Acute Religious Experiences

In short, this is a brilliant and long overdue attempt to overcome the effects of the discipline-bound approaches to studying extreme experiences in psychiatry and religious studies using Mad Studies and the experience of “madness” as a wedge to open an interdisciplinary space of overlap and indeterminacy. * Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JAAR) * This is a major, much needed intervention in the study of (religious) experiences. It offers a brilliant critique of the works of major 20th-century theorists, most of whom went to great lengths to distance religious and psychopathological experiences, and a fascinating new approach to visions, voices and possession from the perspective of mad studies. * Ann Taves, Distinguished Professor (Emerita) of Religious Studies, UC Santa Barbara, USA * Richard Saville-Smith introduces a novel reframing of acute religious experiences away from dominant, normative psychiatric classificatory schemes. Yet the proposed and developed replacement is not merely the frame of traditional ineffable mysticism or of apophatic striving, but rather that of “mad studies” wherein a mutually beneficial and intelligible reciprocity between “the mad” experiencer and the “rational” listener may be sought. Madness may yield knowledge, as the ancient Greeks intuited. The author applies this old intuition to the modern world through the tracing of a dialogue amongst relevant figures such as William James, Rudolf Otto, Walter Stace, and Foucault – alongside critical analyses of psychiatric manuals of “diagnosis”. Here is a fascinating, refreshing work that will no doubt ignite further debate. * Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes, Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Exeter, UK * Acute Religious Experiences is a ground-breaking transdisciplinary work that brings the domains of madness and mysticism together in a transformative synthesis. Richard Saville-Smith offers a powerful challenge not only to the tendency in psychiatry to view psychosis through an exclusively pathological lens, but also to the tendency in religious studies to erase the madness of the mystic and the prophet. The discourse of the phenomenology of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme, heretofore fractured, is unified and made visible in this brilliant text. * Awais Aftab, Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Case Western Reserve University, USA * This major contribution offers an interdisciplinary reading of religious and mystical experiences, opening up a pluralistic space that undercuts any rapid move from anomalous experiences to pathology. It will be of great value to clinicians, researchers and those with lived experience. * Matthew Broome, Professor of Psychiatry and Youth Mental Health, and Director of the Institute for Mental Health, University of Birmingham, UK * Those who want to delve into mad studies reading of psychiatric and religious texts will find themselves well on their way with the book by Saville-Smith. And anyone who also wants to get acquainted with deconstruction as a method of reading and commenting on texts can doubly well turn to this author, who, inspired by Derrida, applies the method freely and skilfully. That is the double strength of this book when it comes to an old, undecided, and truly relevant theme across a range of academic disciplines. -- Peter J. Verhagen * Mental Health, Religion & Culture *