Mind, Modernity, Madness

Liah Greenfeld

“Explaining madness in cultural terms is what makes Greenfeld’s book so audacious. A classical parallel would be with Durkheim’s attempt to explain suicide through sociological categories. Her reasoning is strong; the data extensive; the conclusions counterintuitive. The book represents a triumph of imaginative thought.”—Peter Baehr, Lingnan University

“What most distinguishes Greenfeld’s model of the mind from so much else in the field is that she brings together biological and cultural approaches to mental illness inclusively rather than exclusively, in a way that enlarges rather than diminishes both. While accepting the biological reality of major mental illnesses, her analysis is focused not simply on the brain, in a reductive sense, but on the mind as a product of experience and learning as well as biology. Likewise, she applies cultural concepts to psychiatry not in the reductive, purely social-constructionist manner of Laing, Foucault, and Szasz, but so as to foster understanding of cultural and historical variations in the incidence and expression of mental illness that biology alone cannot explain.”—Harold J. Bursztajn, M.D., Harvard Medical School

“Liah Greenfeld has written a book of weight (figuratively and literally) and power. It is an avalanche that pulls the reader with it into a new landscape.”—Charles Lindholm, Boston University