Warped Minds

Cinema and Psychopathology

Temenuga Trifonova

9789089646323

288 pages

Amsterdam University Press

Hardback $161.00

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Overview

Warped Minds explores the transformation of psychopathologies into cultural phenomena in the wake of the transition from an epistemological to an ontological approach to psychopathology. Trifonova considers several major points in this intellectual history: the development of a dynamic model of the self at the fin de siècle, the role of photography and film in the construction of psychopathology, the influence of psychoanalysis on the transition from static, universalizing psychiatric paradigms to dynamic styles of psychiatry foregrounding the socially constructed nature of madness, and the decline of psychoanalysis and the aestheticization of madness into a trope describing the conditions of knowledge in postmodernity as evidenced by the transformation of multiple personality and paranoia into cultural and aesthetic phenomena.

Author Bio

Temenuga Trifonova is Associate Professor in Creative Arts and Humanities at University College London. She is the author of Screening the Art World, The Figure of the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema, Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime, Warped Minds: Cinema and Psychopathology, European Film Theory, The Image in French Philosophy, and the novels Tourist and Rewrite.