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Division/Reveiw: Please tell me a bit about what led you to write the book.
Orna Ophir: The initial reason was quite prosaic. First, it was a commissioned book. Pascal Porcheron, who was at the time an editor at Polity, started a new series about the history of health and illness, and he contacted us at the DeWitt institute for Psychiatry: History, Policy, and the Arts at Weill-Cornell Medical College here in Manhattan. He kindly asked me whether I would consider writing a book about the history of schizophrenia and whether, together with my colleagues, I could help him identify other authors who would write for the series about other psychiatric illnesses. At the time, I was working on a manuscript about the reception of Melanie Klein's thought in America for Routledge, with the planned ironic title Klein in America (klein meaning “small” in German). Still, I also taught a course about the history of madness at the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University, a course which I have continued to offer at NYU's Gallatin School for Individualized Studies since 2017. So, the idea of writing a book about the history of mental illnesses, in this case, schizophrenia, and of being further involved in advising the series indirectly was very appealing.
D/R: In my mind, the book broadly appeals to clinicians and academics interested in the history of psychosis and its treatment. I'm curious, though, if you anticipate it being received by psychoanalysts in the U.S. in any particular way.
OO: It was very satisfying to hear that the book also appeals to clinicians, which I heard from a few other colleagues. My hope and intention were to reach a wider readership, including those “in the trenches” of treating patients with these difficulties. I make the point in the book that, as clinicians, what we know about “schizophrenia” is often what we learned about it in our training. We are taught that “if it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck,”