The articles in this special issue seek to re-examine the relationship between creativity and the schizophrenia spectrum of disorders in the wake of recent research and theorizing. They revisit both empirical and conceptual findings and issues regarding connections between the schizophrenia spectrum of disorders: schizotypy, psychotic-like traits, and creativity.

The articles in this special issue seek to re-examine the relationship between creativity and the schizophrenia spectrum of disorders in the wake of recent research and theorizing. They revisit both empirical and conceptual findings and issues regarding connections between the schizophrenia spectrum of disorders: schizotypy, psychotic-like traits, and creativity.

The similarities between madness and modernism are striking: defiance of convention, nihilism, extreme relativism, distortions of time, strange transformations of self, and much more. In this revised edition of a now classic work, Louis Sass, a clinical psychologist, offers a radically new vision of schizophrenia, comparing it with the works of such artists and writers as Kafka, Beckett, and Duchamp, and considering the ideas of philosophers including Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. Here is a highly original portrait of the world of insanity, along with a provocative commentary on modernist and postmodernist culture.

Insanity in clinical practice as in the popular imagination is seen as a state of believing things that are not true and perceiving things that do not exist. Most schizophrenics, however, do not act as if they mistake their delusions for reality. In a work of uncommon insight and empathy, Louis A. Sass shatters conventional thinking about insanity by juxtaposing the narratives of delusional schizophrenics with the philosophical writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein."

Insanity - in clinical practice as in the popular imagination - is seen as a state of believing things that are not true and perceiving things that do not exist. Most schizophrenics, however, do not act as if they mistake their delusions for reality. In a work of uncommon insight and empathy, Louis A. Sass shatters conventional thinking about insanity by juxtaposing the narratives of delusional schizophrenics with the philosophical writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In the formative years of psychiatry Freud, Bleuler, and Jaspers all studied Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness as a model of psychotic thought. Sass provides a nuanced interpretation of Schreber's Memoirs in the context of Wittgenstein's analysis of philosophical solipsism. A dauntless critic of the illusions of philosophy, Wittgenstein likened the speculative excesses of traditional metaphysics to mental illness. Sass observes that many of the "intellectual diseases" that Wittgenstein discerned - diseases involving detachment from social existence and practical concerns, and exaggerated processes of abstraction and self-consciousness - have striking affinities with the symptoms of schizophrenia. Like the philosophical solipsist, the schizophrenic may define his or her own consciousness as the center of the universe - and may experience his or her delusional world as a product of that same consciousness. Schizophrenia, Sass demonstrates, is not the loss of rationality, but the far point in the trajectory of a consciousness turned in upon itself. The Paradoxes of Delusion will be necessary reading for anyone concerned with the preoccupations of modern philosophy and the realities of mental illness.