and Practice.

TL;DR: The study explores the relationship between schizophrenia and heightened conscious awareness, alienation from emotion and instinct, and the dissociation of sensitivity. It emphasizes the phenomenological approach to understanding the major psychological symptoms and draws parallels with literary and artistic works.

Abstract: psychologist, emphasizes the heightening of conscious awareness accompanied by the alienation from emotion and instinct associated with schizophrenia. This he calls ' hyperreflexivity' and relates it to the 'dissociation of sensitivity' that T. S. Eliot regarded as characterizing the work of several key artists, writers and thinkers of the twentieth century. His method of exposition is dominantly phenomenological; the major psychological symptoms are presented in turn and discussed with reference to individual patient's experience, the views of psychiatric and psychoanalytical commentators and, most extensively, relevant material culled from the literary and visual arts and from philosophy. What is the point of such a study? While insisting at first that he is seeking no more than clarification by means of analogy, the author provides an epilogue linking schizophrenia more closely with modern culture and then supports his arguments with a critique of neurobiological reductionism. More than 150 pages of detailed notes indicate the breadth and depth of his background reading, but the notion of an Age of Schizophrenia emerges as not much more than a suggestive intellectual conceit, in the same category as its predecessor, The Age of Anxiety.