Wisdom, Madness and Folly

Wisdom, Madness and Folly PDF Author: Ronald David Laing
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 0862418313
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
This remarkable autobiography charts the subtle horrors of Laing's own upbringing in the 1940s. The author's lucid and witty prose offers some unforgettable personal experiences and a host of cultural, political and professional insights.

Wisdom, Madness and Folly

Wisdom, Madness and Folly PDF Author: Ronald David Laing
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 0862418313
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
This remarkable autobiography charts the subtle horrors of Laing's own upbringing in the 1940s. The author's lucid and witty prose offers some unforgettable personal experiences and a host of cultural, political and professional insights.

Wisdom, madness & folly

Wisdom, madness & folly PDF Author: Ronald D. Laing
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


A Mad People’s History of Madness

A Mad People’s History of Madness PDF Author: Dale Peterson
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822974258
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
A man desperately tries to keep his pact with the Devil, a woman is imprisoned in an insane asylum by her husband because of religious differences, and, on the testimony of a mere stranger, "a London citizen" is sentenced to a private madhouse. This anthology of writings by mad and allegedly mad people is a comprehensive overview of the history of mental illness for the past five hundred years-from the viewpoint of the patients themselves.Dale Peterson has compiled twenty-seven selections dating from 1436 through 1976. He prefaces each excerpt with biographical information about the writer. Peterson's running commentary explains the national differences in mental health care and the historical changes that have take place in symptoms and treatment. He traces the development of the private madhouse system in England and the state-run asylum system in the United States. Included is the first comprehensive bibliography of writings by the mentally ill.

Madness and Civilization

Madness and Civilization PDF Author: Michel Foucault
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307833100
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 - from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and walls were erected between the "insane" and the rest of humanity.

The Praise of Folly

The Praise of Folly PDF Author: Desiderius Erasmus
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Folly
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Divine Madness

Divine Madness PDF Author: Harry Eiss
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443833290
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 525

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Book Description
Lila is Sanskrit for play, the play of the gods. It is the self-generating genesis of Bliss, created by Bliss for the purpose of Bliss. It is the uninhibited, impulsive sport of Brahman, the free spirit of creation that results in the spontaneous unfolding of the cosmos to be found in the eternity of each moment. It is beyond the confining locks and chains of reason, beyond the steel barred windows looking out from the cages of explanation, beyond the droning tick-tick-tick of the huge mechanical clocks of time. Come, let us enter the realm of the madman and the finely wrought threads of Clotho as they are measured out by Lachesis and cut by Atropos to create the great tapestry of life, including the intricate, intertwining designs of dementia with the trickster, the shaman, the scapegoat, the shadow, the artist and the savior. Come, let us join in the divine madness of the gods.

How I Became a Madman

How I Became a Madman PDF Author: Kahill Gibran
Publisher: Ronin Publishing (CA)
ISBN: 9781579512569
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
Known for his evocative book The Prophet, Gibran's most original work delineates madness -- the existential angst of melancholy and misfortune that separates the individual from society, not a formal mental illness. Gibran contrasts the normal individual who conforms to society's class, role, law, and behavior, with one who sees through hypocrisy, semblance, power, and judges others as ignorant, deceived, or treacherous -- the madman. While the world classifies him as mad, he is thewise one. HOW I BECAME A MADMAN consists of 34 short multi-paragraph sketches, vignettes, parables, and tales composed in a Nietzschean prophetic voice, the insights of Blake, and Eastern story-tellers. The opening passage presents Gibran's theme of madness as social separation: "You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen -- the seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives. I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting, "Thieves, thieves, the cursed thieves." Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me. And when I reached the market place, a youth standing on a house-top cried, "He is a madman." I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time. For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, "Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks." Thus I became a madman. And I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us. But let me not be too proud of my safety. Even a Thief in a jail is safe from another thief." Gibran shows that we wear masks to get along society that demands conformity for collective purposes, whereas to act without a mask, to think and speak and behave without the veil of illusion is to be mad. While being maskless frees us, it carries a risk of loneliness and misunderstanding as we become estranged from others. The Madman goes unnoticed, not listened to, and pitied by others. The press for conformity absorbs society like nothing else. When we look beneath the masks of daily life, we find hypocrisy, greed, pride, sloth, ambition, vanity, conformity. These people do not see anything wrong with the ways of the world. Instead, in madness there is wisdom. In HOW I BECAME A MADMAN a youth wants but to be himself, not what his parents and family demand he be, so he has fled to a madhouse --his hermitage -- to be what he wants to be. This is a heart-felt critique of hypocrisy, wealth, arrogance, and power versus the individual. Who has learned to disengage, to keep a distance while nevertheless relating to others with compassion and kindness.

Perfect Fools

Perfect Fools PDF Author: John Saward
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 9780192132307
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This title, by John Saward, explores foolishness and fools in Catholic and Orthodox spirituality.

Ecclesiastes

Ecclesiastes PDF Author:
Publisher: Canongate U.S.
ISBN: 9780802136145
Category : Bibles
Languages : en
Pages : 68

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Book Description
The publication of the King James version of the Bible, translated between 1603 and 1611, coincided with an extraordinary flowering of English literature and is universally acknowledged as the greatest influence on English-language literature in history. Now, world-class literary writers introduce the book of the King James Bible in a series of beautifully designed, small-format volumes. The introducers' passionate, provocative, and personal engagements with the spirituality and the language of the text make the Bible come alive as a stunning work of literature and remind us of its overwhelming contemporary relevance.

A Philosophy of Madness

A Philosophy of Madness PDF Author: Wouter Kusters
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262044285
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 769

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Book Description
The philosophy of psychosis and the psychosis of philosophy: a philosopher draws on his experience of madness. In this book, philosopher and linguist Wouter Kusters examines the philosophy of psychosis—and the psychosis of philosophy. By analyzing the experience of psychosis in philosophical terms, Kusters not only emancipates the experience of the psychotic from medical classification, he also emancipates the philosopher from the narrowness of textbooks and academia, allowing philosophers to engage in real-life praxis, philosophy in vivo. Philosophy and madness—Kusters's preferred, non-medicalized term—coexist, one mirroring the other. Kusters draws on his own experience of madness—two episodes of psychosis, twenty years apart—as well as other first-person narratives of psychosis. Speculating about the maddening effect of certain words and thought, he argues, and demonstrates, that the steady flow of philosophical deliberation may sweep one into a full-blown acute psychotic episode. Indeed, a certain kind of philosophizing may result in confusion, paradoxes, unworldly insights, and circular frozenness reminiscent of madness. Psychosis presents itself to the psychotic as an inescapable truth and reality. Kusters evokes the mad person's philosophical or existential amazement at reality, thinking, time, and space, drawing on classic autobiographical accounts of psychoses by Antonin Artaud, Daniel Schreber, and others, as well as the work of phenomenological psychiatrists and psychologists and such phenomenologists as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He considers the philosophical mystic and the mystical philosopher, tracing the mad undercurrent in the Husserlian philosophy of time; visits the cloud castles of mystical madness, encountering LSD devotees, philosophers, theologians, and nihilists; and, falling to earth, finds anxiety, emptiness, delusions, and hallucinations. Madness and philosophy proceed and converge toward a single vanishing point.