‘… the most complex and lyrical song of experience’: Walter Benjamin and a dialectical image of madness. Introduction to Walter Benjamin for psychiatry (III)
International Review of Psychiatry May 20, 2024 Alastair Morgan
Abstract In this paper I explore Walter Benjamin’s complex thoughts about the concept of experience to illuminate a central paradox when thinking about madness. This paradox concerns the need to hold together constellations of concepts that appear to be diametrically opposed. On the one hand there is the realm of the psychopathological; a psychiatric thinking of madness as mental illness that...