Psychiatry And Anti-Psychiatry
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
At the crossroads of medicine, philosophy, and radical social thought, Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry presents one of the most incendiary challenges ever mounted against the psychiatric establishment. David Cooper, a South African-born psychiatrist and a central figure in the 1960s anti-psychiatry movement, draws on his landmark Villa 21 experiment — a therapeutic community within a conventional psychiatric hospital — to argue that schizophrenia is not a discrete biological illness but a social crisis manufactured and reinforced by family structures and institutional power. With unflinching intellectual rigour, Cooper details how the very apparatus designed to heal the mentally ill may instead function as an instrument of social control, stripping individuals of their autonomy and labelling deviance as disease. Cooper's work stands as a foundational text alongside R.D. Laing's writings, sharing a conviction that madness must be understood as a meaningful human experience rather than a pathology to be suppressed. His prose is urgent and polemical, blending clinical observation with existentialist and Marxist critique in a style that is as provocative as it is persuasive. Decades after its first publication, the questions it raises about the ethics of diagnosis, the politics of confinement, and the definition of sanity itself remain startlingly unresolved — leaving the reader to wonder precisely where the boundaries of the normal mind truly lie.
Author: David Cooper
Format: Paperback
Genre: Psychology
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
At the crossroads of medicine, philosophy, and radical social thought, Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry presents one of the most incendiary challenges ever mounted against the psychiatric establishment. David Cooper, a South African-born psychiatrist and a central figure in the 1960s anti-psychiatry movement, draws on his landmark Villa 21 experiment — a therapeutic community within a conventional psychiatric hospital — to argue that schizophrenia is not a discrete biological illness but a social crisis manufactured and reinforced by family structures and institutional power. With unflinching intellectual rigour, Cooper details how the very apparatus designed to heal the mentally ill may instead function as an instrument of social control, stripping individuals of their autonomy and labelling deviance as disease. Cooper's work stands as a foundational text alongside R.D. Laing's writings, sharing a conviction that madness must be understood as a meaningful human experience rather than a pathology to be suppressed. His prose is urgent and polemical, blending clinical observation with existentialist and Marxist critique in a style that is as provocative as it is persuasive. Decades after its first publication, the questions it raises about the ethics of diagnosis, the politics of confinement, and the definition of sanity itself remain startlingly unresolved — leaving the reader to wonder precisely where the boundaries of the normal mind truly lie.