Beneath the Form of Eternity: Wittgenstein, the Spirit, and Psychosis

Abstract

The study of mental disorder is historically riddled with the inflammatory suspicion that psychosis cohabits with sacred experience. Are the revelations and voices which characterize the great spiritual leaders and innovators no different from the religiously themed delusions and hallucinations of the psychotically ill? A Wittgensteinian approach to this dilemma questions the question, revealing what is already implicated in its framework. Cutting the problem off from the habits of thought which make it possible lays it finally to rest. We are then left to examine how the conceptual landscape of psychiatry shifts when the weight of the ‘Religion or Madness?’ construction—and the philosophical mistakes it exemplifies—is lifted. The resulting conceptual shifts allow us to work toward an understanding of those gripped by psychosis in which the life of the spirit is germane to psychiatry’s ordinary practices of healing.