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A leading interpreter of modernity argues that our culture of limitless self-fulfillment is making millions mentally ill. Training her analytic eye on manic depression and schizophrenia, Liah Greenfeld, in the culminating volume of her trilogy on nationalism, traces these dysfunctions to society’s overburdening demands for self-realization.
- Sales Rank: #1188956 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-04-01
- Released on: 2013-04-01
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
Mind, Modernity, Madness displays an astonishing level of research...Greenfeld's book most persuasively demonstrates the lack of consensus in the scientific community and beyond, over the causes, treatment and prevalence of schizophrenia and manic depression, both in America and worldwide...Liah Greenfeld's call for a broader understanding of the role of culture in the growth of the illnesses of schizophrenia and manic depression seems perfectly timed to join the debate over the balance between science and culture in the diagnosis and treatment of these complex illnesses. (Catherine McKenna MAKE: A Literary Magazine 2013-06-01)
Liah Greenfeld has written a book of weight (figuratively and literally) and power. It is an avalanche that pulls the reader with it into a new landscape. (Charles Lindholm, Boston University)
Explaining madness in cultural terms is what makes Greenfeld's book so audacious. A classical parallel would be with Durkheim's attempt to explain suicide through sociological categories. Her reasoning is strong; the data extensive; the conclusions counterintuitive. The book represents a triumph of imaginative thought. (Peter Baehr, Lingnan University)
What most distinguishes Greenfeld's model of the mind from so much else in the field is that she brings together biological and cultural approaches to mental illness inclusively rather than exclusively, in a way that enlarges rather than diminishes both. While accepting the biological reality of major mental illnesses, her analysis is focused not simply on the brain, in a reductive sense, but on the mind as a product of experience and learning as well as biology. Likewise, she applies cultural concepts to psychiatry not in the reductive, purely social-constructionist manner of Laing, Foucault, and Szasz, but so as to foster understanding of cultural and historical variations in the incidence and expression of mental illness that biology alone cannot explain. (Harold J. Bursztajn, M.D., Harvard Medical School)
Greenfeld offers a sweeping, sociologically grounded theory of the relationship between madness, mind, and society…It is a significant contribution to understanding mental illness and the more general interplay between mind, self, and society. (S. C. Ward Choice 2013-10-01)
[A] magnificent sweep of several fields…Those apt to gain most from Greenfeld’s remarkable tome are biological psychiatrists, legislators, and community leaders. Physicians, behavioral scientists, futurists, parents, and academicians will find the read exhilarating and useful. Cultural psychiatrists, ethnopsychiatric investigators, and psychiatric epidemiologists--those least apt to realize totally new understandings--will still find their comprehensions expanded in unanticipated ways. (Joseph Westermeyer American Journal of Psychiatry 2014-02-01)
About the Author
Liah Greenfeld is University Professor and Professor of Political Science, Sociology, and Anthropology at Boston University.
Most helpful customer reviews
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Being mindful of culture
By Michael Ben-Chaim
Mental disorders such as manic depression and schizophrenia are widely construed by experts and the general public as natural phenomena caused by physical processes in the brain. Our understanding of these disorders has been shaped by neuropsychiatric research as well as by the materialist belief that the physical nature of human beings and the environment is the ultimate cause of human behavior.
But how valid is the materialist notion of cause and effect? The answer, as demonstrated by David Hume in the 18th century and reaffirmed by many philosophers ever since, is that causal explanations, in general, cannot be conclusively proved or refuted. Products of human imagination and ingenuity, explanations are more or less successful or satisfactory depending, in part, on the values, concerns, and interests of the beholder. A skeptical approach to materialist explanations of mental illnesses is vital to the search for new and hopefully better theories and forms of therapy.
Liah Greenfeld's Mind, Modernity, Madness is an intellectually audacious and thought-provoking masterpiece of scholarship that demonstrates a new way of understanding schizophrenia, manic depression, and similar mental disorders in contemporary society. Her approach to the study of mental disorders is extremely important precisely because it shows why we ought to be skeptical about materialistic accounts of human nature. Our emotions and behaviors are responses to the environment, yet our experience of ourselves and the environment is molded by human culture. Hence, culture and its intricate history ought to play a critical role in the endeavor to understand human emotions and behaviors and modify them when they seem to be inadequate or harmful.
Mind, Modernity, Madness is the culminating volume of Greenfeld's modern nationalism trilogy. Like her two earlier volumes, it demonstrates meticulous attention to historical evidence coupled with rigorous analysis. Nationalism, according to Greenfeld, originated in early modern England and has gradually become one of the most powerful cultural factors shaping human identity and human conduct throughout the world. Its core principles are popular sovereignty, equality, and secularism, which often encourage individuals who grow up and mature in national communities to feel entitled to the freedom to determine themselves and their life projects in light of their aspirations and ambitions. But what happens when an individual's sense of self-empowerment and determination somehow becomes too overwhelming and unmanageable? Greenfeld's answer to this and related questions is a riveting study of more than four centuries of grappling with the modern condition of humanity across Europe and the United States.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
compelling cultural etiology of mental disorder
By Jonathan C. Gagas
Liah Greenfeld's work of historical sociology rings truer for me as a humanities scholar interested in psychology than any book about modernity I've read since Joyce's Ulysses, back in 2006. "The mind is individualized culture" supported and conditioned by human bodies, Greenfeld claims, in the boldest sentence I've read all year. In prose that crackles with novel propositions that seem self-evident, she says what many of us in the humanities and social sciences who reject both physicalist theories of mind and nominalist accounts of mental disorder have been trying to argue for a few decades. All who write about mental disorders, treat them, have them, or know people who do owe it to themselves to read this book, as does everyone interested in Western modernity, Protestant England onward, and all looking for an explanation of America's rash of mass shootings, aside from the obvious one of U.S. gun laws and gun culture.
By madness, Greenfeld means the three major conditions that feature psychosis induced by neither mind-altering substances nor brain degeneration: depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. These three disorders, she claims, are real disorders of real minds, though imperfectly explained by biomedical, psychodynamic, and social constructionist theories. Her theory of mental disorder resembles those by revivers of existential-phenomenological psychiatry like Louis Sass, Matthew Ratcliffe, Josef Parnas, Giovanni Stanghellini, and Rene Rosfort, but with an emphasis on historical breadth rather than the descriptive depth characteristic of that field. Mind, Modernity, Madness thus supplements that holistic tradition of understanding madness with an explanation of madness's emergence, from sixteenth-century England to the twentieth-century United States and the current epidemic of anxiety and depression in much of the developed world.
Drawing on ample archival research and a thorough understanding of psychiatry and psychology, Greenfeld claims that madness is the price paid by the developed world for replacing communities knitted together by traditions with nation-states organized by the liberal values of equality, liberty, and religious tolerance. For a significant minority of these nation-states' populations, the identity-formation responsibilities and pressures inherent in such societies, such as an ever-expanding array of choices and the reflexive thinking it promotes, combines with biological predispositions to result in madness.
Greenfeld organizes her argument as follows:
1. Matter, an expanding set of physical and chemical processes, is the most fundamental level of reality.
2. The hard sciences provide the most desirable explanations of matter because of their explanatory power, prevention of solipsistic and chaotic worldviews, and mitigating effect on violence motivated by religion.
3. Science depends on logic.
4. Logic depends on belief in the principle of non-contradiction.
5. Science arose in Europe and its colonies most quickly because Thales of Miletus encountered monotheism in Hebrew scriptures and formulated the principle of non-contradiction in response to the idea of a universe ordered by a single will, thus giving rise to Plato's Demiurge and Aristotle's Prime Mover, then the orderly forces theorized by modern physics.
6. Life, a set of organic processes, emerges from matter.
7. Darwinian evolution is the best explanation of life.
8. Culture, a set of symbolic processes, emerges from life.
9. The social sciences provide the best explanations of culture when they're not distorted by ideology.
10. "The mind is individualized culture."
11. The abovementioned disorders are diseases of the mind.
12. They involve the brain, as all mental processes do.
13. More specifically, these disorders are diseases of the will, as distinct from the thinking self and the relational self, i.e. identity, though they affect these other two components of the mind in increasing degrees of complexity, from depression to bipolar to schizophrenia.
14. Depression cripples the will's motivation of the body and control over the content of thought.
15. Bipolar disorder cripples the will's motivation and restriction of the body and control over the content of thought.
16. Schizophrenia cripples motivation and/or restriction but also loosens the will's grip on the structure of thought, thus resulting in hyper-reflexive thinking with either a shallow but rigid sense of identity, as in paranoia, a precarious sense of identity, as in the delusions of alienation and putrefaction/immortality/deadness called Capgras syndrome and Cotard's syndrome, respectively, or no sense of identity at all, in which case the mind disintegrates. In the latter case, "schizophrenics, in a way, have culture, always multi-perspectival, think for them and language, always multivalent, speak for them" (27).
17. Modern nation-states make stable identity formation difficult and precarious for many of their members.
18. Modern nation-states, often reinforced by families and other institutions that help individuals form their identities, combine with the biology of individuals to cause madness.
This argument demonstrates that Foucault's 50-year-old monograph, Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l'âge Classique (abridged as Madness and Civilization, later published in English translation as History of Madness), has lost whatever explanatory power it once had. Future intellectual historians will regard it as an exemplar of the political currents of post-World-War-II France affecting academia in the late twentieth century, then losing their intellectual appeal in the twenty-first.
Greenfeld has refuted contemporary anti-psychiatrists' explanations of mental disorder until and unless someone comes up with a persuasive libertarian theory of mind, which seems unlikely given the inherently social nature of language and its crucial role in constituting human experience. Sometimes, helping those who suffer simply matters more than radical politics, and, Greenfeld argues, cultural reform provides a more realistic means of helping such people and reducing the rate of madness. Drugs and psychotherapy can help those with mental disorders, but they're not enough to solve the larger cultural problem. To do so, other institutions must become more therapeutic and humane.
Rather than judging the mentally disordered as insufficiently strong and revolutionary, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari do in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Greenfeld takes a pragmatic approach by advocating the continuing reform of psychiatry and psychology, and the reconceptualization of education as a tool for helping members of modern nation-states form livable identities with as much awareness of the advantages and pitfalls of such societies as possible. Greenfeld's position entails a model of humanistic education focused on neither technical training as an end in itself nor an anachronistically Romantic idea of Great Books written by geniuses, but rather on understanding incompatible means of identity-formation. In this model, a radicalization of Alasdair MacIntyre's and Gerald Graff's, ancient and medieval texts archive not only beliefs and practices different from modern ones, but minds structured differently from ours.
The price paid by ancient and medieval cultures for their unity and stability was the unnecessary suffering and stunted potential of most people touched by their power: women, slaves, barbarians, sinners, idolaters, heretics, infidels, Untouchables, serfs, and peasants. The price paid by modern liberal cultures for their lack of unity and stability is the unnecessary suffering and stunted potential of the mentally disordered: a minority, but a significant and growing one. Greenfeld's book asks us moderns to set aside our hubris and work toward creating new syntheses of traditions and modern values.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
A new foundation for the human sciences
By dphillippi
For the sake of disclosure: I am a former student of the author and read an advance copy of the book.
Quite simply, this is an extremely important work. Greenfeld lays out a general, integrated theory of culture and mind, hoping to provide a common basis from which the work of the various "human sciences" - sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, political science, economics, etc. - which are often at odds, can proceed. This is obviously no small task, and therefore the first section of the book is devoted to providing the philosophical justification and explanation of the theory. This section deserves the attention of those interested in philosophy (and in particular philosophy of science, mind, and language), as well as the aforementioned "human sciences."
The central empirical claim of the book is just as surprising: madness as we know it today, (in particular those illnesses diagnosed as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression), is a biologically real but historically recent phenomenon with a cultural cause. That cause, Greenfeld argues, is nationalism, the specifically modern form of consciousness which she has written about in previous works. The open social structure of modern societies and the numerous competing and contradictory cultural messages lead to problems of self-definition for an alarmingly large number of individuals. Identity being in Greenfeld's framework the central organizing structure of the human mind, the consequences of this failure to form a stable and satisfactory identity range from a general malaise to acute psychosis.
This hypothesis obviously contradicts the conventional explanation of mental illness - that its causes are biological (primarily genetic) and as such it occurs with roughly the same frequency throughout history and across cultures. Greenfeld's hypothesis also rejects the various social constructionist accounts which suggest that mental illness categories have been created as ways of reinforcing power or marginalizing individuals and groups who manifest certain characteristics which fall outside accepted social norms. But Greenfeld is not merely putting forth an alternative hypothesis - she systematically demonstrates through examination of the authoritative texts on schizophrenia and bipolar and analysis of historical and epidemiological data how the genetic/biological paradigm fails to account adequately for the evidence, and shows that when reinterpreted in light of her cultural hypothesis, evidence that was previously minimized or considered anomalous or arbitrary takes on new meaning. Additionally, Greenfeld tries to explain historically how certain aspects of modern culture led to the dominance of the genetic/biological framework in the first place.
The above synopsis, while far from explaining every aspect of the book, should be enough to demonstrate why it is guaranteed to be controversial. But Greenfeld's hypothesis deserves consideration at least as careful as that which she gives to currently accepted models, and even if the reader remains skeptical, it is difficult to imagine how previously held notions of culture and mental illness could remain undisturbed.
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