Abstract Voices in psychosis and fictional voices can open a window on how we understand ghostly presences, whether as intimations of otherness or richly personified companions—what Charles Dickens simply calls ‘that someone else’ in his celebrated ghost story ‘The Signalman’ (1866). That ‘someone else’ might involve a multifaceted sense of otherness, as the Voices in Psychosis interviews...
The modern identification of the mind with the brain has its roots in the intellectual traditions of the nineteenth century. Isolating the brain as the seat of mental experience, and as the organ of the mind, emerged in the empirical work of Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Spurzheim and became a central, normative assumption of Romantic and Victorian culture, cutting across literary and...