All Categories
    Filters
    Preferences
    Search

    My madness saved me:Madness & marriage of Virginia Woolf

    £121.50
    £135.00
    Price-Match is available in-store for recommended titles in CCCU module handbooks
    ISBN: 9780765803214
    Products specifications
    Attribute nameAttribute value
    AuthorSZASZ,T
    Pub Date30/01/2006
    BindingHardback
    Pages173
    Publisher: TAYLOR & FRANCIS INC
    Ship to
    *
    *
    Shipping Method
    Name
    Estimated Delivery
    Price
    No shipping options
    Availability: In stock
    Looks at how Virginia Woolf, as well as her husband Leonard, used the concept of madness and the profession of psychiatry to manage and manipulate their own and each other's lives. The author interprets Virginia Woolf's life and work as expressions of her character, and her character as the "product" of her free will.

    The vast literature on Virginia Woolf's life, work, and marriage falls into two groups. A large majority is certain that she was mentally ill, and a small minority is equally certain that she was not mentally ill but was misdiagnosed by psychiatrists. In this daring exploration of Woolf's life and work, Thomas Szasz - famed for his radical critique of psychiatric concepts, coercions, and excuses - examines the evidence and rejects both views. Instead, he looks at how Virginia Woolf, as well as her husband Leonard, used the concept of madness and the profession of psychiatry to manage and manipulate their own and each other's lives. Szasz argues that Virginia Woolf was a victim neither of mental illness, nor psychiatry, nor her husband - three ways she is regularly portrayed. He finds her to be an intelligent and self-assertive person, a moral agent who used mental illness, psychiatry, and her husband to fashion for herself a life of her own choosing.
    This is not to impute to Virginia Woolf some sort of limitless freedom of the will, nor is it to deny that the cultural and social milieu in which she grew up and lived had a profound impact on her psyche and her sense of the life choices open to her. It is only to remind us of the primacy of Virginia Woolf as an active, goal-directed, moral agent, responsible equally for her madness-badness and her genius-creativity. Do we explain achievement when we attribute it to the fictitious entity we call "genius"? Do we explain failure when we attribute it to the fictitious entity we call "madness"? Or do we deceive ourselves the same way that the person deceives himself when he attributes the easy ignition of hydrogen to its being "flammable"? Szasz interprets Virginia Woolf's life and work as expressions of her character, and her character as the "product" of her free will. He offers this view as a corrective against the prevailing, ostensibly scientific view that attributes both her "madness" and her "genius" to biological-genetic causes. We tend to attribute exceptional achievement to genius, and exceptional failure to madness. Both, says Szasz, are fictitious entities.