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This book is as complex as its subject matter. Even if one is familiar with its territory, it takes some time to orient oneself in the text. So let me begin by decoding a little. De Waelhens and Ver Eecke come from a primarily philosophical background which includes the phenomenological and linguistic traditions of the 20th century (Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein). Like many philosophers, they were led to psychoanalysis and to the work of Jacques Lacan, who himself integrated the above philosophers into his approach.
This book is actually two books. The original text on schizophrenia by De Waelhens, written and published over 20 years ago, has been edited by Ver Eecke, who has then added a text of his own. But the focus of this book is “madness”—more specifically “schizophrenia.” Psychoanalysis and phenomenology are linked in that they are the main disciplines which have questioned the objective knowledge of man and have restored the validity and even primacy of the subject—the subjective position. Phenomenological and existential psychiatry sought to respect and learn from the world of the patient's inner experience, and developed psychiatric environments where this could be done. Freud's psychoanalytic approach of listening non-judgmentally to the expression of the patient's inner world opened a dream space in everyday life outside the medical-scientific institutionalization for anyone to work through a symptom. This became the basis for the work of Michel Foucault, R. D. Laing, and others to analyze the social construction of “madness” as what is excluded from the socially agreed upon states of normality and health.
De Waelhens and Ver Eecke do not go that far. They accept schizophrenia as a state even if they don't necessarily condone the psychiatric label and its defining characteristics. By placing his text within the medical-scientific model, they demonstrate the effectiveness of psychotherapeutic approaches to schizophrenia from a variet