This book sets out to explain what madness, or psychosis (these words are used interchangeably by the author), is, in a uniquely accessible way. Starting from rejection of multiplying diagnoses of the modern day and time, Leader asks questions about underlying structures of psyche as well as places of their possible breakdowns, and posits madness as a question of failure to integrate or interpret meaning.
He dedicates a fair share of the book to discussing “quiet”, everyday madness that has not erupted – or potentially will never erupt – and hence has not acquired a plethora of loud, noticeable symptoms. Madness, he says, is usually compatible with “normal” life (analysing, among others, the case of Harold Shipman, british serial killer), and understanding this helps us understand how to proceed and care for those, whose psychosis has been triggered. Interestingly (and contrary to general knowledge and common sense), Leader states that the noticeable, “loud“ symptoms of a triggered psychosis usually point to the attempts of psychotic subject to cure themselves, and not to the root of the illness.
The book is full of case studies and examples of direct speech – something, Leader says, is missing from the majority of modern psychiatric literature or therapy reports. Instead of seeing the therapist as a figure of authority, as an expert, who aims to provide their patient with one-size-fits-all algorithmic treatment, he believes that patient and therapist must be working together, as colleagues, on mending the breakdown of meaning. It was Lacan who said that therapists must be “secretaries to the insane”. And after reading this account of what madness is, I incline to agree on this with both Lacan and Leader.
This is in no way a bad book. I really enjoyed the last essay of the volume on the development of sexual work in the US and Britain (except for the unabashed Freud-bashing, but that was expected). However, I found the way in which the essays were arranged to be a little tedious (to a savvy Federici reader), circling around pretty much the same thing, using the same examples and the same quotes over and over again. I almost feel like this could have been rewritten to make up one single essay on the concept of “the patriarchy of the wage”, instead of every essay introducing a small piece of missing information or a little new idea of some sort. Although there's clearly a lot of value in introducing the reader to the classics such as “Counterplanning from the Kitchen” in their original form, Federici's 2012 book Revolution at Point Zero does, in my opinion, a better job since it both reproduces her older classic texts and deals with a variety of subjects.
In this incredible collection of highly sympathetic interviews Vivian Gornick sheds light on what compelled Americans from different walks of life to become a part of CPUSA: be it loneliness of human condition, intense need to be a part of history or desire to understand their place in the world. At the centre of the book she places the contradiction between “the visionary discovery of the self”, the hunger for a new method of knowing life that made Americans into Communists in the first place, and deadening dogma that often accompanied them on the way out of CPUSA and that unmade them. She asks if CPUSA and its achievements were at all possible if not for the stifling straightjacket of organisation and discipline (qualities that the modern day left wing scene seems to lack) and if those qualities were only the logical continuation of the nineteen century radicalism – precisely, the spirit of time looking at itself in the mirror.
These longings haunted the Communists, arising as they did out of one of the great human hungers, a hunger that finally had a life of its own; so that while at first Communists fed the hunger, at last the hunger fed off them.
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