Paperback, 192 pages
English language
Published April 1, 1980 by Penguin Books Ltd.
The Language of Madness
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"I am not saying that there is a radical need to go mad but that madness is one desperate expression of a radical need for ... change". This remark by David Cooper is indicative of his study of the language of madness. To go mad because there is nowhere else to go is to use that language both as an expression of need and as a challenge to the world which fails to see that need. Thus madness becomes the indictment of our failure to bring together our sexuality, our lives and our autonomy. Cooper points to the need both to accept this indictment and to recover the mad and their experience in the process of fighting to put ourselves together. He points to ways in which we might put this programme into practice. The book ends with a new statement of the position the author, together with R.D. laing, …
"I am not saying that there is a radical need to go mad but that madness is one desperate expression of a radical need for ... change". This remark by David Cooper is indicative of his study of the language of madness. To go mad because there is nowhere else to go is to use that language both as an expression of need and as a challenge to the world which fails to see that need. Thus madness becomes the indictment of our failure to bring together our sexuality, our lives and our autonomy. Cooper points to the need both to accept this indictment and to recover the mad and their experience in the process of fighting to put ourselves together. He points to ways in which we might put this programme into practice. The book ends with a new statement of the position the author, together with R.D. laing, put forward on schizophrenia in the fities and sixties. The statment is new and more powerful than ever before because both the world and Cooper have changed. Anti-psychiatry has been given another resonance in this book and becomes the demand to understand ourselves.