The following meditation on the subject of ‘opening’ and ‘closing’ was written in one go, shortly after the last zoom meeting with a discussion group on Alastair Morgan’s Continental Philosophy of Psychiatry. It is a story in which a bit of my fear of limitless openness shines through. Limitless openness also was one of the main themes in those reading sessions – the openness within madness and the openness towards madness. It is an openness about which I have certain reservations. In my hastily written response I have tried to give some words to those reservations employing the context of what I call ‘alternative space’, ritual space or therapeutic space.
With ‘alternative space’ I am referring to a space in which things happen for which there is little or no room in public or institutional space. Hardly anything definitive can be said about how light or how dark these alternative spaces can turn out to be – there are countless variations possible, from the most serene prayer sessions to the most perverse practices within a shady sect. I believe it is my fear of limitless openness – which is one the forms my psychosis is still present in my life – that I have come to appreciate the relative limitations, demarcations and restrictions within public and institutional space. I appreciate the way they offer protection. My fear of a boundless openness, an openness that fascinates many a thinker we have discussed on the basis of Alastair Morgan’s book, also inspires a certain attitude that could be called ‘conservative’.
Psychoses, therapy, rituals – from my anthropological perspective, all these things can get mixed up. And what is perhaps strange about the meditation below is that the series of conversations I had with a number of people about the book mentioned are included within these alternative spaces. Or to put it differently: the question of whether these conversations should be classified as alternative or regular has, in my story, not yet been properly crystallized. And this does not only concern this specific group of people, or of this specific book, but more generally the activities of the Foundation for Psychiatry and Philosophy in a broader sense, such as the Too Mad To Be True conferences they organize.
Which is why I waited a while to publish these considerations. Although I am not reaqlly able to give a definitive answer to this question at the moment, I do realize that giving an answering involves many other issues as well. When searching for a more open attitude towards our insane fellow human beings or to the parts of insanity that reside within our deepest selves, are we moving into a kind of cultural corner, or inro a kind of psychosis-friendly subculture? Or are we still part of the great academic debate? Do scientific and political elements play a role? How alternative is the Foundation, or how alternative does the Foundation want to be? How alternative or how regular do book writers want to be, with their – reflective, descriptive, learned – books, either personal or not? Inevitably, such questions will surface again in later posts on this website. But first – releasing to public space after all – my original meditation.
1. Closing and opening
In this brief reflection, I would like to say a few things about the closing virtual meeting of a series of Zoom sessions discussing Alastair Morgan’s Continental Philosophy of Psychiatry: The Lure of Madness. 1 It was a closing session in which the author himself participated, answering questions and receiving responses. The reason II call the conversation a ‘closing’ conversation is simply because it was the last session in a series. As such, this word initially does nothing more than indicating a formal end to a pre-agreed finite set of thought exchanges. Or, to put it slightly differently, it is no more than the closing element in a ritual series. Yet at the same time, the word ‘closing’, approached thematically, harbors a problematic contrast with words and notions such as ‘opening up’, ‘creating possibilities’, ‘giving space’ – notions that played such an important role in the session itself and the series of preceding conversations. It is this contrast that I would like to explore further, and to which I would like to devote a few philosophical reflections.
For the record, the sessions I refer to are the reading sessions on the aforementioned book by Alastair Morgan, organized by the Foundation for Psychiatry and Philosophy in the first months of 2025. These conversations were attended by a dozen psychiatrists and experiential experts, having Wouter Kusters as a discussion leader. Morgan’s book, which was published in 2022, deals with the developments in continental philosophy of psychiatry from the beginning of the 20th century to roughly the 1970s.