of insanity, locating his considerations in the shift in its definition in the 1960s and 1970s. This was the time of my own psychiatric and psychoanalytic training. I recall being very taken with the views of Michel Foucault on insanity, asylums, and prisons. I was influenced also by Thomas Szasz's book The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conflict (1961). Although Rotman does not cite him, Szasz too opposed the tendency to label people “disabled by living” as mentally ill, believing that psychological problems should not be classified as diseases.
Karl Menninger (I trained at the Menninger School of Psychiatry) exchanged letters with Szasz after publication of the latter's Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences (1987). In the letters both questioned the value of psychiatric diagnoses and supported the view that mental illness is an existential condition, not a medical one. I recall Karl's Saturday morning seminars at MSP in which he made it very clear that referring to a person as a schizophrenic was verboten. Both Menninger and Szasz believed in free will and individual responsibility, and they both had a place