Schizophrenia and postmodern philosophy

Abstract

This essay examines the postmodern idea that the schizophrenic process can be seen as a strategy of disruption, to be directed against the stability and productive forces of modern capitalism. The modern idea that schizophrenia itself is a correctable form of mental illness is also examined, and this assumption is related to issues about power and control encountered in cultural, social and psychological studies. These issues center around the different ways that modernist and postmodernist thinkers approach schizophrenic experience. Issues pertaining to social control and its connection to the nature of personal identity are examined, as are modernist and postmodernist responses to the double bind experience. Strategies of modernist control and postmodernist disruption are compared and contrasted.