Reply to Barnaby Barratt

Iwould first like to thank Barnaby Barratt for the many kind words he said about Madness and Modernism. I am gratified that he found the core of my book—the portrait of schizophrenic existence and the parallels drawn between this kind of experience and certain aspects of the art, literature, and philosophy of the last 100 years—to be compelling and worthwhile. The book is a hermeneutic study, an exercise in comparative phenomenology: I argue that a great many features of schizophrenia can best be understood as manifesting not the regression or dementia traditionally postulated, but various kinds of alienation and hyper-self-consciousness. As Barratt acknowledges, his criticisms are largely directed to issues that are treated at the end of Madness and Modernism and are somewhat peripheral to its central phenomenological themes—namely, issues of explanation (the etiological question of the possible social causation of schizophrenia) and of evaluation (my assessment of certain postmodernist figures). He also criticizes what he sees as my acceptance of three traditional distinctions: between culture and psyche, rational and irrational, and normal and abnormal. Given the overall tenor of Barratt's generous and appreciative review, it feels slightly churlish to be drafting this reply; nevertheless I shall endeavor to answer his criticisms and reservations.

Let me first address Barratt's criticism of me for distinguishing too sharply between culture and psyche. As a hermeneutically inclined scholar, I certainly agree that the two are interdependent, indeed in certain respects inseparable, as two aspects of the same, mutually interpenetrating human reality (as I thought I had made clear enough in my book). But this does not mean that it is not possible, indeed at times absolutely necessary, to separate them for analytic purposes. In my epilogue I am addressing the widespread medical-psychiatric view that schizophrenia is in all significant respects a biological illne