Voices of Reason, Voices of Insanity

by Leudar,Ivan

• ISBN13: 9780415147866
• ISBN10: 0415147867
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-06-20
• Publisher: Brunner-Routled

Summary

Records of people experiencing verbal hallucinations or hearing voices can be found throughout history.Voices of Reason, Voices of Insanityexamines almost 2,800 years of these reports including Socrates, Schreber and Pierre Janet's "Marcelle", to provide a clear understanding of the experience and how it may have changed over the millenia. Through six cases of historical and contemporary voice hearers, Leudar and Thomas demonstrate how the experience has metamorphosed from being a sign of virtue to a sign of insanity, signalling such illnesses as schizophrenia or dissociation. They argue that the experience is interpreted by the voice hearer according to social categories conveyed through language, and is therefore best studied as a matter of language use. Controversially, they conclude that 'hearing voices' is an ordinary human experience which is unfortunately either mystified or pathologised. Voices of Reason, Voices of Insanityoffers a fresh perspective on this enigmaticexperience and will be of interest to students, researchers and clinicians alike.

Author Biography

Ivan Leudar is Reader in Psychology at the University of Manchester Philip Thomas is a Consultant Psychiatrist with Bradford Community Trust and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bradford

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vii
Introduction	1	(6)
The daemon of Socrates	7	(21)
On the history of the concept of hallucination	8	(6)
The sign of Socrates	14	(11)
What the daemon of Socrates could do with words	25	(3)
The gods of Achilles	28	(24)
Julian Jaynes on gods and voices	29	(4)
Social action in the Iliad	33	(7)
The gods and heroes in the Iliad	40	(6)
The voices of Achilles	46	(6)
The souls of Daniel Paul Schreber	52	(17)
Pragmatics of Schreber's supernatural world	53	(7)
Mixing metaphors in the Court	60	(9)
Pierre Janet on verbal hallucinations: the case of Marcelle	69	(21)
Pragmatists on self	90	(17)
William James on consciousness of self	91	(7)
Mead on the socially reflexive self	98	(7)
Are voices mutations of self?	105	(2)
Verbal hallucinations in contemporary psychiatry	107	(22)
Hearing voices and psychopathology	108	(10)
Voices and therapists	118	(11)
Working with voices	129	(19)
The participants	131	(3)
Dialogical properties of Peg's voices	134	(10)
Follow-up	144	(4)
The frenzy of Anthony Smith: hearing voices in British national newspapers	148	(25)
Voices in British national newspapers	149	(3)
The frenzy of Anthony Smith	152	(14)
Voices in the House of Commons	166	(7)
Voice-talk	173	(34)
On what voices do with words	175	(25)
On mundane reality testing	200	(7)
Conclusion	207	(3)
Notes	210	(5)
Bibliography	215	(9)
Index	224