Metaphors of Madness: Silenced Myth-Makers and Disordered Brains.

The work has basically three aims: 1st to map the wide range of various approaches in the current debate about madness, 2nd to formulate a specific theory of madness, 3rd to identify general philosophical problems the topic brings about, (a 4th aim is also outlined: to understand the presented theory in terms of therapeutic potential). The central thesis of this work is that insanity is an inherently ambiguous and elusive phenomenon and that trying to understand it we are using various metaphors borrowed from other areas, and consequently forget their metaphorical nature. The work is generally motivated by an effort to reconcile conflicting approaches, to understand them as complementary. It also wants to avoid creating an all-embracing synthesis on the one hand, and purely relativistic and pragmatic viewpoint on the other hand. The first part identifies four levels on which particular approaches understand madness as a problem: the level of the individual, the level of the collective, the transpersonal level and the existential level. At the end of the part, I discuss the possibilities and risks of creating a theoretical framework that would enable to understand various contradictory approaches on a common basis. In the second part, I develop my own analysis of madness. It is based on a..