Description:
This book shows how an understanding of the nature and role of insanity in Hegel's writing provides intriguing new points of access to many of the central themes of his larger philosophic project. Berthold-Bond situates Hegel's theory of madness within the history of psychiatric practice during the great reform period at the turn of the eighteenth century, and shows how Hegel developed a middle path between the stridently opposed camps of "empirical" and "romantic" medicine, and of "somatic" and "psychical" practitioners.
A key point of the book is to show that Hegel does not conceive of madness and health as strictly opposing states, but as kindred phenomena sharing many of the same underlying mental structures and strategies, so that the ontologies of insanity and rationality involve a mutually illuminating, mirroring relation. Hegel's theory is tested against the critiques of the institution of psychiatry and the very concept of madness by such influential twentieth-century authors as Michel Foucault and Thomas Szasz, and defended as offering a genuinely reconciling position in the contemporary debate between the "social labeling" and "medical" models of mental illness.
Brief description: Daniel Berthold-Bond is Professor of Philosophy at Bard College. He is the author of Hegel's Grand Synthesis: A Study of Being, Thought, and History, also published by SUNY Press.
Review Quotes:
"This book provides us with a very intelligent understanding of Hegel's view of madness, especially in its comparative strengths relative to more influential views such as Freud's. The author also helpfully relates Hegel to some very current debates about the precise status of insanity." -- William Desmond, Loyola College"