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Agnes Richter's hand-sewn jacket resides in a museum in Heidelberg. It is covered with an “intricate text [that was] embroidered in five colors over practically every inch of the garment,” (p. ix) circa 1895. Why
is it in a museum? It was collected by Heinz Prinzhorn, an art historian who trained as a psychiatrist (but never practiced) who “had a special interest in creativity and madness … and was committed to understanding the expressive impulse in its purest form” (p. x).
For Gail Hornstein, author of Agnes's Jacket: A Psychologist's Search for the Meanings of Madness, the jacket “precisely captures the fundamental conundrum of madness, an experience rich with symbolic meanings that are indecipherable by ordinary means” (p. xi).
Agnes's Jacket, among other things, is an ethnographic study of self-help groups for individuals who experience auditory hallucinations. It is written in the tradition of earlier psychiatrists like R. D. Laing and Thomas Szasz who sought to find meaning in what is conventionally regarded as meaningless insanity.
Hornstein positions herself as an opponent of pharmacological interventions for psychosis, asserting that “in the United States, psychiatry is entirely controlled by doctors, who have a direct economic interest in siding with the drug companies and preventing patients from treating themselves” (p. 53). In Hornstein's view, there is no scientific evidence demonstrating that any pharmacological interventions work.
As a result of her research, Hornstein believes hearing voices is often adaptive, and therefore natural and normal for those who hallucinate. She believes hearing voices is most likely caused by early trauma, and that “[s]exual abuse is, by far, the trauma most frequently found to precede voice hearing … [which] occurred most often when the trauma took place before the age of seven” (p. 41). Hornstein, who attended innumerable support groups both overseas and in the United States, summarizes her ethnographic research:
It took