Abstract

In On Madness: Understanding the Psychotic Mind, published in 2022, Richard G.T. Gipps embarks on a philosophical exploration of psychosis. Generally speaking, Gipps’s book presents an approach he calls “apophatic psychopathology,” (Gipps 2022, 2) borrowing from negative (that is, apophatic) theology and its method of understanding God’s nature by seeing how it defeats the predication of even those most supreme qualities we are drawn to predicate of Him. Gipps’s central insight regarding psychotic phenomena is that we best come to understand them not positively, by predicating of the psychotic subject this or that rationally intelligible, intentional state, but instead negatively, through seeing how such predications are here defeated. Sitting down with a person suffering from psychosis requires that we develop the capacity to stay with them in their brokenness, rather than projecting onto them an intentional structure that their illness has abrogated. Gipps comments critically on relativistic tendencies we encounter these days, concluding that people suffering from severe psychosis are not happily thought of as just living in an “alternative reality” as good as the one populated by nonpsychotic people.