title: Schizophrenia, reification and deadened life.
abstract: Recent debates concerning the abolition of the schizophrenia label in psychiatry have focused upon problems with the scientific status of the concept. In this article, I argue that rather than attacking schizophrenia for its lack of scientific validity, we should focus on the conceptual history of this label. I reconstruct a specific tradition when exploring the conceptual history of schizophrenia. This is the concern with the question of the sense of life itself, conducted through the confrontation with schizophrenia as a form of life that does not live, or as Robert Jay Lifton termed it "lifeless life" (1979: 222-39). I conclude by arguing that the contemporary attempt to deconstruct or abolish the schizophrenia concept involves a fundamental shift in concern. The attempt both to normalize psychotic experiences, and to conceive them purely in terms of cognitive processes that can be mapped onto brain function, results in a fundamental move away from the attempt to understand the experience of madness.
authors.affiliation: University of Nottingham, UK.
authors.forename: Alastair
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Morgan
mesh_terms: D001294:Attitude to Health / Q000208:ethnology; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000208:ethnology / Q000266:history; D003469:Culture; D049673:History, 20th Century; D019369:Life; D011570:Psychiatry / Q000193:education / Q000266:history; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000208:ethnology / Q000266:history; D012586:Science / Q000193:education / Q000266:history