Too mad to be true II - The promises and perils of the first-person perspective
Too mad to be true II - The promises and perils of the first-person perspective

- Date: 27-28 May, 2023
- Location: Ghent, Museum dr. Guislain
- Call for Papers: closed
- Registration: Ticketshop, click here.
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Robert Chapman

Sam Fellowes


Alastair Morgan
Alastair Morgan is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester, UK. His most recent book is Continental Philosophy of Psychiatry. The Lure of Madness, published with Palgrave MacMillan in 2022. More information can be found here. Twitter: @morgan_alastair
Title: Interpretation as attention to difference

Elizabeth Pienkos

Richard Saville-Smith

Angela Woods
Angela Woods is a Professor of Medical Humanities and Director of the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University. From 2012-2022 she was the Co-Director of Hearing the Voice, a large interdisciplinary project on voice-hearing, and co-edited a major volume arising from this work entitled Voices in Psychosis: Interdisciplinary Perpsectives.
Title:First-Person Perspectives: Questions of Form
This talk takes as its focal and departure points the experiences of postpartum psychosis shared publicly by the writer and literary agent Catherine Cho. Cho’s Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness was published to acclaim in 2020 and elements of it have since been excerpted, referenced, elaborated and revisited in related publications across a range of media. Yet such memoirs seem frequently to be a source of unease within philosophy of psychiatry: acknowledgements that they can supply rich and extended insights into first-person experiences of madness are attended by concerns that the texts’ literary qualities and wider editorial processes distort experience in distinctive ways. In this talk, I want to show how literary approaches can address the tensions and lacunae that contribute to this unease, and argue for the value of memoir qua memoir in exploring experiences of madness in general and of postpartum psychosis specifically.