Alastair Morgan is a Senior Lecturer, University of Manchester, UK.

This book explores how the continental philosophical tradition in the 20^th century attempted to understand madness as madness. It traces the paradoxical endeavour of reason attempting to understand madness without dissolving the inherent strangeness and otherness of madness. It provides a comprehensive overview of the contributions of phenomenology, critical theory, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism and anti-psychiatry to continental philosophy and psychiatry. The book outlines an intellectual tradition of psychiatry that is both fascinated by and withdraws from madness. Madness is a lure for philosophy in two senses; as both trap and provocation. It is a trap because this philosophical tradition constructs an otherness of madness so profound, that it condemns madness to silence. However, the idea of madness as another world is also a fertile provocation because it respects the non-identity of madness to reason. The book concludes with some critical reflections on therole of madness in contemporary philosophical thought.

Alastair Morgan is a Senior Lecturer, University of Manchester, UK.

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Part I: Three Inclusive Exclusions.- Chapter 2: "A subtle, pervasive and strangely uncertain light": Jaspers on understanding madness.- Chapter 3: "As strange to me as the birds in the garden": Bleuler, Jung and the creation of schizophrenia.- Chapter 4: A distance from all that is human: Freud and Psychosis.- Part II: Through a glass darkly.- Chapter 5: Vital Contact.- Chapter 6: Ipseity.- Chapter 7: The Body.- Chapter 8: Being-in-the-world.- Part III: It's a Mad world.- Chapter 9: "The world cannot acknowledge its own madness": alienation and the destruction of experience.- Chapter 10: Reification and Schizophrenia - a socio-pathological parallelism.- Chapter 11: Beware, Marcuse!.- Chapter 12: "O my body. . .": Fanon and the pathologies of recognition.- Part IV: "A certain madness must watch over thinking".- Chapter 13: "In the distance of madness": Foucault and the History of Madness.- Chapter 14: The lure of madness.- Chapter 15: Lacan: the shadow of madness.- Chapter 16: The ineffable and limit-experience.- Part V: Anti -Psychiatry and madness.- Chapter 17: Capitalism and schizophrenia.- Chapter 18: A germinal anti-psychiatry: R.D. Laing's wild empathy.- Chapter 19: "It all began with a 'no'": The Institution negated.- Chapter 20: Epilogue - The end of madness?.